Transgender migrants face unique hardship
She was walking alone, a block from her house in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, in a fuchsia-colored dress when three strangers leaped on her in the dark.
“They ripped open my dress, they insulted me, they threw me to the ground. They punched me, they threw combustibles over me, and they lit me on fire,” said Estrellita Escobar, clasping her scarred forearms at the memory.
As a transgender woman in Honduras, she constantly was at risk. She narrowly escaped being abducted, and then would endure another brutal beating on the streets. Escobar said she reported all three incidents to the police. When nothing was done, she fled to the United States.
In December, Escobar, 25, was placed in a special immigrant detention unit where people like her — born male, but identifying as women — wait for their asylum hearings.
At the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall, about 250 miles southwest of Houston, she ate and slept with dozens of trans
gender women for five months until she was granted asylum in April and released.
The special unit for transgender women, which officials say is only temporary, opened in December at the facility as the number of migrants crossing the southern border surged and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers were flooded with new arrivals identifying as LGBTQ.
In 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained 166 transgender asylum-seekers. So far this fiscal year, which started in October, the number is 282. More than 900 transgender migrants have been booked into detention centers since November 2015, around the time ICE began tracking the population.
ICE has only one other detention facility with a transgender section, the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico.
Bearing injuries and tales of brutality in their home countries, their cases often are “slam dunks” for asylum, said Allegra Love, executive director and immigration attorney for the Santa Fe Dreamers Project.
At Pearsall, 16 transgender women represented by pro bono lawyers from the San Antoniobased Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services have been granted asylum since February, and five have been denied, according to Cristian Sánchez, a RAICES staff member who has been caring for Pearsall’s released transgender migrants. Many more are in detention or free on bond as they await final asylum rulings.
The transgender unit is designed to protect the women from discrimination and harassment. It centralizes the resources ICE provides specifically for that group.
“We need dedicated housing that allows them to be, one, authentic to themselves, but two, that we have the appropriately trained staff that knows to deal with them sensitively,” said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, the deputy assistant director for custody management at ICE. He leads a team in charge of LGBTQ custody.
‘We’re seen as inhuman’
“We’re seen as people that aren’t part of society. Like we’re a disease. Inhuman,” said Escobar, who was a leader of the LGBTQ contingent in the highly publicized caravan through Mexico last fall.
Jennifer Mariena, 45, a transgender woman from Honduras, has a long, jagged scar on her chest from when a stranger attacked her with a piece of glass. She’s missing a front tooth — a reminder, she said, of when a police officer struck her in the mouth with a gun.
She said being detained in Pearsall was “another intense trauma.”
“We’ve been mistreated; we’ve been hit and almost killed. We bring the trauma of rape and sexual abuse. And now, being detained and enclosed like that, it’s like everything turns around in your head and heart,” Mariena said.
She was released on bond in early May after about a week in Pearsall.
This country’s attitude toward its transgender citizens has become a source of contention. The Trump administration has banned them from serving in the military, and it recently proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters to shut their doors to transgender people.
Transgender people in the U.S. have high rates of suicide, homelessness and sexual violence. At least 26 transgender people were killed in the U.S. last year, according to the Human Rights Campaign, an LBGTQ advocacy group.
But Central American transgender migrants — the great majority of them transgender women — continue to arrive at the U.S. border, hoping life will be better here.
“It’s either be killed or come to a country where you have a chance of being safe and having an existence,” said Madison Fairchild, legal services director for the TransLatin@ Coalition, a Los Angeles nonprofit that aids transgender immigrants. “We do have a problem with trans people dying in the United States, but it’s not as horrific as the countries from which these people come from.”
‘I thought I was going to die’
Last year, border officials began a transgender health screening at ports of entry. Those who say they identify as transgender are asked a set of questions, including whether they’re taking hormones, whether they’ve been exposed to any infectious or sexually transmitted diseases, and whether they’ve been victims of human trafficking.
Escobar was a leader of the LGBTQ contingent in the highly publicized caravan through Mexico last fall. She has long, multicolored hair in the hues of a sunrise: light yellow, orange and faded pink. The burns she suffered in 2016 now are scars running up and down her forearms and across her face.
“I really thought I was going to die,” Escobar said of the night she was burned on the street. “They said, ‘Here you’re going to die. You’re not going to keep living.’ But I did.”
Her best friend was a transgender woman who was stabbed in the throat and killed in Honduras. Her last image of her friend is her lying dead in a grocery store.
Now that she’s free, Escobar can hide her blemishes, with powders and blush, often wearing eye shadow that matches the color of her clothes.
“I don’t like to remember what happened. It makes me sad and worse,” she said. “But there are things in life that you have to confront with bravery.”
About a dozen transgender women at the Pearsall unit pulverized crayons, mixed the powder with water and smeared the colors on their faces and hair. Escobar shaded her hair half pink and half blue.
They pulled curtains from windows and blankets from beds to fasten them around their bodies.
As they strutted down the hallway on Valentine’s Day, some pretended to fall as though they were wearing heels, though they weren’t. Others pretended to trip on their dresses, though the only clothes they owned were jumpsuits.
All pretended, for that hour, that they weren’t locked up.
They were putting on a drag show.
Escobar said the event wasn’t just an uplifting experience in detention. Drag shows long have been a source of empowerment for her community.
“It shows society that we, too, as trans girls, have talents, and intelligence and beauty,” she said.
“We had fun and laughed together,” said Lisbeiry Arguetta, 24, a Honduran migrant who said she won first place in the contest.
“There, we forgot we were trapped, and how horrible it all was,” she said.
The Pearsall center is a blue and gray compound surrounded by razor wire, run by the private company GEO Group Inc., a Florida-based government contractor. Detainees are counted every day, and the lights are on around the clock. Movements are tightly controlled.
They are given women’s prison uniforms and sex hormone supplements. Those who have HIV receive treatment and medication.
“Who someone decides to love or how they decide to present their gender identity, the agency is agnostic to — but we have to make sure they’re free from sexual assault, sexual violence, and treated respectfully,” LorenzenStrait said.
The transgender women who have been released from Pearsall say some of the guards were nice and others were cruel, using derogatory terms. All said a guard had referred to them using male pronouns.
ICE said in a statement it has a zero-tolerance policy for abusive or inappropriate behavior in its facilities.
But some transgender migrants don’t have the luxury of a dedicated unit for detention. They remain in the general male or female units that correspond with their sex at birth or in what ICE calls “protective custody.”
At risk of assault
Lorenzen-Strait said ICE has added specialized units for transgender people to “avoid … the use of protective custody, which is a solitary environment.”
Transgender migrants who aren’t segregated could be vulnerable to sexual assault and discrimination by other migrants.
More than 110 transgender migrants are scattered across 28 different detention facilities. More than half either are put in solitary units or general population ones. Only 39 are in the dedicated units at Cibola or Pearsall. The agency expects to soon select a facility for a permanent transgender unit.
Only a handful of the migrants in custody are transgender men, the rest are transgender women.
The Pearsall trans unit fostered a sense of solidarity, the women said. They said being able to put on a drag show — which they weren’t always allowed to do — was empowering.
“They want to express their true, authentic self. And not having that expression can lead to depression, can be demoralizing, can cause them to not be able to have the wherewithal to advocate for themselves,” Fairchild said. “This is a vestige they cling to.”
Flor Tzun, 21, checked into Pearsall’s detention center on Dec. 2 speaking no English, some Spanish and fluent in k’iche, an indigenous language in Guatemala.
She spent about five months in detention, attending court hearings and meeting with lawyers, to see if she could win asylum.
Wearing a blue jumpsuit and no makeup, Tzun entered her final asylum hearing in Pearsall shaking as she sat at the witness stand opposite her lawyer, Smaranda Draghia.
Immigration Judge Stuart Alcorn called her “sir” throughout the hearing, saying it was Justice Department protocol to do so.
She spent the next hour explaining in excruciating detail how her brother had raped her when she was 11, and how her father had held her hostage years later.
“Sir, did your father tell you why he was locking you up and beating you?” Alcorn asked.
“He insulted me, calling me an (expletive) and saying he did not want a son that was a woman. He wanted a son that was a man,” Tzun said on the witness stand.
Tzun, who traveled to the U.S. with the large caravan last fall, was in detention for months because she was denied parole and bail, Draghia said.
World opened up
When Alcorn told Tzun she was being granted asylum, she clasped her hands to her face.
“Gracias,” she said, trembling and beginning to cry. She struggled to take off her headphones, which she had been using for translation. She made the sign of the cross. She clutched her heart, looking upward.
“I felt like the world opened up,” she said later in a room at Pearsall, a day before she was released. “Wow, what a happiness. Everything seemed different now. I felt a strong sense of calm.”
Tzun went to join people she knew in Houston, while Escobar decided to stay in San Antonio, where she is hoping to start a crisis shelter for transgender women who are released from Pearsall.
She started a Facebook page called Casa Sin Fronteras, where she posts about the group’s daily experiences.
This month, she uploaded photos of the trip she and four other transgender women took to the department store to buy luggage for the next leg of their journey. She also has posted about the donated haircut they got and puts out regular calls for donations.
Like most 25-year-olds, she’s often on her phone, texting and sending voice messages to other trans women who were recently freed from Pearsall.
“Despite of everything I’ve suffered, all I’ve went through, I think it only gives me strength to move forward and help others,” Escobar said.
“We just want to be who we are.”
Tzun, whose biological name is Vicente, picked Flor, the Spanish word for flower, for her female name because, she said, “I like thinking of them blooming in the morning.”
Mariena, whose biological name is Luis, named herself after Jennifer Lopez. She said she fell in love with her after watching her in the Selena movie, and she hopes to move to New York because that’s where the actress is from.
And Escobar, whose birth name was Jairo, picked her female name Estrellita because it means little star.
“After they burned me, after they beat me, when I felt alone and like I wasn’t worth anything — that I was someone that shouldn’t exist. When I was like that, I looked at the stars,” she said. “And I thought, one day I’ll be like a star. Free.”