Oztaskin, ‘The Harrowing, Two-Year Detention of a Transgender Asylum Seeker’, 2019
- Category: Other
- Source: Other
- Subject: Gender Identity, Refugee/Asylum
- Place: Americas
- Year: 2019
- File: Harrowing, two-year detention of a transgender asylum seeker
- URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-harrowing-two-year-detention-of-a-transgender-asylum-seeker#
Murat Oztaskin, ‘The Harrowing, Two-Year Detention of a Transgender Asylum Seeker’, 31 October 2019
Abstract
The Cibola County Correctional Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, is situated at the edge of Milan, New Mexico, about eighty miles west of Albuquerque. It sits behind a Shell gas station, cut off from the rest of town by a bend in I-40. Behind it lies an expanse of the New Mexican highlands, mostly yellow grass and rusted conifers. Cibola is the only ICE facility in the country with a unit reserved exclusively for transgender women. The trans pod, as it’s known, opened in 2017, and can house up to sixty people, though the population is usually around half that. In late June, twenty-nine detainees in the pod sent an open letter to a Phoenix-based advocacy group, Trans Queer Pueblo, reporting deficient medical care in the facility and abuse by its staff. The letter, which was written in Spanish, said that the medical staff did not provide proper treatment to individuals who are H.I.V.-positive, disabled, or in need of routine medical treatment.