Almost three dozen Democratic lawmakers called on the Obama administration to change its immigration detention policies saying that they lead to systemic homophobic and transphobic abuses.
The 35 House members said in a letter sent Monday to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson that, under the status quo, the US would be better served if lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and transgender alleged offenders of immigration laws are not detained during proceedings.
“We believe [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] should consider an LGBT person’s detention as ‘not in the public interest,’ per your enforcement priorities memo of November 20, 2014, due to the extraordinarily high risk of abuse in detention,” they told Johnson.
They called for alternatives to imprisonment, including parole and “supervised release and community placements” until DHS and ICE find a lasting remedy to the abuses.
Backing up their claims, the Democratic lawmakers cited recent studies which, collectively, paint a picture of a discriminatory prison system.
“Recent surveys of jails and prisons by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that non-heterosexual detainees experience sexual assault at up to ten times the rate of heterosexual men,” they wrote. “The situation is starker for transgender detainees. According to the BJS survey, one in three will be sexually abused within twelve months in custody.”
They also pointed to a 2013 Government Accountability Office report, which discovered that transgender immigrants were victimized by one in every five reported sexual assaults in ICE detention.
“This is deeply troubling given the fact that transgender individuals are estimated to be less than 1% of the general population,” the Congresspeople wrote.
The legislators did note that ICE has reached out to LGBT immigrant advocates and that it “will be issuing recommendations for DHS’ consideration in the near future.”
They, however, also alluded to what appears to be a deep prejudice among ICE officials.
“ICE’s own intake system recognizes the risk LGBT immigrants face in detention and says they
can release LGBT immigrants 70 percent of the time, however ICE officers consistently override this
and use their discretion to detain anyway in 68 percent of those cases,” the lawmakers wrote. They also noted that an internal DHS study found that ICE officials overrode “Risk Classification Assessment” recommendations in 7.6 percent of all cases “and in 19 percent of the cases for LGBT detainees.”
Read the letter here.
