The complaints — filed by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, the ACLU, and the National Immigration Project — claim the abuse took place between 2023 and 2025, across two presidential administrations.
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“It got to the point where he would harass me everywhere that I went,” Monica Renteria-Gonzalez, who identifies as male, told Newsweek in an interview from the South Louisiana Detention Center in Basile.
“If I was in the recreation yard, he would come and he would follow me. If I was eating at the dining hall, he would come and just sit there next to me, making me feel uncomfortable. He would follow me into the dorm,” Renteria-Gonzalez added
He and two other trans detainees, Kenia Campos-Flores and Mario Garcia-Valenzuela, say they were targeted by the warden with an ad hoc, forced-work program and subjected to manual labor for little or no compensation.
Detainee complaints about the abusive conditions were allegedly met with the same repsonse: “‘If you wanna be a man, I’ll treat you like a man’, or ‘Aren’t you strong enough? Aren’t you a man?’”
The forced labor included pushing heavy cinder blocks or metal cabinets across a dorm before detainees were ordered to push them back to where they came from.
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Multiple complaints about the alleged mistreatment were dismissed as “unsubstantiated.”
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DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security official tasked with refuting multiple claims of abuse by ICE and its proxies in President Trump’s war on immigrants, responded to the allegations in typically bellicose language employing questionable statistics.
The allegations were “another hoax about ICE facilities,” she said, dismissing the detainees claims as the types of “smears” that are “directly contributing to our officers facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them.” She didn’t provide a source for her statistic nor said whether the alleged assaults were against officers in ICE facilities or in cities where ICE officers have forcibly injured and detained people without due process.
DHS is really out here openly defending ICE under a previous administration, its a big beautiful fascist machine folks, one of the best, vote blue