Nowhere to Run: Detained Transgender Immigrants Are Abused, Beaten, and Worse Jake Naughton - TakePart
go to original May 24, 2015

Johanna Vazquez is a transgender woman who was locked up in a men’s immigration detention facility. A six-month Fusion investigation found some 75 transgender detainees are detained by ICE every day. (Fusion)

Just before 1 p.m. on May 22, 2009, Johanna Vasquez was waiting for the bus in Houston. The afternoon was calm, and she was on her way to meet her boyfriend of the last several months when a police car pulled up. Though she had been doing nothing wrong, she feared she knew where the encounter would end.

Vasquez had been living undocumented in the United States for 11 years, but her immigration status was the last thing on her mind at that moment. She was a transgender woman, born Moris Vasquez Villanueva in Jucuarán, El Salvador, where she had been tormented throughout her youth for her identity. At 16, she was brutally gang-raped by seven men who called her “a sickening piece of trash.” Violence against transgender women is widespread in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America, and she had come north in search of a life free of abuse and persecution.

Houston police charged her with tampering with a government record—a permanent resident card she had acquired through a friend, onto which she had pasted her own photograph. Trans women often deal with issues concerning I.D. cards because their real documents rarely match their appearance. So if they want to avoid scrutiny or rejection, they carry fake I.D.s. Vasquez had one with the name she preferred to be called. She pleaded guilty to the charge.

Though she had been taking hormones for seven years and had been living as a woman since leaving El Salvador, at Harris County Jail outside Houston she was placed in custody with men, which is common for transgender detainees. When she was transferred to another facility, guards laughed and mocked her on arrival. Then they shaved her head.

“From the moment they arrest you they already start treating you differently, as if you’re someone from another planet,” says Vasquez, now 34. “They start treating you badly. They don’t know how to treat you, like a man or a woman. That’s when you start suffering and being afraid.”

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Photo/Illustration: Jake Naughton/Marc Fusco

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