A Georgia immigration judge has denied a Mexican transgender immigrant’s asylum petition for the second time, stating that “she failed to demonstrate that the cause of the abuse was her gender identity,” WABE, an Atlanta NPR affiliate, reported.
“Estrella” Antonio-Sanchez, a transgender immigrant, applied for asylum in October 2012 when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency detained her at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia. Antonio-Sanchez stated that “she was abused in Mexico for being transgender and feared to return to her home country,” according to WABE.
Although Antonio-Sanchez didn’t begin dressing in feminine attire until she entered the United States, the “attacks in Mexico began when men noticed her feminine nature,” her legal brief stated. In separate incidents, she was allegedly repeatedly raped by four men, a cousin, and her mother’s boss between the ages of eight and 19. Antonio-Sanchez was also allegedly assaulted by a government official and the male relative of a woman who provided shelter.
Once she entered the U.S., Antonio-Sanchez was reportedly sold into prostitution, where she was put in a brothel for a year before she escaped.
Judge Dan Trimble denied Antonio-Sanchez’s petition for the first time in 2013. After Immigration Equality, a New York-based nonprofit, appealed her case to a higher court, the case was remanded back to Trimble for a new evidentiary hearing.
Jeffrey Fisher, a litigation associate at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, who represents Antonio-Sanchez pro-bono told WABE, “She suffered repeated incidents of fairly serious physical and sexual abuse, all at the hands of authority figures who — fairly clear — were intended to punish her for being a transgender woman and her femininity.”
Fisher argued in the remand order that Antonio-Sanchez was abused in Mexico and that the Mexican government is unable to protect her from further harm.
But Trimble ruled against the second petition, stating that there wasn’t conclusive evidence that the Mexican government can’t protect her from further abuse. In his ruling, Trimble wrote that Antonio-Sanchez couldn’t demonstrate that the abuse resulted from her transgender appearance, writing that she “was targeted by four men who were presented with the opportunity that allowed them to commit a crime to satisfy their sexual desire, rather than on their desire to persecute or punish him because of his gender identity.”
There’s a strong possibility that Antonio-Sanchez could be ordered deported. In the 2015 fiscal year, 93.2 percent of immigrants have been ordered deported from Stewart, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Antonio-Sanchez has already began hormone treatments and appears as a transgender woman. If she gets deported to Mexico, she may encounter transphobic people who could harm her. The Transgender Murder Project, which tracks reported killings of trans people, ranks the country as one of the deadliest for trans people. Between October 2013 and September 2014, there were 31 homicides of transgender people in Mexico.
“Many of our clients don’t feel safe taking the hormone replacement therapy that they find is necessary because it makes them more visibly identifiable as transgender women and subjects them to more risk of violence against them by transphobic members,” Clement Lee, detention staff attorney at Immigration Equality, told ThinkProgress. “It’s often the case that the clients we see don’t fully come to embrace their transgender identity until they’re here in the United States.”
While deportation to Mexico could mean death, immigration detention could result in additional sexual assaults perpetrated against Antonio-Sanchez.
“Detention is a fundamentally unsafe place for transgender people,” Lee said. “Almost invariably, transgender people in immigration facilities are housed in sex-segregated facilities according to their sex assigned at birth, rather than their gender identity.”
LGBTQ immigrant detainees are uniquely vulnerable to abuse, including sexual assault, while in custody. A 2013 Center for American Progress report found that some facilities place LGBT immigrants in administrative segregation, or solitary confinement, in an attempt to protect them from the general population.
“What that means is that transgender women are almost always housed in men’s facilities,” Lee continued. “Detention centers are essentially a jail. There’s barbed wire, there’s lack of freedom and movement. There’s jumpsuits and shackles.”
Lee said that transgender women are “13 times more likely to be subject to assault,” a finding backed by a California study done in male prisons.