“It’s a dangerous game you play because if you don’t express yourself, you feel you are dying inside, killing yourself, but when you do express who you are, you feel you might be killed,” says Tara Patel, the namesake character in Tara’s Crossing — a play inspired by a transgender asylum seeker in the United States who experienced transphobia in her home country, only to wind up in isolation after she was detained in an U.S. federal immigration detention center for two months.
Inspired by the life of Victoria Vimal — a transgender Guyanese immigrant who felt like a “female featured in a male’s body” — Jeffrey Solomon, a New York-based playwright, wrote Tara’s Crossing to shed light on some of the conditions that transgender people face once they arrive in the United States when they attempt to apply for asylum, a form of humanitarian relief provided to immigrants who can prove that they have a “credible fear” that they can no longer go back to their home countries. After immigrants go through the arduous process and are granted asylum, they can permanently stay in the country.
Drawing from multiple interviews with LGBTQ immigrants in New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, Solomon saw a common theme for asylum seekers who undergo harrowing journeys “to survive and to make a life for themselves,” he told ThinkProgress in a phone interview. In explaining why he wrote the play, Solomon said that he wanted to convey “the trauma” that immigrants feel in detention centers in a country that otherwise strongly asserts its allegiance to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
“Persecution based on sexual orientation could be grounds for asylum in the United States,” Solomon said. He explained that LGBTQ immigrants who flee persecution in their home countries are subjected to similar levels of hate once they arrive in the United States. In the interviews he conducted, LGBTQ immigrants wind up in detention centers where both the guards and fellow detainees treat transgender people with undue cruelty. Such a contradiction between what immigrants face in detention — rapes, beatings, and taunts — goes against “what we profess are American values,” he quipped.
The play has gone through several renditions since it premiered in 2005, with its most recent iteration in New York City showing this weekend at the LGBT Community Center.
U.S. immigration officials detained Vimal in July 2003 after she pleaded for political asylum when she arrived at the Miami, Florida airport. She was denied political asylum, but because she fought for her case, it also meant that until a decision was made in her case, she would remain in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency. Because she identified as transgender, Vimal was initially placed in isolation, then later transferred into the general population at a New Jersey-area detention center, she told ThinkProgress. When she watched the play based on her life, she said that she relives her emotions that she felt when she was detained.
Every time I see the play, everything comes back to me.
“Every time I see the play, everything comes back to me,” Vimal said. “I break down silently. I try to be strong because I want to show others that this play can send a message to give hope to people who are going through this trauma in the same situation.”
Like Solomon, Vimal wanted the play to show that the conditions she underwent in U.S. immigration detention centers were no better than conditions in her home country.
She had been “prosecuted, raped, stabbed, beaten, and much more in Guyana,” she said. But once in the United States, Vimal was placed in isolation “in a little cell.” When she was “let back out in general population,” other immigrant detainees treated her with intense hostility, an experience that she characterized as “stressful” and said “hasn’t been easy.”
Vimal’s experiences as a transgender asylum seeker in the United States is not unique. Last year, the government put protocols in place to detain LGBTQ immigrants in transgender-specific housing, but these guidelines have not been followed to the letter. Detention facilities lack an independent oversight mechanism to ensure that the measures are carried out. But current policies allow transgender women to be placed in male detention facilities or in solitary confinement, a traumatic practice that immigration officials justify as a form of protection for detainees. Even at Santa Ana City Jail, the only detention center in the country to accommodate LGBTQ detainees, women alleged that they were regularly subjected to humiliation by male guards.
Statistics bear out that LGBTQ immigrant detainees are much more at risk of 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. A March 2016 Human Rights Watch report found that at least half of the transgender women interviewed were held, like Vimal, in solitary confinement allegedly for their protection.
The play is so true to life that even immigration lawyers get emotional when they watch it. “To this day when I see [the play], it brings tears to my eyes because it is so true and it deeply saddens me that we haven’t been able to change the conditions in the immigration detention system,” Amy Gottlieb, an immigration lawyer and regional director of the human rights organization American Friends Service Committee, told ThinkProgress. Gottlieb also originally sponsored the original premiere of the play.
The system is so powerful, oppressive, and profit-driven.
“The system is so powerful, oppressive, and profit-driven,” Gottlieb added. “We continue to lock people up to their detriment that this is how we’re treating asylum seekers.”
Both Solomon and Vimal hope that the play could be a starting point for people who otherwise don’t understand the federal immigration detention system. When the play opened at a high school for international students in New York City, Solomon said that it provided students with the opportunity to discuss “a topic that really had not been openly discussed before, with the homophobia and transphobia.”
Vimal said that putting a real face to the play also helps people understand why detention is so damaging to immigrants. “It sends a message that makes it more real,” she said. “I try to stay strong for others going through the same situation to let them know that there’s hope.”