Progressive Politics

A transgender Mexican national held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Louisiana has told Newsweek that he endured months of physical and emotional abuse in federal custody, beginning long before President Donald Trump was sworn in.

Monica Renteria-Gonzalez is one of four detainees, three of whom are transgender, alleging systemic abuse at the hands of a former ICE assistant warden, who they say created a work program which was used to penalize and demean them at a center designed to hold women.

“It got to the point where he would harass me everywhere that I went,” Renteria-Gonzalez, who identifies as a male, told Newsweek in an interview from the South Louisiana Detention Center in Basile.