Human Impact Project

Tarlis Marcone De Barros Gonçalves, a transgender asylum seeker from Brazil who fled threats to her life, entered the U.S. near El Paso on February 15, 2025, and was detained at the Otero County Processing Center before being flown to a U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In a declaration filed as part of the lawsuit Espinoza Escalona v. Noem—brought by the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, and International Refugee Assistance Project to stop ICE from sending immigrants to Guantánamo—she said she was housed with five men despite objecting, searched by male guards, allowed outside only 25 minutes a day, and given just one set of clothes with little food. She said guards communicated only in English, which she does not speak, and that she had no privacy using the bathroom or showering. She was later transferred to an ICE facility in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, where agents shackled her so tightly during the flight that she was in pain for days afterward.

In New Orleans, ICE called a trans-Latina immigrant advocate and community organizer into the field office after telling her they wanted to offer her less restrictive monitoring in recognition of her community leadership. She was detained when she arrived at her check-in and held at a Louisiana ICE jail, where she says she was denied medical care, placed in solitary confinement, and subjected to verbal and transphobic harassment. She had received the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center annual human rights award in 2024 and was in the process of obtaining a visa for trafficking survivors. She was later deported to Mexico, a country she had never lived in before, and is now working to rebuild her life there while recovering from infections she says went untreated during detention.

In Maryland, ICE agents arrested a transgender woman married to a U.S. citizen after she appeared for a routine probation check-in. She was then transferred to an all-male detention facility in Miami even though her lawyers said they had provided a passport listing her gender as female. When her attorney objected to her being held with men, ICE responded in writing that "as per executive order, your client's immutable, biological, classification is that of a male." The White House later posted about her case on social media, and her lawyers say they no longer know her current location.

Ana Cañedo Luna, a business owner and long-term U.S. resident who was brought to the country at age 10, was arrested on January 9 after a traffic stop in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where she holds a valid work permit. She was transferred to the ICE Denver Contract Detention Facility in Aurora, Colorado, where she spent five months and ten days in custody. Cañedo discovered that her previous lawyer had requested a voluntary departure without her knowledge or consent, prompting her to change legal representation. After switching to local attorneys and filing a writ of habeas corpus, she was released on June 19 and reunited with her wife, Gloria Guerra. Cañedo continues to fight her immigration case while dealing with the psychological trauma of her detention and remains fearful of future arrest, saying the experience felt like "psychological torture" and a "never-ending nightmare."