Camila Toro de Paula, a 25-year-old transgender woman from Venezuela, has spent the past 11 months in a federal immigration detention center for men, where she said she has been assaulted, threatened and deprived of medical care.

Ms. Toro de Paula, who entered the United States seeking asylum, has lingered in solitary confinement without ready access to water for up to 24 hours a day, her lawyer said. Medical files from the center in Jena, La., where she is being detained show that she has complained to social workers about being punished because of her gender expression.

“I’m afraid of dying here,” Ms. Toro de Paula said in Spanish during a video interview from the federal facility. Immigration officials said Ms. Toro de Paula had entered the country illegally and cited her criminal history in the United States. Records show that the most serious charges against her, of felony assault and possession of a weapon, had been dismissed.

The case of Ms. Toro de Paula comes as the federal government has halted specialized care for transgender detainees inside at least 10 detention centers from Calexico, Calif., to Batavia, N.Y., according to public records. Officials no longer consistently provide transgender inmates with hormones and other gender-related care.

An Obama-era policy that provided basic rights for transgender people in immigration detention was deleted from the Department of Homeland Security website in February 2025. And officials have dissolved longstanding protections meant to shield transgender detainees from being harassed or physically harmed.

“We are NOT wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide hormone therapy to illegal aliens seeking to change their sex,” the Department of Homeland Security said in an email to The New York Times, which did not address the other changes in policy.

Homeland Security has in recent months declined to say how many transgender migrants are in custody, but experts on incarceration estimate that there are at least several dozen out of more than 65,000 people in detention as of July 11. On Jan. 12, 2025, the latest date for which the government reported a count, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had 47 transgender people in custody, according to data archived by the Vera Institute of Justice, a think tank focused on criminal justice reform.

Many migrants have complained about mistreatment and shoddy medical care in federal facilities. While transgender detainees represent a small fraction of those being held, they are an especially vulnerable population. Many are fleeing harassment in other countries and had just begun to be given some protections within the U.S. detention system in recent years.

Medical experts say that withholding hormones and other treatment for gender dysphoria can cause unique physical and mental health complications.

A hotline run by Immigration Equality, a nonprofit organization that helps L.G.B.T.Q. and H.I.V.-positive people who are in the immigration system, recorded a 68 percent increase in calls from L.G.B.T.Q. detainees in 2025 compared with the year before. (The group does not have data specifically for transgender detainees.)

Immigration Equality’s clients include transgender women who said they had been removed from detention center units that had been reserved for them during the Biden administration and placed with men or in solitary confinement. The group said that the federal government had denied requests from transgender women to be transferred to facilities for women or transgender people.

“The administration is creating a humanitarian disaster” by changing policies that were meant to protect transgender people, said Bridget Crawford, the legal director at Immigration Equality.

The Homeland Security Department rejected claims that conditions inside detention centers were inhumane. The agency did not directly respond to Ms. Toro de Paula’s assertions of assault and mistreatment, and identified her with male pronouns. Ms. Toro de Paula has received hormones for years, and her lawyer said that she has been denied hormone treatment in ICE detention.

The federal agency said that “no detainees are being beaten or abused.”

“No lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States,” the agency said.

The actions of the Trump administration have been welcomed by opponents of transgender rights, including the Women’s Liberation Front, a women’s rights advocacy group that defines gender based on sex at birth and does not acknowledge transgender women. The group has argued that placing transgender women in prisons for women violates the constitutional rights of female inmates who are not transgender, including the Eighth Amendment right to protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, issued a report citing ICE data that Democrats in Congress had collected. It found that L.G.B.T.Q. migrants have a disproportionately higher chance of being abused in migrant detention centers. The statistics were collected during the 2017 fiscal year, which spanned Democratic and Republican administrations.

The report said that transgender detainees, on average, spent 99 days in solitary confinement, more than double the average for all immigrants in ICE custody. In the 2017 fiscal year, one in eight transgender detainees was placed in solitary confinement, which officials said is done when detainees are viewed as a threat to other immigrants or personnel, or for protective purposes.

Data from the federal government shows that in the 2024 fiscal year, during the Biden administration, 244 detainees who identified as transgender were booked into ICE custody.

In 2023, Immigration Equality interviewed 41 L.G.B.T.Q. and H.I.V.-positive immigrants who had been in detention. About one-third said that they had experienced sexual abuse, physical assaults or sexual harassment because of their identity while in detention.

Almost all the participants said that they were the targets of homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, racist or other verbal and nonverbal abuse. Most said that they had received inadequate medical care for a range of conditions, and about half said that they had been placed in solitary confinement. Of the 41 participants interviewed for the report, 14 were transgender.

Safeguards under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. have vanished during President Trump’s second term.

In May, the federal government closed the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which was responsible for investigating misconduct and abuse of all kinds in the immigration detention system.

“The violations that we’re seeing now are, to some extent, what we had seen in Trump’s first term — it’s almost like they’re on steroids, though,” said Lynly Egyes, the legal director of the Transgender Law Center, a civil rights group. “It was often difficult for trans people to access medical care. Now, it is almost impossible.”

Many transgender migrants in detention, like Ms. Toro de Paula, came to the United States seeking asylum.

She told the story of a violent childhood in Venezuela. From the age of 8, she said that she was raped repeatedly by relatives. When she was about 10, she said that she tried to hug her mother, who recoiled and splashed her with hot cooking oil. She said that the police stabbed her when she was 14 in what she described as a homophobic attack.

In October, a doctor who was retained by her legal team evaluated Ms. Toro de Paula and found an irregular hyper-pigmented patch inside her left elbow where she said her mother had burned her. She had long scars on her left wrist and hand and on her right leg where she said that the Venezuelan police had sliced her skin with a knife when they had detained her.

Two years ago, she made the dangerous journey on foot to the United States. In September 2024, she reached Eagle Pass, Texas, where officials gave her food and clothes and put her on a flight to New York City. At the time, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas had been sending thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities as part of his multibillion-dollar border security effort, known as Operation Lone Star.

In New York, she joined a community of transgender women and attended parades and parties for L.G.B.T.Q. people.

Her new life unraveled in August 2025 when she was arrested during a routine appointment at the New York City offices of ICE. She was flown to Louisiana and placed in a detention center for men, despite objections from her lawyer, Laura Berger, who works with the Legal Aid Society. The placement, Ms. Berger said, would put her client in danger.

The Homeland Security Department said that Ms. Toro de Paula had a criminal history that included charges for felony assault and criminal possession of a weapon, both of which were dismissed and sealed. According to her lawyer, those charges related to her arrest in the Bronx on June 30, 2025, after she was accused of hitting a man on the head with a skillet. Her lawyer said that Ms. Toro de Paula was fending off a robber. The charges related to that incident were dismissed in October, court records show.

In a separate case in Queens, Ms. Toro de Paula was charged with prostitution; that was dismissed. She was also charged with pickpocketing in Queens and pleaded guilty to jostling.

“A lot of people don’t understand us,” said Jessica Guaman, a transgender woman who organized gatherings that Ms. Toro de Paula had attended in New York. “Camila is a good girl.”

Many transgender people in detention have fled persecution in their home countries, said Ms. Crawford of Immigration Equality.

Wilmar Quintero, a 50-year-old transgender woman from Venezuela, came to the United States seeking asylum and was detained in Michigan for about three months. Ms. Quintero said that she had fled her native country because police officers tortured her and left her for dead after she spoke out against civil rights abuses. Photographs of her bare chest revealed an expansive stretch of pinched, red scars that mark where officers carved out her breast implants, she said.

Ms. Quintero said that she was sexually assaulted by another migrant while being detained in Michigan.

“I lived through the worst horrors and humiliations imaginable,” Ms. Quintero said in Spanish. “They treated me like an animal.”