Hundreds of immigrants have reported sexual abuse at ICE facilities. Most cases aren’t investigated

When 23-year-old Mari walked out of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention in 2022, she felt invisible. It was barely a month after she had entered the United States as an asylum seeker from Venezuela. The once vivacious bodybuilder now felt like she didn’t matter. “When I looked at myself in the mirror, I felt like I didn’t deserve to wear nice clothes or to put on makeup or look good. I felt so immensely invisible,” Mari said. Her time inside ICE’s Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, between December 2021 and January 2022, left a deep mark on her self-worth. A year and a half later, it continues to wake her up in the middle of the night, shivering and in tears. Mari is not her real name. We’re using it to protect her identity. She is one of five women who complained of being sexually assaulted by a male nurse who worked at Stewart. Listen to the investigation from Future Investigates in the player above. Escaping from political violence in Venezuela, Mari arrived in the U.S. in late December 2021. She was arrested by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) after crossing the border and then quickly transferred to Stewart. Shortly after, she went into the infirmary for a routine check-up. There, Mari encountered the nurse for the first time. He was a short, middle-aged white man with a short beard. The nurse asked her to follow him into a small room and closed the door. When Mari was alone with him, she felt uneasy. After a few routine medical questions, he said she was pretty. He asked her if she had had any surgeries in the past. When Mari informed him of her breast surgery, he got excited and began staring at her breasts. And then he asked her to lay down on the examination table. “He pressed my hand against his penis. When I tried to take my hand away, he began masturbating with it. I was devastated,” Mari said. Weeks before, another asylum seeker from Venezuela, who we will call Viviana, said she faced a similar experience. Viviana has accused the male nurse of sexually assaulting her on two occasions. READ MORE: They reported sexual harassment. Then the retaliation began. “He asked me to lower my pants and placed the stethoscope down there,” Viviana said. “He would make lewd faces while doing that. I froze and stared into the void. I couldn’t understand why he did that to me.” There are several laws meant to protect immigrants detained at ICE facilities from sexual assault and abuse. The primary law that offers this kind of protection to incarcerated and detained people is the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). After learning about PREA, Viviana, Mari, and two other women filed an administrative complaint with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — ICE’s supervisory body — in July 2022. ImageA woman at the Glades County Detention Center in Florida, seen here in March 2022, is one of hundreds who have filed sexual abuse complaints at ICE facilities since 2015. File photo by Zeba Warsi/PBS NewsHour. The complaint, first reported by The Intercept, stated that the nurse had “repeatedly taken advantage of his position as a medical professional to isolate women at Stewart in private medical examination rooms, to force or coerce them into giving him access to private parts of their body without medical justification or need and assaulting them during his ‘medical exams.’” Apart from these four women, public records confirm that a fifth woman has also made similar allegations about the same male nurse. There is a pattern of sexual abuse complaints in ICE detention that goes beyond the Stewart facility and the accused nurse. Official records and testimonies obtained by Futuro Investigates, the investigative unit of the Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization Futuro Media, show disturbing details of 308 sexual assault and sexual abuse complaints filed by immigrants detained in ICE facilities nationwide between 2015 and 2021. The data obtained by Futuro Investigates reveals a systemic pattern of abuse by detention officers, contractual guards, and ICE employees, accused of sexually assaulting the individuals they are meant to protect. According to the obtained data, more than half of all abuse allegations made in the past six years were directed against staff. At least five complaints in the records allege that ICE employees threatened them with deportation. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.