President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions repeatedly describe undocumented immigrants as criminals and, in Trump’s case, “animals.” Under Trump’s direction anyone coming to America without proper documentation – even those who are here escaping violence – are now unwelcome in many cases, especially if they are traveling from Mexico or Central America.
Drug gangs south of the U.S. border in many areas have free reign and control. Many of the people traveling to the U.S. seeking asylum know if they stay in their home country they will likely face violence and death. The dream is asylum in America, but under President Trump, that dream can turn into a nightmare.
“Roxsana Hernandez, 33, died in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico,” Buzzfeed’s Adolfo Flores reports. “She had been taken to another hospital in New Mexico more than a week earlier with symptoms of pneumonia, dehydration, and complications associated with HIV.”
Hernandez, who died Friday, spoke with Buzzfeed in April. She “said she had fled Honduras in part because of the discrimination and violence she faced for being transgender.”
Months earlier, “Hernandez said, she was walking home when MS-13 gang members started screaming ‘We don’t want you in this neighborhood, you fucking faggot’ at her before gang-raping her.”
“Four of them raped me and as a result I got HIV,” Hernandez told BuzzFeed News. “Trans people in my neighborhood are killed and chopped into pieces, then dumped inside potato bags.”
ICE is “responsible for her death,” Jennicet Gutiérrez, national organizer for Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, told Buzzfeed.
“Trans women continue to face violence inside and outside detention centers, and are oftentimes forced to do sex work as a means of survival,” Gutiérrez said. “She was trying to find safety in the United States and sadly she’s no longer with us. We demand answers and justice for Roxana.”
President Trump has long used MS-13 as a weapon against Democrats, claiming anyone who does not support his draconian and inhumane immigration policies supports MS-13. That’s false.
“Roxy died due to medical negligence by US immigration authorities. In other words, she was murdered,” a joint statement from three immigrant groups charges. “She saw in the United States the opportunity to start new life free of abuse, risk, and threats, by seeking asylum. What she found in the United States, however, was death.”
“Roxy exercised her legal right to seek asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on the morning of May 9th,” the groups, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, Al Otro Lado, and Diversidad Sin Fronteras say on Facebook. “She was processed and held for 5 days in the dreaded ‘icebox’ – holding cells with extremely low temperatures – in US Customs & Border Protection suffering cold, lack of adequate food or medical care, with the lights on 24 hours a day, under lock & key. During her first week in the United States Roxy’s body and spirit quickly deteriorated. Why incarcerate and torture her like this?”
U.S. law is clear: people have a legal right to seek asylum and cannot be automatically turned away or processed for immediate return.