When Your Life Is On The Line

Let’s face it our lives are cheap, kill a trans person and you can get off scot free.

Can a Transgender Woman Get Justice in Texas?
After Aliah Hernandez was brutally beaten in a New Braunfels motel room, her attacker walked away free.
Texas Monthly
By Nate Blakeslee
June 2018 Issue

When Officer J. Lopez of the New Braunfels police arrived at the motel at three-thirty that morning, he found Aliah slumped in the lobby, half-conscious. There was blood on her mouth and hands, and her face and neck were grotesquely swollen and bruised. Her left ear had been partially ripped off, and dangling cartilage was clearly visible. Lopez squatted beside Aliah and asked what had happened. She could barely speak, mumbling something that sounded like “Carmen.”

“He hit me with everything,” she whispered.

Officer Lopez asked for her ID, and she managed to find her Mexican passport. He began to jot down her particulars but then stopped short, looking down at the battered woman next to him. The given name on the passport was not Aliah but Blas. Under “Sexo,” he saw, the passport was clearly marked M.

The victim was transgender.
[…]
It worked. Wright corroborated almost every element of Aliah’s story: they’d met at the drive-thru and arranged to get together. Nothing sexual had occurred, but he’d become enraged when she told him she was transgender, and he had beaten her. Wright denied that Aliah had ever lost consciousness, but he confessed to hitting her multiple times. And he admitted something else that suggested that he knew he’d committed a serious crime: he’d stolen Aliah’s phone and deleted the text messages on his own device to hide evidence that the encounter had ever taken place. The stolen phone was gone—he’d thrown it away once he’d left the motel, he told Groff—but he agreed to turn over his phone so that it could be examined.

The victim again gets victimized…

Aliah had been the victim of a violent crime too, yet she was beginning to suspect that her case was not a priority, a feeling that her meeting with Tharp did little to dispel. Tharp was petite and blond, a picture of professionalism in her nicely tailored suit. She nodded respectfully when Aliah explained that she no longer used the name Blas, which was on all of the police reports and other documents in the case file. The DA asked Aliah what outcome she was looking for in the case and agreed that prison time was warranted. But she couldn’t tell Aliah when her assistant prosecutor would be presenting the case to a grand jury so that it could move to trial. She finally had the hospital reports, thanks to Aliah, but now Tharp said she was waiting on a forensic analysis of Wright’s cellphone, which she described as a key piece of evidence.

And victimized again…

In July, Tharp called Aliah in for a third meeting. This time Aliah brought her best friend, Sami Vela, with her for emotional support, along with a counselor from the Department of Public Safety who had been guiding her through the process of getting the state to help with her hospital bills, which totaled over $22,000. Tharp had bad news. The case had been brought before a grand jury twice, she said—first by an assistant prosecutor, and then by Tharp herself—but both times, the jury had declined to issue an indictment. Tharp had filed a misdemeanor charge instead, for which no grand jury approval was needed. Wright had been charged not with assault but “interfering with an emergency call”—stemming from his theft of Aliah’s phone, which had prevented her from calling the police. The maximum penalty was a year in jail.

Then we have the case of a trans woman who died in ICE custody…

A Transgender Woman Who Was Part Of The Migrant Caravan Has Died In ICE Custody
"I didn't want to come to Mexico; I wanted to stay in Honduras but I couldn't."
BuzzFeed
By Adolfo Flores
May 30, 2018


A transgender woman who was part of the caravan of Central American migrants that arrived at the US border earlier this month died in custody Friday from what appeared to be cardiac arrest.

Roxsana Hernandez, 33, died in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 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.
[…]
In addition to being cold, Pueblo Sin Fronteras said, Hernandez lacked adequate food or medical care and was held in a cell where the lights were turned on 24 hours a day. On May 16, she was then taken to a transgender unit at the Cibola County Correctional Center, a federal prison facility in Milan, New Mexico, that contracts with ICE.

The following day Hernandez was admitted to Cibola General Hospital and was later transferred via air ambulance to Albuquerque's Lovelace Medical Center where she remained in the intensive care unit until she died on May 25. The preliminary cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to ICE.

The Transgender Law Center said,

Transgender Law Center (TLC), Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement (Familia:TQLM) and Organización Latina de Trans en Texas (OLTT) mourn the death of a transgender asylum seeker who died while in ICE custody. Roxana Hernández, a transgender woman from Honduras, was only 33 years-old when she died while incarcerated in immigration detention. Although she was processed into the United States on May 13, 2018, it is unclear where and in what conditions Ms. Hernández was held for the five days she was in custody until she was transferred to ICE and the Cibola Correctional Facility. It has been repeatedly reported that asylum seekers at the border are held in freezing holding cells (often referred to as “hieleras”) for days. Ms. Hernández died from medical complications with pneumonia.

“Paired with the abuse we know transgender people regularly suffer in ICE detention, the death of Ms. Hernández sends the message that transgender people are disposable and do not deserve dignity, safety, or even life,” said Isa Noyola, Deputy Director at Transgender Law Center.

“It is alarming that transgender communities continue to face transphobic violence outside and inside of detention walls,” says Flor Bermudez, Legal Director at Transgender Law Center. “This is why TLC’s Trans Immigrant Defense Effort (TIDE) has organized to demand the liberation of transgender women from detention and the end of all detention and deportations. ICE has shown time and again it is incapable of protecting transgender women in detention. Transgender people should not be detained by ICE, at all.”

“We have been demanding the release of our trans communities detained in ICE detention centers because of rampant physical and brutal treatment from guards and other detainees,” said Jorge Gutiérrez, Executive Director of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement.

To have survived the dangerous journey from Honduras and flee the oppression only to die from the oppression that we face in the hands of ICE is a tragedy that could have been avoid.

Snatched from the hands of ICE we have a victory,

Kilpatrick Wins Asylum for Transgender Woman in Hard-Fought Pro Bono Case
A team of Kilpatrick lawyers and staff spent about 800 hours on the asylum case of transgender Mexican woman Estrella Sanchez.
Law.com – Daily Report
By Meredith Hobbs
May 29, 2018

Estrella Sanchez, a transgender immigrant who claimed she suffered repeated rapes and abuse while growing up in Mexico—and then endured harassment in a U.S. immigration prison—has finally won asylum with the help of her pro bono lawyers from Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.

After denying Sanchez’s petition three times, U.S. Immigration Court Judge Dan Trimble granted Sanchez asylum last week, three years after a Kilpatrick team led by Jeff Fisher and Michael Turton first took on her case.

“I think she didn’t believe it until the judge said the words,” Fisher said. “Then she smiled and cried.”

Sanchez had been fighting for asylum since 2012, including three appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

“We were thrilled that we were able to get justice for her, even though it took six years,” Fisher said.

Sometimes it seems hopeless for us but then there is another light at the end of the tunnel.