Roxsana Hernández
She fled Honduras because she was trans and asked for asylum in the US – three weeks later she died in immigration custody.
Roxsana Hernández was a trans woman from Honduras who lived with HIV. In the spring of 2018 she travelled north with hundreds of other migrants; activists in Guatemala and Mexico supported her on the way. On 9 May 2018 she asked for asylum at the San Ysidro border crossing south of San Diego.
US border officers took her into custody. A few days later she was transferred to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and taken to the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico, which has a separate unit for trans detainees. On 17 May she was admitted to hospital with signs of pneumonia, dehydration and complications of HIV. She died on 25 May 2018 at a hospital in Albuquerque, aged 33.
The cause of her death is disputed. An independent autopsy commissioned on behalf of her family by the former Georgia chief medical examiner Kris Sperry found deep bruising on her ribs and back and injuries to her wrists typical of handcuffs; he concluded that she had most probably died of severe dehydration on top of her HIV infection. ICE rejected the allegation of abuse. In April 2019 New Mexico’s Office of the Medical Investigator concluded that she had died of an AIDS-related illness and that her death was natural; it attributed the rib fractures to repeated resuscitation. The Transgender Law Center, which represented the family, sharply criticised the investigation.
Her death caused outrage among LGBTI and immigrant rights groups in the United States and Central America; several US senators demanded information about her treatment. Her case still raises the question of how safe trans people are in immigration detention.