October 02 2025, 08:15 
At a women’s detention facility for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Louisiana, four detainees — three of whom identify as transgender men — allege they were subjected to forced labor, sexual assault, forcible touching, groping, physical abuse, and denial of medical attention at the hands of a former ICE assistant warden.
The complaints — filed by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, the ACLU, and the National Immigration Project — claim the abuse took place between 2023 and 2025, across two presidential administrations.
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“It got to the point where he would harass me everywhere that I went,” Monica Renteria-Gonzalez, who identifies as male, told Newsweek in an interview from the South Louisiana Detention Center in Basile.
“If I was in the recreation yard, he would come and he would follow me. If I was eating at the dining hall, he would come and just sit there next to me, making me feel uncomfortable. He would follow me into the dorm,” Renteria-Gonzalez added.
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He and two other trans detainees, Kenia Campos-Flores and Mario Garcia-Valenzuela, say they were targeted by the warden with an ad hoc, forced-work program and subjected to manual labor for little or no compensation.
Detainee complaints about the abusive conditions were allegedly met with the same repsonse: “‘If you wanna be a man, I’ll treat you like a man’, or ‘Aren’t you strong enough? Aren’t you a man?’”
The forced labor included pushing heavy cinder blocks or metal cabinets across a dorm before detainees were ordered to push them back to where they came from.
“We never had the proper [personal protective equipment] and stuff like that. We never got paid. If we did, it would be like a dollar, no more than five at a time,” Renteria-Gonzalez said. “Or we would work for like a bag of chips or a snack bag from the kitchen, or a soda, just small things like that.”
When the detainees complained, they said they faced retaliation, including being placed in solitary confinement. Garcia-Valenzuela said he was beaten and handcuffed.
Multiple complaints about the alleged mistreatment were dismissed as “unsubstantiated.”
Sarah Decker, staff attorney at RFK Human Rights, said that Manuel Reyes, an officer no longer at the detention center, explicitly targeted trans men and masculine-presenting LGBTQ+ detainees.
“The program had actually a much more sinister purpose and that from my perspective was designed to punish and physically torture people who identify as LGBTQ or transgender,” Decker said.
Detainee complaints about the abusive conditions were met with the same repsonse, Decker said: “‘If you wanna be a man, I’ll treat you like a man’, or ‘Aren’t you strong enough? Aren’t you a man?’”
“So clearly there was something more diabolical going on,” Decker added.
The abuse was identified during RFK Human Rights’ ongoing visits to Louisiana’s ICE facilities. The organization believes ICE and GEO Group, the private contractor running the South Louisiana Detention Center, were aware of Reyes’ actions but did nothing to stop them.
The complaints were filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which allows the organizations to sue the federal government for damages caused by the negligent or wrongful acts of federal employees.
“It was hard. It made me feel scared, it made me feel frustrated, it made me feel angry, because we don’t have a voice in here.”
Monica Renteria-Gonzalez, an ICE detainee who identifies as male
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security official tasked with refuting multiple claims of abuse by ICE and its proxies in President Trump’s war on immigrants, responded to the allegations in typically bellicose language employing questionable statistics.
The allegations were “another hoax about ICE facilities,” she said, dismissing the detainees claims as the types of “smears” that are “directly contributing to our officers facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them.” She didn’t provide a source for her statistic nor said whether the alleged assaults were against officers in ICE facilities or in cities where ICE officers have forcibly injured and detained people without due process.
“Nobody was forced into coerced labor. The Assistant Warden did not perpetrate or enable any sexual harassment or assault. Nobody was physically abused. And nobody was denied proper medical care,” McLaughlin added in her denial.
Nevertheless, Renteria-Gonzalez asserts that the work program was used to penalize and demean him.
“It was hard,” he said. “It made me feel scared, it made me feel frustrated, it made me feel angry, because we don’t have a voice in here.”
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