a trans hairstylist from miami got deported to a country she had never set foot in. she shares a room with four men there. we are not okay.

via the Associated Press and the Tampa Bay Times

"My whole life, my whole identity, was taken away from me."

Daniela Fuentes left Cuba in 2023, she told the Associated Press, after being attacked there more than once over who she is. She spent seven months in Mexico, crossed into Texas through the CBP One app, and built a life in Florida doing hair and performing drag. Then ICE picked her up, and the United States deported her to the Central African Republic, a country she had never been to, where she knows nobody and does not speak the language.

"Everything is difficult here because I have to hide who I am," she told AP, which says she rarely leaves the room she shares with four Cuban men. "When I learned that they were going to put me with men, I almost fainted." And: "My personal appearance is awful. I look like a different human being."

The Tampa Bay Times reached her there weeks earlier, in a story about Cubans living in Florida being flown to Africa. It reported she spent four months in detention after an arrest in March. Security guards, she told the Times, "tell me it is better not to go outside because it's not safe for me." The two papers differ on some details, including when she arrived in the US and her age, so we have left those out.

AP says ICE did not reply to its questions, and that the government maintains the policy is lawful and that receiving countries promise deportees will not be persecuted. In the Central African Republic, AP reports, trans people "have little to no legal protections." DHS told the Times that once someone leaves ICE custody, "ICE will no longer be responsible for them."

She is not the first. Reuters found LGBTQ deportees dumped in Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Eswatini, and a federal judge has just ordered the government to bring back Ahmed Soliman, a gay man from Phoenix sent to Equatorial Guinea. The policy has a type, and it is people with nowhere safe to land.