Latinas Detained by ICE Face Abuse From Both Officers and Impersonators
It’s becoming harder to tell who’s a federal immigration officer and who’s pretending to be one. For Latinas across the U.S., that confusion is proving dangerous, sometimes even fatal. According to Ms. Magazine and CNN, men across several states have impersonated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to intimidate, kidnap, and rape immigrant women. The attackers count on fear and uncertainty. And in Trump’s America, they have both in abundance.
A man in Philadelphia flashed an ICE badge before robbing a woman. A college student in Temple, Pennsylvania, dressed in fake “ICE” gear, tried to intimidate students. In Raleigh, North Carolina, 37-year-old Carl Thomas Bennett allegedly raped an immigrant woman at a Motel 6. He did so while posing as an ICE officer and threatening her with deportation. He’s now facing charges for kidnapping, second-degree rape, and impersonating a law enforcement officer, as reported by CNN and ABC11.
And in Maryland, police say Victor Antonio Reed, 26, forced a woman into his car under threat of deportation. Then, he sexually assaulted her. According to WUSA9, he had flashed a badge and claimed to be an ICE agent.
Latinas detained by ICE face real abuse, not just impersonators
The threat doesn’t stop with the impersonators. According to Ms. Magazine and Cultura Colectiva, Latinas in actual ICE custody report hunger, abuse, medical neglect, and sexual violence. One woman, Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus, was five months pregnant when she says ICE officials denied her prenatal care. Instead, she received twelve unidentified pills daily and food infested with cockroaches. She begged them to take her to the hospital. By the time she was, her baby had already been dead for three days. She gave birth alone, shackled, and under armed guard. ICE deported her to Guatemala shortly afterward, separating her from her family.
“There was no explanation, no translation, and no time,” Monterroso-Lemus said in an interview with Cultura Colectiva.
ICE impersonators are spreading fear across Latino communities
In South Carolina, a man named Sean-Michael Johnson was recorded mocking and threatening a group of Latino men on the road. “You’re going back to Mexico!” he yelled, jiggling their car keys in their faces and blocking them from leaving. “Don’t be speaking that pig Latin in my f**king country!” CNN reported that authorities charged Johnson with kidnapping, impersonating law enforcement, petty larceny, and assault.
In San Francisco, a man wearing a fake “ICE” windbreaker and a red “Trump Won” hat was spotted dining at a taquería in the Mission District, according to KRON4. Supervisor Jackie Fielder called him a “terrorist” attempting to intimidate the immigrant community.
According to the grassroots group Siembra NC, these impersonation attempts have sparked more than 200 calls about possible ICE sightings in North Carolina alone. Many turn out to be hoaxes, like a fake ICE truck parked at a Compare Foods grocery store in Durham.
Inside Alligator Alcatraz: Latinas detained by ICE report terrifying conditions
The official detention centers aren’t safer. In Florida’s Everglades, a new facility dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” is raising concerns due to its swampy location, poor weather conditions, and militarized surveillance.
According to CBS News, the government is using the facility for mass deportations and is already housing thousands of detainees. Officials are even selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise, treating the place like a theme park instead of a detention center.
How Trump’s policies embolden violence against Latinas detained by ICE
The rise in impersonators is happening in tandem with ICE’s expanded powers under the Trump administration. The government now allows agents to arrest immigrants in places once considered “sensitive,” like churches and schools. In ProPublica’s reporting, ICE has even detained immigrants in violation of court settlements and fabricated warrants after the fact.
Civil rights experts say this isn’t just negligence. It’s a system authorities have designed for chaos. “The point of their policies is to create fear, to create panic, to create chaos,” said Maribel Hernández Rivera of the ACLU in an interview with CNN. “People see and hear this and they feel emboldened to go against immigrants.”
From forced sterilizations to impersonation assaults, it’s all connected
Sexual violence is not new. It’s just repackaged. According to reporting from Ms. Magazine, Black and Latina women have long been targeted through sterilization, eugenics, and dehumanizing medical experiments. In the 20th century, doctors used Puerto Rican women as test subjects for birth control pills without consent. Previously, in the 1970s, authorities coerced Mexican women into sterilizations at LA County hospitals. And in 2020, a whistleblower exposed “unnecessary gynecological procedures” in a Georgia ICE facility.
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations later confirmed that over 80 percent of certain gynecological procedures conducted on ICE detainees across the U.S. were performed at that one Georgia facility, even though it only held 4 percent of ICE’s female detainees.
Latinas detained by ICE are isolated, unprotected, and retraumatized
According to USA Today, women detained in ICE facilities like Miami’s Krome Center describe conditions that feel like “hell on earth.” They report being shackled for hours on buses, denied food or bathrooms, sleeping on concrete floors, and being forced to urinate in corners.
“We smelled worse than animals,” one woman said.
Even women without criminal records are being sent to all-male detention centers, forced into isolation, and denied access to medical or hygiene products. These are the stories we don’t hear about until it’s too late.
This is about more than immigration. It’s about power
Whether through impersonation or official ICE abuse, what’s happening to Latinas in the U.S. is part of a much older, deeper story. According to Ms. Magazine and America’s Voice, these acts of violence are rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy. Black-led advocacy groups have drawn parallels between ICE’s current tactics and Jim Crow-era policing. “ICE follows a blueprint … drafted and tested in our Black neighborhoods, from the Fugitive Slave Act to predictive policing,” said Elice Hennessee of CADRE.
As Trump-era policies gut civil liberties and empower mass surveillance and militarization, women of color—especially immigrants—are left vulnerable to both state violence and civilian predators.
“It is no surprise,” Ms. Magazine reported, “that some could take this rhetoric as a license to target immigrant women of color with sexual violence.”
