text: ICE killed Roxsana Hernandez | SocialistWorker.org
  Lea Ramirez reports on the death of a trans woman who fled gang threats in Honduras only to die from cruelty and medical malpractice in the U.S. immigration system.
  THE WAR on refugees claimed another victim on May 25. Roxsana Hernandez, a 33-year-old transgender woman from Honduras, died in a New Mexico hospital from health complications due to pneumonia after being denied proper medical care for a week in a detention cell run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in San Ysidro, California.
  Roxsana was seeking asylum and arrived at the U.S. border as part of the well-publicized caravan of more than 1,000 Central American migrants.
  Roxsana viewed her only option for survival to make the journey to the U.S., where she had previously been deported from. But when she arrived at the border with the caravan, Border Patrol placed her for five days in one of the holding cells commonly known as hieleras (iceboxes) for their freezing temperatures.
  These abuses mirror the dreadful conditions in the U.S. criminal justice system as a whole. A National Inmate Survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2014 found that "33.2 percent of transgender women in state and federal prisons report experiencing sexual abuse by other prisoners, and 15.2 percent reported abuse by facility staff."
  On June 6, Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement called a #JusticeforRoxsana national day of action in a number of cities in the U.S. and Mexico. It's a small but important step towards demanding that Roxsana not be forgotten — and that the agencies that killed her be abolished.