Garrison Davis

Social media posts further extrapolated the potential harm facing trans people by ICE agents beyond the claims made in the article by saying that ICE will now deport or disappear trans citizens.

Anyone who tried to push back on the legitimacy of those claims were labeled dangerous or feds for trying to quote-unquote downplay the threat posed by ICE.

Assertions of new pressing danger in this back-and-forth discourse largely took three forms.

One, saying that because ICE is already doing X bad thing, that means they could also start doing this new bad thing.

Two, people asserting that ICE is in fact actually already doing this.

And three, arguments based on distrust of the government and ICE's general lack of legality.

Much of the discussion emerged from the genuine belief that ICE has been granted new power or has been quote-unquote authorized to detain someone for looking trans.

That Trump has quote-unquote opened the door for ICE to start profiling trans people.

That, like the Supreme Court's ruling last year, profiling has been essentially greenlit for trans people.

Or that checking the consistency of gender markers has been added to ICE's quote-unquote jurisdiction.

And to be 100% clear, there's not been any new ICE memo or policy related to trans people, gender markers, or documentation being in their jurisdiction.

State Department policy on requiring biological sex on applications has existed for over a year.

The real danger posed by this policy is that more trans immigrants could have their visas delayed or in extreme cases denied.

And people may need help navigating this increasingly confusing application process.

Still, people have tried to assert that ICE's intentional targeting and profiling of people for being trans was quote-unquote already happening.

In the past year, ICE has detained trans people.

It's hard to get exact numbers on this because ICE stopped collecting detention data for trans people last year to comply with Trump's anti-trans executive orders.

Though we do know of attempts to deport trans people from news reporting.

Last August, ICE detained a trans woman who overstayed a visa by six years.

And in November, a trans woman who lost her lawful permanent resident status in 2023 after pleading guilty to a felony was quote-unquote inadvertently deported to Mexico despite a court order specifically barring her from being sent to Mexico.