BREAKING🚨🏳️‍🌈 A trans asylum seeker spent 44 days in one of the DEADLIEST immigration detention centers in the country, six weeks of it in the men's unit, her hormone treatment withheld and her name replaced with "Mr." Karla Saenz, a 26-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker, walked into what she thought was a routine immigration check-in in Phoenix on March 9. An agent told her she was being detained but not why. They shackled her hands, ankles and waist and took her out the back. She had spent the previous year as one of the loudest voices demanding the release of Arbella "Yari" Marquez, a Phoenix woman locked in the Eloy Detention Center whose chronic leukemia worsened dramatically inside and who has lost more than 70 pounds. Saenz landed in that same camp, a few hundred yards from the woman she had been fighting to free, unable to speak to her. Her first five days were spent in isolation over a COVID test. "They only let me out to bathe," she said. Food came at odd hours. Sometimes it didn't come. Then six weeks in the men's unit. Guards called her "Mr. Carlos Saenz." Her hormone treatment was withheld for weeks, along with medication for a chronic illness. She asked for a bra and got one 15 days later. Three other trans women were held with the men there too. "We'd go out to the yard together, the three of us, and we'd cry and laugh together," she said. "They're my sisters." Staff pushed her to sign voluntary departure papers more than 10 times, she says. "I always refused. I would rip up the paper, fight, scream." Eloy is run by the for-profit prison company CoreCivic. Detainees there describe medical neglect, BROKEN air conditioning through Arizona summers and prolonged solitary confinement. ICE calls her account of mistreatment and denied medical care "entirely false" and says she missed check-ins, which she denies. The agency's emailed response referred to her by her deadname and male pronouns while stating that staff treat "all detainees equally, with respect and dignity." "Being in detention is a choice," the spokesperson added. A judge ordered her release. If you appreciate Gay News, it would mean the world if you followed my page. Thank you for being here.