According to the Legal Defense Fund, nearly 400,000 ICE arrests across all 50 US states were made during the first 10 months of Trump’s second term. As of April 2026 (the most recent TRAC Immigration data), over 60,000 people were reportedly being held in US detention centers, with 70.8% of detainees having no criminal record.
Numerous reports from both US media sources and civil rights groups have since documented the poor and abusive conditions people living in detainment experience. But what still remains underexamined is the plight of LGBTQIA+ immigrants harassed and abused for their identities while being apprehended by ICE, as well as in these detention centers.
Before Trump’s reelection, the National Immigrant Justice Center found in a June 2024 survey that “nearly all of the participants (35 out of 41) reported being targets of homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, racist, or other verbal and nonverbal abuse in ICE and CBP jails.” In addition, “approximately one third of survey participants (18 out of 41) reported sexual abuse, physical assaults, or sexual harassment in immigration detention due to their LGBTQ identity.”
Maksim Borisov is a 23-year-old Gay Russian refugee who was detained by ICE at the US-Mexico border in early 2025 while attempting to claim political asylum. He was released from the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona last March, after being held for 13 months. Now, he waits to have his asylum case heard by an immigration judge, while staying with family in Los Angeles.
As of press time, ICE has still not returned any of Borisov’s legal documents (birth certificate, passport, etc.). He contacted the SGN to share his struggle, and that of other LGBTQIA+ detainees he befriended, at the hands of ICE and inside Eloy.
Persecution in Russia
Borisov told the SGN he left his home country of Russia in 2023 due to the relentless targeting he faced for his Gay identity. He said that while growing up on Sakhalin (an island north of Japan), the assaults on him and his family had been constant.
“I’ve been, like, humiliated at school. I got beaten up by a lot of people because of my identity and that was really, really hard,” he said.
Despite leaving the country years ago, he described how his family back home has still been targeted for him being Gay. “A few days ago, a person was trying to kill my mother with a knife,” he said. “And was yelling that her son was a faggot.”
He explained that local Russian police were not sympathetic to his mother’s situation, and let the man go.
In 2023, the Russian government passed a series of virulently anti-Queer laws, including a ban on gender transition, and declared the “international LGBT movement” an “extremist organization” that incites social and religious discord. Russia today continues to rank as one of the most unsafe places for Queer and Trans people to live in Europe.
Coming to America
Initially, Borisov fled to Thailand because of its more friendly attitude and laws toward LGBTQIA+ people (as well as having friends there). However, his circumstances became precarious, because Thailand and Russia have an extradition agreement, which mandates that Thailand send people convicted of crimes in Russia back to the country for trial).
“While I was living in Thailand, the Russian authorities were monitoring my social media accounts and collecting my TikTok videos and other online content as evidence against me,” he said.
Sensing that the Russian government was building a case, he felt that there was no other option but to seek political asylum in the US.
In fact, the Russian government did formally open a criminal case against Borisov in October 2025, due to his alleged involvement with the “international LGBT movement,” alleged extremist activity for his support of Ukraine, and the “humiliation of human dignity” for supporting LGBTQIA+ rights — serious charges that Borisov said would cost him $7,000 and multiple years in prison.
He explained how other members of his family were also targeted by the Russian government, and that his aunt and cousin asked him to join them in seeking asylum in the US together, since another relative was already living here. But their initial plan to wait through the asylum process in Mexico went awry, after Trump canceled the program immediately after his inauguration.
He said they felt like there was no other choice but to claim asylum in person at the Mexico-US border, but his assumption that things wouldn’t be so bad was disproven immediately when they arrived.
“I was wrong. I was so wrong actually,” he said.
In his first interaction with an ICE agent, the man reportedly said to him, “We don’t care that you’re a faggot. We’re gonna deport you anyways.”
When asked to confirm if that was the exact language the agent used, he affirmed that “that was the first thing I heard when I asked for asylum.”
Eloy
Borisov said he was detained overnight by ICE on February 15, 2025, after he refused to sign a voluntary deportation form. At first, he said he was held for three days at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, California. Then, he was transferred to Eloy.
The Eloy Detention Center is owned and operated by CoreCivic Inc., which is the largest for-profit, private prison company in the country. For the 2025 fiscal year, CoreCivic was awarded $591.7 million in US government contracts. From 2008 to the present, 26.11% ($2.32 billion) and 23.81% ($2.11 billion) of the company’s total awarded US government funds so far have been for ICE and Federal Prison System projects, respectively.
According to Borisov, the conditions and treatment that he and other detainees endured while at Eloy were as bad as Russia’s gulags. During his arrival, he said it took 16 hours to get processed while waiting in overcrowded holding rooms with no heating.
“We had no jackets. It was freezing cold, and there were so many people. It was just crazy,” he said.
Once he was admitted, the accommodations did not improve. For the next 13 months, he endured numerous hardships at Eloy, from finding mold in his food to encountering homophobic and transphobic harassment.
He told the SGN that while in detainment, he made several friends, including a Mexican Trans woman. “They barely spoke English. I was trying to speak a little Spanish,” he said. “I was trying to protect them, because officers were making homophobic jokes at me and then transphobic jokes about them.”
He described the sexual harassment his Trans friend endured: being told to show people her boobs, being called a “gentleman, man, bro, and dude,” and being forced to use male-designated showers and other facilities.
“I cannot believe this is what’s happening around me,” he recalled thinking of the situation.
Regarding a photo of him, her, and other friends together, shared with the SGN , Borisov explained that their uniforms were color-coded to indicate their level of security threat. His Trans woman friend wore a different color (khaki), because she was ranked as a higher threat. He explained that was due to the fact she had already attempted to cross the US border once, and was deported back to Mexico before attempting again to flee transphobia at home. A week after the photo was taken, on November 3, 2025, she was deported back to Mexico.
Borisov said he continues to stay in contact with her, and that she no longer wants to immigrate because “America is such a horrible place.”
She declined the SGN’s request for an interview, and said that her experiences were a nightmare she didn’t want to remember.
Grievances
Borisov also gave to the SGN a series of “state grievance” documents he submitted while in detention at Eloy. The situations Borisov describes in these forms suggest an strongly homophobic and transphobic environment in the facility. In his interview, he emphasized how LGBTQ+ people were not treated the same as other inmates.
On April 22, 2025, Borisov reportedly told an officer named Hernandez he had the same name as his pod officer. The officer allegedly responded, “Are you talking about that shemale?” in reference to his friend. He also allegedly referred to her as the “tranny with no balls.” Then the officer reportedly said, “I am OK with Gay people like you, but if they start moving on me, I don’t like them.” The grievance was closed by the facility on April 28.
Then on July 3, 2025, another guard, Officer Green, allegedly threatened Borisov for lodging grievances of homophobia and transphobia with the facility.
“He was telling me about my grievances and that he read all of them,” he wrote. The threat he allegedly made, Borisov said, was that if Borisov decided to complain “about [his] Gay shit again,” the guard would “beat the shit out of me.”
In response, a facility official named A. Housewright wrote that they would fulfill his request to be moved to another part of the facility to avoid the guard, but they did not ultimately remove the guard from his post for his behavior.
“Upon my investigation, I did not see any evidence of staff misconduct,” they wrote.
After detainment
In the three months since Borisov’s release, he has continued to be vocal about the experiences of his detention.
“We’re all human beings, and we all are struggling with the same problems, and this is really important,” he told the SGN, “because, like, a lot of LGBT immigrants are coming to America from all over the world to try and save their lives. And they’re getting deported and tortured. I think a lot of people need to know what’s going on with people like us.”
He has been working with California Sen. Mark Kelley’s office to get back his documents that are still being held by ICE.
Asked how he felt since leaving Eloy, he said he wouldn’t have tried to claim asylum in the US if he had known how difficult it was going to be.
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