A rape kit sat refused by local prosecutors who said they had no jurisdiction over the ICE facility where a woman reported being sexually assaulted. That account came from an attorney testifying at a congressional field hearing in San Antonio on Friday, one of several pieces of testimony describing sexual violence inside Texas immigration detention sites as the city weighs a new ICE warehouse on its East Side.
Kristen Etter, who serves as director of policy and legal services for the Texas Immigration Law Council, testified that women detained in ICE facilities are subjected to sexual assault, according to the San Antonio Current. Etter told the panel that a sexual assault nurse examiner performed a rape kit on a woman who said she had been sexually assaulted inside an ICE detention facility, but local prosecuting authorities refused to accept the kit, citing a lack of jurisdiction over the facility, which was operated by private contractors. Etter described ICE detention facilities as black sites, the outlet reported.
The hearing was organized by U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro and held Friday at the San Antonio Central Library, per the same report. Panel members said they intend to share Friday's testimony with colleagues and hope to pass legislation aimed at preventing further assaults in ICE custody.
A Jurisdictional Gap Between Jail Rosters
Part of the difficulty in tracking abuse allegations traces to how little is publicly known about who is even held inside these facilities. The South Texas Family Residential Facility in Dilley — a privately run lockup for immigrant families southwest of San Antonio — has no publicly available detainee roster, unlike the Bexar County Jail, which maintains a public roster, the San Antonio Current reported.
Priscilla Olivarez, a policy attorney and strategist with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, said the number of women raped inside ICE facilities remains unclear. Olivarez pointed to detention-site operators making it difficult for detainees to communicate with legal counsel, and said the Legal Orientation Program, which had allowed nonprofits to meet with detainees weekly under federal funding, was decimated after the Trump administration began. Many detainees with attorneys are unable to access legal counsel as a result, she said, and the full impact of sexual assault in ICE facilities remains unknown.
Testimony at the hearing also included an allegation involving a child. A father in McAllen alleged that his 3-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted while in foster care after federal immigration agents separated the girl from her mother in April. Officials later removed the girl from the foster care facility where the alleged assault occurred, according to the San Antonio Current's reporting.
A National Pattern of Underreported Complaints
The testimony in San Antonio echoes patterns documented nationwide. Futuro Investigates found 308 sexual-assault and sexual-abuse complaints filed by immigrants detained in ICE facilities across the country between 2015 and 2021, according to PBS NewsHour, which reported that more than half of those allegations were directed against detention staff and that at least five complaints alleged ICE employees threatened the complainants with deportation.
Separately, the ACLU reported that 1,448 allegations of sexual abuse were filed with ICE between 2012 and March 2018, including 237 allegations in 2017 alone. The civil rights group also cited a Government Accountability Office finding that officials at immigration prisons and jails failed to report 40 percent of sexual-abuse allegations to ICE headquarters in 2013, and noted that researchers found only 7 percent of 215 sexual-assault allegations reviewed between 2009 and 2013 were ultimately substantiated.
Similar gaps have surfaced at other facilities around the country. The University of Washington Center for Human Rights reported that internal investigations at Tacoma's Northwest ICE Processing Center ignored key evidence, failed to implement preventive measures and failed to report crimes to law enforcement, describing serious gaps between ICE's stated zero-tolerance policy and conditions inside the facility. The same report found that many incidents were reported but received no apparent response. In Arizona, an October 2023 audit of the Marana facility under the Prison Rape Elimination Act stated that no sexual-abuse incidents had been reported in the preceding 24 months, even as state investigative reports identified at least two sexual-abuse allegations during that same period, according to The Intercept. The Marana site, previously run by Management and Training Corporation before closing in 2023, was sold back to the company in 2025 and is slated to reopen as an ICE detention center.
San Antonio's East Side Facility Still Taking Shape
The hearing arrived as San Antonio continues to scrutinize ICE's plans for a detention site on the city's East Side. The facility, proposed at 542 S.E. Loop 410, has drawn conflicting estimates of its size and timeline. ICE has said the site is expected to house an average daily population of 500 to 1,500 people, according to Texas Public Radio, while KSAT reported the facility is expected to house between 1,000 and 1,500 detainees. Texas Public Radio reported ICE expected to begin full operations by the end of September 2026, while KSAT reported ICE's acting director said the facility could be operational by spring 2027.
Oakmont Industrial Group sold the East Side warehouse to ICE in February for $66 million, the San Antonio Current reported separately. San Antonio City Council voted 9-2 to amend the city's zoning code to require council approval for detention centers within 1,000 feet of homes, schools, places of worship and public parks, per Texas Public Radio's reporting, with Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones and other local officials voicing opposition to the planned center. San Antonio City Council is set to receive an update on the proposed facility this month, and District 3 Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran has been among the local officials tracking the project.
State lawmakers including Democratic state senators Roland Gutierrez and José Menéndez, along with Democratic state Representative Barbra Gervin-Hawkins, were named among officials connected to the hearing's broader political response, according to the San Antonio Current's reporting. Advocates who testified Friday say the stakes extend well beyond San Antonio: a coalition of human-rights organizations previously identified 35 women who were sexually abused at FCI Dublin in California, or who provided information to investigators, and who faced deportation as of 2023, according to Truthout. In Dilley, RAICES said in a court filing that families raised concerns about inadequate medical care on at least 700 occasions since August 2025, Texas Public Radio reported, part of a broader set of allegations involving shortages in medical attention, inadequate food and water, and serious mental-health strain that federal officials and the facility's private operator have disputed.
