04/12/2025
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BREAKING: Trump DECLARES WAR on LGBTQ prisoners, slashes oversight and safety protections.
President Donald Trump just handed America yet another moral disgrace—this time by ordering the Department of Justice to stop enforcing the very prison safety standards designed to protect LGBTQ people from sexual assault behind bars. And make no mistake: this isn’t some bureaucratic tweak. It’s a dangerous, deliberate rollback that will put lives at risk.
According to an internal memo obtained by NPR, DOJ inspectors have been instructed to stop evaluating prisons based on LGBTQ safety rules under the Prison R**e Elimination Act—rules rooted in decades of bipartisan work and hard data showing that LGBTQ, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people are six times more likely to be sexually assaulted in custody than the general prison population. Six. Times. More. Likely.
But the Trump administration doesn’t care about that. Instead, it’s scrapping these safeguards to satisfy the president’s latest culture-war obsession: an executive order declaring that the U.S. “recognizes only two sexes.” The result? Auditors are now told to pretend that protections for some of the most vulnerable human beings in America’s prisons simply do not apply.
Trump’s DOJ already ended policies allowing trans women to be housed safely based on gender identity. He’s banned transgender service members. He’s attacked gender-affirming care. And now he’s rolling back the only guardrails meant to prevent sexual violence against LGBTQ people in prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, and immigration detention centers.
Linda McFarlane of Just Detention International—one of the nation’s leading anti–prison-r**e advocates—didn’t mince words: This rollback “will immediately put people in danger.” When the most vulnerable people are at risk, she warned, everyone in the facility becomes less safe.
And it gets worse.
Earlier this year, Trump’s DOJ slashed funding for victim-support programs, including the National PREA Resource Center. Hundreds of grants—gone. Oversight—gutted. Protecting incarcerated people from r**e and abuse simply doesn’t make the cut in Trump’s America.
The memo’s guidance is so chaotic that veteran PREA auditors say it has made their jobs “more confusing and more difficult.” One auditor said facilities may now simply choose to ignore protections altogether—because the DOJ told them they could.
After two decades of progress—slow, imperfect, bipartisan progress—Trump is dragging the country backward, dismantling protections for vulnerable people who have no voice, no power, and no escape. Even by this administration’s standards, it is a cruel and reckless move.
This is what Trump’s “war on gender ideology” really means: stripping away protections, inviting violence, and turning human beings into collateral damage.
People will be hurt. Some will die. And Trump is doing it on purpose.
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