President Donald Trump has made it a priority to keep men out of women’s sports, bathrooms, and other sex-specific spaces. But thanks to little-known Obama-era regulations, states could be required to house boys in all-girl youth prisons.
Currently, states are barred from imprisoning juvenile inmates on the basis of sex. That means a 17-year-old boy who claims to be “transgender” could be locked up alongside an 11-year-old girl. States that don’t comply with these mandates risk losing crucial federal funding, making even deep-red states comply with the guidance.
Advocates tell The Daily Wire that Trump’s executive orders protecting women’s spaces may not automatically negate these rules. Unless amended, the federal code will continue to force youth prisons to consider housing transgender-identifying males alongside girls, raising serious concerns about their safety.
Amie Ichikawa, a woman who spent nearly five years in a California prison and now advocates to keep males out of female prisons, told The Daily Wire it was “disturbing” that juvenile facilities are blocked from making housing decisions on the basis of sex. She believes it’s even more dangerous than mixing genders in adult prisons.
“Kids in juvenile are extremely vulnerable, and to add mixed sex housing into it, that’s creating a totally unnecessary hurdle to have to jump over,” she said. “It’s setting them up for failure, and it’s just robbing them of any kind of normalcy or ability to focus on healing.”
The regulations for juvenile facilities were first issued by then Attorney General Eric Holder in May 2012 and became law that August. The Obama administration touted the rules as a way to end rape and sexual assault in prisons. But in practice, these regulations could allow for girls, sometimes as young as 12, to be housed alongside physically and legally adult males.
For example, a 2022 audit of the Brentwood Residential Center for Girls in New York noted that there were two transgender offenders housed at the facility. One was identified as a “transgender male” and another as a “transgender female.” Since the facility houses females between the ages of 12-18, this means there could be an adult male lodging in the same location with middle school-aged girls.
Under the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) — which doesn’t mention transgender inmates — the Justice Department is authorized to come up with standards for prisons to end sexual assault at detention facilities.
Under the code’s section on juvenile facilities, prison staff are blocked from placing inmates based on biology.
“In deciding whether to assign a transgender or intersex resident to a facility for male or female residents, and in making other housing and programming assignments, the agency shall consider on a case-by-case basis whether a placement would ensure the resident’s health and safety, and whether the placement would present management or security problems,” the regulation reads.
The prohibition is made explicit in a form used to audit detention facilities across the country for compliance with PREA. The form states that “if an agency by policy or practice assigns residents to a male or female facility on the basis of anatomy alone, that agency is not in compliance with this standard.”
August 2023 PREA audit of Oregon’s Camp Tillamook Youth Transitional Facility
While the Biden administration facilitated the movement of males into female prisons, Trump has taken a dramatically different approach.
Trump signed an executive order in January directing his administration “to ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers.” The order says that amending federal code 115.41, a portion of the law related to “standards for adult prisons and jails,” may be necessary to comply with this directive.
However, it is unclear if this potential amendment of the federal code would include the juvenile standards that have been imposed on states, since the “standards for juvenile detention facilities” are found in section 115.342, a different part of the code.
The Justice Department referred The Daily Wire to the White House when asked for more details on any proposed changes to the code.
Lauren Adams, a lawyer with the Women’s Liberation Front, a feminist organization that fights to keep men out of women’s prisons, told The Daily Wire that just because the section on juvenile facilities wasn’t mentioned doesn’t mean it couldn’t be encompassed by the order.
“That specific direction to consider amending that particular provision, it doesn’t mean that they also shouldn’t also amend the other relevant provisions,” she said. “We can’t let juvenile offenders be dropped out of the conversation.”
Adams added that it was especially important for the federal code to be updated because of the ongoing lawsuits that have been filed by male prisoners across the country to stay housed at female facilities in defiance of Trump’s executive order.
“As we see these challenges and the litigation, the more we see that going through the courts, the more important it’s going to be to do regulation. We need to be able to have something that has the force of law. Executive orders are very, very weak in terms of law,” she said.
The prohibitions on juvenile facilities assigning housing by sex were still in effect throughout the first Trump administration, a review of PREA audits reveals. That was at the same time that Trump revoked Obama-era guidelines in the Bureau of Prisons Transgender manual and mandated that sex be used for the initial determination of placement.
Screenshot: April 2020 audit of Elbert Shaw Regional Youth Detention Center in Georgia.
Now, a few months into Trump’s second term, one juvenile detention facility confirmed to The Daily Wire that it has not received updated guidance on the transgender housing standard. A spokeswoman for Echo Glen Children’s Center in Washington, where transgender identifying inmates have been housed, said the facility has not received any new directive on the standard.
According to the most recent data available from the Justice Department, 26 states and the District of Columbia have fully certified compliance with PREA regulations, while 23 states have submitted an assurance that they will ensure compliance. Only four states, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, and Utah, have declined to comply with PREA standards.
Source: DOJ.
States that don’t comply with PREA guidance are penalized with federal funding cuts. If a state is non-compliant with PREA, including the transgender housing guidelines, the Justice Department yanks 5% of funding for grants given to the states from the department for “prison purposes.”
This includes programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, the top source of federal funding for state and local jurisdictions for a wide variety of areas, including law enforcement, prosecution, indigent defense, courts, crime prevention and education, corrections and community corrections, and technology improvement. The cuts could also apply to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Title II Part B Formula grant program, which funds juvenile justice system improvements.
State and local juvenile facilities are audited every few years to ensure compliance with PREA, and a review of audit reports reveals a focus on special conditions for transgender-identifying offenders. Even in conservative states like Tennessee or Georgia, facilities have to affirm that they will not house offenders based on their sex.
For example, a recent PREA audit of the Williamson County Juvenile Detention Center in deep-red Tennessee affirmed that the facility did not have a policy of placing inmates in alignment with their sex.
According to the report, the detention center’s PREA coordinator stated that “housing and programming assignments for transgender or intersex residents are made on a case-by-case basis whether a placement would ensure the resident’s health and safety, and whether the placement would present management or security problems.”
Special considerations were also made in the audit to inquire whether transgender identifying inmates can shower separately and the person’s sense of their safety. Auditors also have to ensure that faculty staff are trained “to communicate effectively and professionally with residents, including, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or gender nonconforming residents” and “respect” their identity.
Ichikawa told The Daily Wire that these kinds of standard auditing practices show special attention is given to transgender-identifying offenders while considerations of female safety are bypassed.
Ichikawa, who was incarcerated after being convicted of kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon, said that female inmates were never asked about their own perception of safety and well-being, in contrast to transgender-identifying inmates.
“Nobody in prison had that, so it’s not like they were reinstating some precious right that was stolen from them. They’re just providing exclusive human rights to this small group of people, and it’s created a huge power imbalance,” she said. “Everybody’s sense of well-being and safety should be taken into consideration, not just trans-identified. This is gender politics, it’s not even about safety anymore.”
When she was in prison in California, she said that she and her fellow female inmates feared for their safety when a male double rapist was transferred into their prison. They were never asked how their safety could be impacted by the transfer of a male rapist into a women’s detention center.
A review of PREA audits conducted over the last few years finds multiple examples of juvenile detention centers housing transgender-identifying inmates.
For example, a 2024 audit of the Echo Glen Children’s Center in Washington showed it was housing two residents who identified as transgender, though no further details were given. That facility has both male and female units, and admits boys between the ages of 11-17 and females between the ages of 12-15.
An audit of Camp Tillamook Youth Transitional Facility in Oregon also showed that one transgender-identifying resident was in custody.
In the previously mentioned audit of the Brentwood Residential Center for Girls, the auditor interviewed one transgender-identifying male resident who claimed to be a girl. This resident told the auditor that he had never been searched or physically examined to “determine her genital status.” Under PREA, faculty can only determine “genital status” through routine physical check-ups or medical records. That resident told an auditor that staff were “respectful toward her identification.”
Women’s safety advocates, like Adams, say that federal code should be amended to allow prisons to implement categorical placement by sex. She also said that it makes no sense for transgender-identifying inmates to be given all kinds of special privileges that are not afforded to women inmates.
For example, she noted that in most cases, male guards are not allowed to search female inmates, while transgender identifying inmates can request either a male or female guard to search them. This means that a male inmate could force a female guard to conduct a search of him, raising safety concerns.
“I don’t know how we can say men are a danger to women when they are guards but not when they’re inmates,
she said. “But they can be forced to shower with sex offenders.”
The battle on this issue is already ongoing at the adult level with multiple federal lawsuits in litigation over the placement of males in female prisons. It remains to be seen whether a similar battle will take place at the juvenile level.
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