U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is quietly deleting rules for how contractors treat transgender people in immigration detention, endangering a vulnerable population that often faces abuse and sexual assault behind bars.

Over the last month, ICE has altered contracts for at least two detention centers, in Florida and New York, to remove transgender care requirements, according to records reviewed by The Intercept.

Those changes followed President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive order targeting “gender ideology extremism.”

The Department of Homeland Security office charged with investigating civil rights violations in immigration detention has cited the same executive order to close at least one complaint based on gender identity discrimination, according to an immigrant rights group.

The government’s shifts could deny trans people some of the few tools available for protecting themselves in detention, advocates said.

“While this is not unexpected, it is still incredibly alarming, because the mistreatment of transgender people in immigration detention has been so horrible for so long, and it has been so difficult to combat that mistreatment,” said Bridget Crawford, the director of law and policy for the nonprofit group Immigration Equality. “There are so few mechanisms by which you can guarantee any modicum of protection or medically competent care, and now they are removing even those limited protections.”

Dropped Language

The records show ICE altered transgender care requirements for at least two facilities soon after Trump’s January 20 executive order, although the contract amendments do not specifically reference it.

In February, the agency changed its contract with Akima Global Services, which has a management contract for the ICE-owned Buffalo Service Processing Center in New York. The contract was modified to “rescind/remove all Transgender Care requirements,” according to an entry in the Federal Procurement Data System.

Earlier this month, the agency dropped similar language from its contract with the GEO Group, a publicly traded private-prison company that has

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