The DOJ Orders Prison Inspectors to Drop LGBTQ+ Protections
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is moving to roll back protections for LGBTQ+ prisoners from sexual violence. An internal memo, dated to December 2, 2025, stated that “effective immediately” prisons and jails will no longer face penalties for violating LGBTQ+-centered regulations in the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). While the changes are not yet official, the directive also ordered prison inspectors to ignore PREA provisions that specifically apply to “transgender, intersex, and gender nonconforming” prisoners while auditing facilities.
The PREA was unanimously passed by Congress in 2003, in response to an enormous trove of data showing that sexual violence was, and remains, rampant in the carcereal system. In 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that administrators reported 36,264 allegations of sexual assault and harassment that year in prisons, jails, and other facilities (2,350 incidents were substantiated after investigation).
In 2012, the Obama administration added increased protections for LGBTQ+ to the DOJ’s PREA rulebook, as these groups of prisoners are particularly threatened by sexual violence. A survey in 2015, in which the criminal justice group Black and Pink interviewed 1,110 prisoners, found that LGBTQ+ prisoners were more than six times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the general population.
The DOJ’s restrictions on prison audits come as the agency says it’s attempting to bring PREA standards in line with an anti-trans executive order issued by Republican Pres. Donald Trump on his first day in office in 2025. The order, in addition to changing the PREA guidelines, aimed to ban transgender women from women’s housing in federal prisons and told the Bureau of Prisons to stop providing gender-affirming care to trans prisoners. (Trump’s order has been blocked in court and some individual plaintiffs have been protected, but most federal trans prisoners are still locked up in facilities that don’t match their gender identity).
According to legal advocates, the memo exposes trans prisoners to even more danger and potential abuse. It is also creating confusion for administrators and auditors, as the PREA has not yet been revised. “Standards that are in place are still the law,” Shana Knizhnik, a senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV project told news publication Prism, “so this is essentially a directive to disregard the law.”
Source: Prism
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