The Department of Justice told the governors of Maine and California on Thursday that it was investigating their housing of transgender women in women’s prisons, to assess whether the constitutional rights of other prisoners at the facilities had been violated.
Federal officials said they would investigate “allegations of sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation due to the presence of males” in women’s prisons in California. In Maine, they said, they were responding to allegations that “a biological male” remained housed with women despite complaints that the inmate had assaulted or harassed female inmates.
“Keeping men out of women’s prisons is not only common sense — it’s a matter of safety and constitutional rights,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a news release on Thursday. “The Trump administration will not stand by if governors are facilitating the abuse of biological women under the guise of inclusion.”
The state inquiries are the latest moves by the Trump administration to force prisons to house transgender women with men, in compliance with President Trump’s executive order last year “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth.”
The order pledged to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons,” one response to what it called “an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts.”
Some affected federal prisoners sued the government over the new policies, arguing that housing them with men could make them targets of violence and increases their risk of suicide. Federal courts blocked those prisoners from being moved to men’s housing last year; the federal government is appealing the ruling.
In a statement, a spokesman for Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat, called the new inquiry “yet another politically motivated, predetermined investigation designed to target states that stand up to the Trump administration and its abuses.”
A spokeswoman for Maine’s Department of Corrections said that transgender inmates’ housing placements were determined “by a multidisciplinary team, under department policy, in compliance with state and federal law.” The policy dates to 2015 and states that housing “shall be consistent with the gender identity of the resident, except when placement in such housing would create a risk to safety, security, or orderly management of the facility.”
Maine’s prison system houses about 2,000 inmates in seven adult facilities. The department does not provide the specific number of trans inmates because the number is small, raising the risk that individuals could be identified in violation of confidentiality requirements, said the spokeswoman, Jill R. O’Brien.
Information about specific allegations of disciplinary misconduct is also confidential, she said.
The federal government blocked some grant funding to Maine prisons last year, a move that Ms. Bondi has said was made in response to the state’s transgender housing policy. Ms. O’Brien said the grants were later reinstated.
California passed a law five years ago allowing transgender prisoners to be housed according to their gender identity rather than their biological gender. The law was seen by supporters as a way to prevent sexual assault and other violence against trans inmates.
The law required prisons to consider such inmates’ health and safety in making bed assignments and placements, and required prison staff members to use inmates’ preferred pronouns.
The state’s prisons enforce a zero-tolerance policy on sexual assault as federally mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act, said Terri Hardy, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in an email on Friday.
“C.D.C.R. is committed to providing a safe, humane, respectful and rehabilitative environment for all incarcerated people,” Ms. Hardy said. “Any suggestion that all transgender women be assigned to men’s institutions as a matter of policy is a suggestion to violate federal law.”
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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