A once-revered transgender activist whose D.C. nonprofit sought to house and aid homeless LGBTQ+ immigrants and youths was sentenced Tuesday to serve 33 months in federal prison and pay more than $900,000 in restitution — a sentence that is likely to trigger deportation proceedings — after she pleaded guilty to diverting federal pandemic relief funds meant to support her clients to offshore personal bank accounts in El Salvador.
“You came to this country hiding under the floorboards of the vegetable truck and this country gave you refuge,” Judge Trevor N. McFadden told Ruby Corado as he handed down the sentence. “You betrayed this country.”
Tuesday’s sentencing comes after Corado, 54, who founded Casa Ruby, saw the safe house she opened for unhoused LGBTQ+ youths in D.C. close amid swirling allegations of fraud, abuse and financial mismanagement. Prosecutors allege Corado fled to El Salvador in 2022 as public scrutiny of her nonprofit intensified. She was arrested and charged with financial crimes two years later.
“I wish I could’ve done things differently, but it is already done,” Corado said, pausing to weep, before she was sentenced Tuesday. “I got caught up in my mission to help others. But I am the first one to hold myself accountable.”
Casa Ruby brought in millions of dollars in grants annually. It employed dozens of people, most of whom were trans and formerly homeless. And for a decade, the nonprofit shelter offered services and a place to stay to tens of thousands of the District’s most vulnerable: homeless LGBTQ+ young people, sex workers, trans women of color, immigrants who arrived in the United States with little more than what they could carry.
Over the years, Corado’s story took on its own mythology in the District: She had fled El Salvador as a teenager in the 1980s, and by the early 1990s, she was sleeping on the streets in D.C. As a trans woman who was living as a gay man at the time, Corado found that the shelters in D.C. were not safe for people like her.
One night in 1992, Corado began to imagine a different kind of shelter — one built for LGBTQ+ people that would have real beds with real mattresses. The sheets, Corado dreamed, would be satin. More than 20 years later, Corado opened Casa Ruby as a small drop-in shelter with a staff of volunteers. Eventually, the operation grew to encompass multiple sites around the city and served as many as 6,000 people a year.
As the nonprofit grew, so, too, did Corado’s name recognition. She flanked the mayor at ribbon cuttings and became a go-to voice in the community for journalists, activists and politicians looking to engage the trans community. But in its final years, Casa Ruby employees said, the woman who had launched a new kind of shelter and inspired a city had changed. Allegations that the facilities were neglected, rents left unpaid and employees were mistreated dogged the nonprofit.
In 2023, a court-appointed receiver sued the group’s board, alleging that its lack of oversight enabled Corado to embezzle more than $800,000, increase her own salary and open an office in El Salvador, all without board approval.
Corado pleaded guilty in July 2024 of one count of wire fraud after admitting that she had diverted more than $150,000 in pandemic relief funds.
Prosecutors had urged the judge to sentence Corado to 33 months in prison, punishment for what the U.S. attorney’s office said was “dishonest and disgusting” conduct that involved moving “almost $300,000 offshore into bank accounts that were beyond the reach of law enforcement,” according to court filings.
“All of the money that Corado received should have been used for the benefit of youth in the District of Columbia who were in need of housing and other services,” prosecutors wrote. “Had the defendant kept her word and used the taxpayers’ support as she had promised, Casa Ruby may have survived.”
Corado’s attorney argued that Corado “fully intended to use the funds for Casa Ruby’s purposes” and that the money she sent to El Salvador was meant to “fund Casa Ruby’s charitable works” in the Central American nation.
“While Ruby never lost the passion, rooted in her own experiences, to help the most vulnerable people in the D.C. Community, she was in over her head,” reads a presentencing petition to the judge. “The money was not diverted to enrich Ms. Corado, but to allow her to establish Casa Ruby El Salvador, in the hopes that by assisting LGBTQ individuals in El Salvador she could decrease the need to emigrate to the U.S.”
Corado’s attorney, Pleasant S. Brodnax, asked the court to consider time served and to not impose any prison time, arguing that Corado’s being incarcerated would carry with it “foreseeable risk of extraordinary harm because of [Corado’s] transgender status and the current retreat from federal protections designed to keep LGBTQ+ inmates safe.”
Late last year, the Justice Department ordered inspectors to stop evaluating prisons and jails using standards designed to protect transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people from sexual violence, according to media reports, reversing a long-standing practice and further eroding legal protections for trans people. Other federal edicts have recently included moving inmates into prisons that align with their sex assigned at birth rather than their gender — a practice that Corado’s attorney worried would land his client in a men’s prison.
Corado’s attorney also identified her status as an immigrant as a possible source of risk, noting that Corado — who is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. — is “likely to be transferred directly from [the Bureau of Prisons] to U.S. Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement (ICE) custody” following her sentencing to await possible immigration proceedings.
“Such conditions would exacerbate her trauma and impose a punishment far more severe than the [federal] Guidelines contemplate for wire fraud,” Brodnax wrote. He had asked that the judge sentence Corado to time served — about 18 months of home confinement — and GPS monitoring.
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