The U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday that it has launched an investigation into two California women’s prisons to determine whether they unconstitutionally provided housing and preferential treatment to “biological male inmates.”
In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon – who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division – said investigators would look into “widely reported allegations of deprivation of rights of female inmates” at the Central California Women’s Facility in Madera County and the California Institution for Women in San Bernardino County.
Justice Department said in a news release Allegations have been made that “there is a widespread climate of sexual harassment, rape, voyeurism and sexual intimidation due to the presence of men in the women’s prison.”
Newsom’s office referred the Times to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. A CDCR spokesperson responded that the agency is “committed to providing a safe, humane, dignified, and rehabilitative environment for all incarcerated people.”
The Justice Department also notified Maine Gov. Janet Mills of an investigation into allegations that the state “allowed a biological male inmate to live with women despite complaints that the male inmate had assaulted or harassed several female inmates.”
Dhillon said In a video posted on The investigation is part of a new project called the “Single Sex Prison Initiative” to look into potential civil rights violations in which female prisoners are “forced to live in the same room with men who pose as women to access women’s prisons.”
“There are reports of several dozen such men being held in women’s prisons in California, which are certainly exposing these women to sexual assault and other types of violence and harassment, which, if true, are extremely disturbing and may violate the civil rights of these women,” Dhillon said.
In 2020, Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 132, which gives transgender, nonbinary, and intersex inmates in state prisons the right to live in men’s or women’s facilities. Opponents of the law filed suit the following year, alleging it was unconstitutional and created an unsafe environment for women in women’s facilities, with some plaintiffs claiming they were assaulted.
At the time, LGBTQ+ advocates described the lawsuit as baseless and harmful.
“The way they wrote (the complaint) is saying that trans women are men and they are putting men in women’s prisons, which is completely wrong,” Bamby Salcedo, president and CEO of the TransLatina@coalition, which sponsored SB 132, previously told the Times. “They are making a claim that is not accurate and is not particularly respectful of trans women.”
Mahila Mukti Morcha, which brought the lawsuit, announced this month that a federal court had dismissed the case but that they planned to appeal. x In a statement posted Thursday, WOLF board chair Elspeth Cypher called the new DOJ investigation “a welcome development.”
“Every day, women in prison are subjected to sexual harassment and abuse by men who say they are women,” Cypher said.
Under the bill enacted in 2021, 1,028 prisoners lodged in men’s prisons have requested to be transferred to women’s facilities. according to data Till March 4, 2026. The department had accepted 47 requests and rejected 132. According to the department, another 140 applicants “changed their minds”.
State officials said 84 inmates sought to be transferred from women’s prisons to men’s facilities. Of these, seven were approved.
According to the Department of Corrections, 2,405 inmates identify as non-binary, intersex or transgender. It is said that those people experience extreme violence in prison. 2007 UC Irvine Study It involved interviews with 39 transgender prisoners, finding that rates of sexual assault are 13 times higher for transgender people, with 59% of those surveyed having experienced such encounters.
The Justice Department said Thursday that its investigation is still ongoing and that it “has not reached any conclusions regarding the allegations in these cases.”
Dhillon said, “I am very determined to ensure that no woman imprisoned in the United States faces potential rape, sexual assault or other violation of her civil rights as a condition of her imprisonment to satisfy some woke ideology by the state.” “If these states are violating these rights and they don’t stop, we will stop them through litigation.”
