Donald Trump’s Justice Department announced on Thursday an investigation targeting transgender women inmates in women’s prisons in California and Maine, reprising a potent 2024 campaign theme ahead of the November mid-term elections.

Mobile billboards traveling through California over the last several weeks, sponsored by two gender-critical groups, Women Are Real and WomaniiWoman, have highlighted the upcoming rape trial of trans prisoner Tremayne Carroll, and coincide with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s announcement of the investigation of two California prisons and one in Maine.

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“Keeping men out of women’s prisons is not only common sense – it’s a matter of safety and constitutional rights,” Bondi said in a statement. “The Trump Administration will not stand by if governors are facilitating the abuse of biological women under the guise of inclusion.”

Those governors are both vocal and unrepentant critics of Trump: potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Gavin Newsom of California, and Janet Mills, who’s in a tight contest for the Democratic nomination for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat.

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In California, the DOJ will focus on the California Institution for Women in San Bernardino County and the Central California Women’s Facility in Madera County; in Maine, the target is the Maine Correctional Center in Windham. Both states have policies allowing inmates to be housed in facilities consistent with their gender identity.

The department justified what Mills called a “politically motivated” investigation by citing “women’s safety.”

The department “will not allow women incarcerated in jails or prisons to be subject to unconstitutional risks of harm from male inmates,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon.

“Despite the Department of Justice’s claims, this is yet another politically motivated, predetermined investigation designed to target states that stand up to the Trump Administration and its abuses,” said Ben Goodman, a spokesperson for Mills, The Washington Post reported.

Gov. Newsom’s office deferred to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for comment.

“Any suggestion that all transgender women be assigned to men’s institutions as a matter of policy is a suggestion to violate federal law,” the department said.

In California, a law sponsored by out state Sen. Scott Wiener (D) in 2021 gave prisoners the option to request placement in single-sex prison facilities that align with their gender, with mixed success.

As of last May, the Department of Corrections denied 47 times more applications than it approved, said Erik Mebust, a spokesperson for Wiener. “The main driver of sexual abuse in prison” is “assault by prison staff,” Mebust told The San Francisco Chronicle last year.

One focus of Trump’s DOJ and the president’s gender critical allies has been the trial of Tremayne Carroll, 54, a trans prisoner whose transfer application to a women’s prison was approved in 2021. She’s accused of raping two cisgender female prisoners at Central California Women’s Facility in 2024, and has been rehoused in a men’s facility.

In 2023, Tremayne, who uses a wheelchair and earned a third-strike sentence of 25-to-life for aiding and abetting a jewelry store theft, spoke about the benefits and drawbacks of life in a women’s prison, and shared indications that her stay in the facility might be short-lived.

“Coming here, I imagined being able to just be myself without having to worry about being attacked, being put in a box, assumptions being made about anything about me,” she said in an interview with MindSite News. “But from my very first day, when I got to R&R [reception and release, where incarcerated people are processed in or out of prison or jail], the warden had a whole cavalry there for me. The warden, associate warden, ISU [investigative services unit], they was all there to talk to me. They said, ‘We don’t think you should be here. But the law is the law, so you’re here.’ It really felt like they wanted to intimidate me.”

A cisgender woman Tremayne said she befriended revealed one form that intimidation would take.

“This lady had survived breast cancer. When I first met her, I tried to be friendly. And you know, I tried to encourage her and unbeknownst to me, she was taking my friendship the wrong way. And when I had to explain that, like she was just outraged,” Tremayne said. “This lady punched me in my face and threw coffee in my face.”

“Later, she told me that an officer who is no longer here used that, encouraged her to assault me and accuse me of things I didn’t do. That the officer coerced her into doing it and promised her she wouldn’t get any punishment for it. I’d never even touched this lady. She was saying I raped her, and then she was saying we had consensual sex. She kept asking for a pregnancy test,” Tremayne said.

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