What Happens When the Miami-Dade Corrections Dept Doesn’t Think You Look Like A Woman

Fior Pichardo de Veloz

Fior Pichardo de Veloz is a lawyer.  She is also a local elected official in the Dominican Republic.   In November 2013, she flew into the Miami International Airport in Florida to witness the birth of her grandchild.  She was taken into custody on a federal, 1988 warrant for a drug charge in a case that she thought had been resolved.

That was two years ago, and on September 13, 2016, Fior filed a lawsuit in federal court; not because of the mix-up with the warrant, but because a nurse at the Miami-Dade jail assumed that Fior had been born male and had her placed in a general holding cell with 40 men.

According to her lawyers, Fior was initially placed into a jail cell as a woman, but a nurse alleged to evaluating her for exhibiting “non-traditional male characteristics.”  The nurse alleged that she determined Fior had male reproductive organs and she was then sent to Metro West Detention Center, a male-only facility.