EXCLUSIVE: Russian Dissident Says ICE Threatened Him With Rape if He Refused Deportation

After three months in Eloy Detention Center, Maksim Borisov faces deportation to Russia, where he says he’ll be tortured or killed. ICE told him U.S. prison would be worse.

WASHINGTON—Maksim Borisov says he can’t hide who he is. “I’m super obviously gay,” he tells me, over a crackling detention center phone line, the kind of static that sounds like it’s hissing in protest. “It’s completely obvious—that’s who I am.”

Maksim is twenty two, he was born on the far edge of Russia, on Sakhalin Island, where the Sea of Japan laps cold against gray shores. Fast-spoken and fierce, Maskim is a survivor.

He’s been locked up in Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center for three months now. The place is a private immigration jail run by CoreCivic, a billion-dollar prison conglomerate whose record on human rights reads like a rap sheet. Eloy is where the system sends people it wants to disappear. And Maksim is terrified that it will expel him.