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.
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“I feel like a street dog,” he wrote in a grievance this spring after accusing a CoreCivic guard of harassing him for being gay. “He openly HATES me.” The guard reportedly confiscated a book from Maksim while letting others read undisturbed. “I’m tired of crying after him being unfair,” Maksim wrote in an official complaint filed just last month. CoreCivic closed the case without resolution.
Maksim doesn’t just endure Eloy. He fights back. Fluent in Arabic, Turkish, and Russian, he’s become an informal translator and advocate for others inside—especially for detainees being pressured into signing voluntary deportation forms.
“When they tell them to sign,” Maksim says, “I tell them they don’t have to—in their own language.”
On Wednesday, Maksim was handed a deportation order. Final decision. No appeal. His ICE officer told him flatly that if he refused to board the plane back to Russia, he'd be locked up in U.S. federal prison for “four or five years”—where, the ICE officer laughed, Maksim “will be raped.”
“I said, ‘I don’t care because if I go to Russia, I’m gonna die,’” Maksim tells me. “He laughed and repeated that I will get raped. I said, ‘Yes, but I will be dead in Russia.’”
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Maksim’s fear isn’t unfounded.
His family has been openly anti-regime since 2018. He himself joined the anti-Putin protests after the reported assassination of Alexei Navalny in 2020. He’s half-Ukrainian and says he was pressured to fight in the war against his own people. “I have friends, I have family in Ukraine. How could I do that to good people?” In 2023, after being outed by a photo taken at a Pride parade in Thailand, Maksim was jumped and beaten in the street.
“I’ve donated over a hundred dollars to Ukraine,” he says. “They know this.” They being the Russian state. Maksim insists Russian intelligence is aware of everything: his donations, his protests, his lifestyle. "I can't go back," he says. "They will kill me."
Still, the U.S. government doesn’t believe that’s likely. On February 23, Maksim’s asylum officer denied his claim under the Convention Against Torture, writing that Maksim failed to prove he’d “more likely than not” be tortured in Russia.
All of this—the threats, the violence, the persecution—happens inside a for-profit cage where people die of medical neglect. Maksim knew the Ethiopian detainee who recently died at Eloy from untreated HIV. “Medical is playing with me,” the man told Maksim and other Russian detainees before he died. Maksim says Eloy’s medical staff don’t treat anything until you collapse. “Ibuprofen. That’s it,” he says.
Maksim tells me he has developed a kinship with the transgender detainees in particular, who he says face brutal harassment from both guards and fellow inmates. “I’ve befriended several,” he says. “But here, especially for trans people… just disappear. One day they’re here, the next day, no one knows. Were they deported? Released? No one tells us.”
In that landscape of indifference, Maksim has found a kind of resistance in solidarity. He is part of a small community of queer detainees who take care of each other.
“I’d be happy if America wants to deport me,” he says. “Just not to Russia. Mexico would be fine.”
