Founder of trans homeless nonprofit pleads guilty to stealing $150K in COVID relief funds

Ruby Corado, the founder of an LGBTQ+ housing organization for trans people and people of color in D.C. called Casa Ruby, has pled guilty in federal court to charges of wire fraud, The Advocate reported.

Corado admitted to a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that she sent $150,000 that her organization received in pandemic relief funds to her personal bank accounts in El Salvador.

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Casa Ruby shut down after the D.C. Department of Human Services announced it would not renew an annual $839,460 grant. At the time, employees stated they had not been paid for months, and all services were shuttered.

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Casa Ruby’s website said that they employed over 50 people and provided more than 30,000 social and human services to more than 6,000 people each year.

The mismanagement of funding came to light in September 2021. Corado resigned in October 2022, sold her home in Prince Georges County, and then fled to El Salvador.

Despite receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants as well as donations, the organization was the subject of a Landlord Tenant Court filing because the owner of Casa Ruby’s headquarters said that the nonprofit owes over $1 million in unpaid rent and other fees. Similarly, Union Temple Baptist Church, an organization that leased four townhouses to Casa Ruby claimed that they were owed $67,867 in unpaid rent.

FBI agents arrested Corado on March 5, 2024, at a hotel in Laurel, Maryland, after she unexpectedly returned to the United States from El Salvador, where she had fled after her organization shut down.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia charged that Corado diverted pandemic relief funds, sending money to personal accounts in her native El Salvador. She hid these transactions from the Internal Revenue Service.

When it was open, Casa Ruby was the only bilingual and multicultural trans community services organization in D.C.

“We took in vulnerable individuals 24 hours a day when nobody wanted them,” Casa Ruby employee Kisha Allure told The Washington Post. “We had programs for people to literally build their lives back up. We had trans women who were D.C. natives, trans women of color, and we kept them in a safe space as the mission told us to do. The full respite care center for trans people of color — built by us, ran by us — is now gone in smoke.”

Corado’s sentencing will take place on January 10. She could face up to 30 years in prison.

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