Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities are horrifying for anybody, embodied by deplorable living conditions, torturous treatment, and a sickening lack of quality healthcare.
Unfortunately, a record number of pregnant women have been swept up and sent to such facilities — and it’s hard to imagine a worse place to be during the prenatal period.
Horrifying new reporting by the Guardian took a hard look at the state of health care for pregnant women and teenagers held in ICE custody. During the first nine months of Trump’s return to the White House, the agency recorded 18 miscarriages from women held in its custody, an already appalling statistic.
Yet as the Guardian found, ICE’s miscarriage records only go up to October of 2025, and any subsequent loss of pregnancy has been lost in the shuffle.
That blatant disregard for critical health information underscores the nightmarish conditions pregnant women face in federal detention facilities. One woman, an asylum seeker from Nicaragua named Anabell, relayed her experience to the Guardian.
After being detained at the end of a routine government check-in, Anabell says she was given two pregnancy tests, both of which came back positive. That was it, however — the standard blood test and dosage of prenatal vitamins were nowhere to be found, and the amount of protein she was given hardly changed.
A month into her detention, Anabell told the Guardian she started to bleed. “I told them I need to see a doctor,” she said, though ICE officers were unmoved. After spending another day in the ICE facility, Anabell’s fellow detainees finally convinced guards to bring her to an emergency room, where she was shackled to a bed and monitored by three ICE agents.
Through an interpreter, Anabell learned that she had lost the pregnancy. She has continued to face health complications including bleeding, vomiting, rashes, as well as hair and weight loss, for which she hasn’t received any additional care.
“I don’t know what is going to happen to me,” she told the paper.
As Sarah Decker, a senior attorney at the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center told the Guardian, it’s unlikely ICE is truly unaware of the amount of pregnant women in the department’s custody, or the horrible health conditions they face.
“Many of the pregnant women that we’ve met at [the South Louisiana processing center in] Basile have told us that they disclosed their pregnancy to ICE officers, that they had to advocate for access to prenatal care and access to a gynecologist, that they needed emergency care for complications, Decker said. “So ICE is clearly aware and I think their desire to kind of obfuscate the access that people have to this data is intended to cover up the level of life-threatening medical neglect that’s happening in these facilities.”
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