Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security falsely accused a mom who lost her baby while locked up by ICE of being a wanted killer.
The DHS smeared Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus after she went public with the harrowing story of how she was forced to spend three days in custody carrying the fetus of her dead son when she miscarried at 20 weeks.
Days later, in early May, she was deported to Guatemala as part of a wave of ICE arrests and deportations ordered by President Trump and overseen by Noem, nicknamed ICE Barbie for her elaborate photo-ops.
Monterroso-Lemus alleged she received no prenatal care and minimal medical attention, despite warning guards she was in severe pain before her miscarriage and subsequent stillbirth.
The mother of six, 38, gave an interview about her experience to the Nashville Banner on May 27. She described having to sleep “starving” on the floor of the notorious cockroach-infested Richwood Correctional Center, in Louisiana. She said she was forced to deliver her stillborn child while a prison guard watched over her.
A month after Monterroso-Lemus’s story was published, Noem’s Department for Homeland Security (DHS) issued a furious rebuttal to “set the record straight.”
Point by point in a June 26 “fact check,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin described the grieving mother’s allegations as “absolutely FALSE,” insisting the department “had documentation to show” she had been provided proper medical care—before stating Monterroso-Lemus was facing an active warrant for homicide in her native Guatemala.
But the Daily Beast can reveal that the incendiary claim was false.
Court documents show that a judge threw out the 14-year-old warrant and freed Monterroso-Lemus on May 13, four days after she arrived in Guatemala.
A letter from Judge Edgar Anibal Arteaga Lopez to the Juzgado de Paz, which handles criminal and civil cases, dated May 13, shows that an order had been issued revoking the arrest warrant, granting immediate release, and directing that her name be removed from any outstanding warrant databases. The judge also notified the director-general of the National Civil Police in Guatemala City that the arrest warrant had been rendered void. It is not known when she was cleared of involvement in the alleged crime.
The court documents were issued six weeks before DHS claimed that she was wanted for “homicide.”
The DHS finally came clean after facing repeated questions from the Beast, admitting that it had failed to verify the current legal status of Monterroso-Lemus before releasing its “fact check” to the public.
McLaughlin said the warrant had been active when she was deported, without addressing why no attempt had been made to check it was still true with Guatemalan authorities ahead of the public statement. She said, “Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence gathering ended the second this criminal was off American streets.”
Monterroso-Lemus is now living as a free woman in her family’s remote village in Guatemala, but is unable to return to Lenoir City, near Knoxville, Tennessee, to be with her devastated fiancé, Gary Bivens, 45.
Bivens told the Beast that a warrant for his partner’s arrest had been issued in April 2011 after a former boyfriend of Monterroso-Lemus shot his own father. Monterroso-Lemus had actually tried to help save the man’s life, Bivens said.
Bivens—who now keeps his son’s ashes in a box by his bed as a reminder of what he and his fiancée have lost—described the other “fact check” claims made by the DHS as “a bunch of BS.”
An official hospital document dated April 29 stated Monterroso-Lemus had been admitted “with pregnancy complicated by no PNC” (meaning pre-natal care)—which Bivens noted was in direct contradiction to what DHS claimed in its “fact check.”
Bivens accused the DHS of issuing the “fact check” as part of a “smear campaign” to “bury the original story, which is [that] they made this woman sit there with a dead baby—my son—in her stomach for three days.”
With Bivens’ consent, the Daily Beast made three requests to DHS to make public the documentation it claims to have proving Monterroso-Lemus received proper care. The DHS spokesperson, McLaughlin, refused, repeating a claim that ICE provided ”prenatal care, an ultrasound, an OB-GYN visit, dental care, and medication,” and that “she was admitted to a hospital and saw multiple nurses.”
Bivens said he suspected that documentation proving proper medical care does not exist and has retained attorneys. The steelworker is also scheduled to testify before Congress in mid-October about the traumatic episode.
Another of DHS’s claims in its “fact check” about Monterroso-Lemus was also misleading. The department stated that she had been “arrested twice for child abuse/neglect with the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.”
But Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office told the Daily Beast that Monterroso-Lemus had been arrested once in May 2022 after one of her young children got out of the house and was found in the street. The second arrest was for failing to attend court on that charge.
Bivens rejected the police’s allegation that Monterroso-Lemus had been at home, intoxicated and asleep, when one of her kids walked out of the house. He said it was “not true whatsoever,” stating that 20 minutes earlier, he had been with Monterroso-Lemus, who made a living by gardening and cleaning.
Bivens said she had not been drunk and had actually been cooking dinner for her kids when her youngest wandered out of the back gate while looking for her older brothers.
It is not known what ultimately came of the charge, and the city court did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement released on Thursday, McLaughlin persisted with the claim that the grieving mom was a child abuser. “It’s disgusting the Daily Beast would choose to peddle a sob story of a child abuser. These types of smears are leading to our brave law enforcement facing a 1,000% increase in assaults against them.” The 1,000 percent figure has been used repeatedly but is not backed by actual numbers.
Bivens has launched a crowdfunding campaign to cover his fiancée’s medical bills, basic living expenses, and food costs. He now plans to sell his house to move to Guatemala to be with Monterroso-Lemus, saying he feels “ashamed to be an American.”
“It’s disgusting,” he said. “We are not a third-world country, and I don’t care what race or nationality you are—nobody deserves to have that kind of treatment, especially in a federal facility.”
The couple is just one of many thousands of families separated by the Trump administration’s deportation drive, spearheaded by Noem, who is nicknamed ICE Barbie for her love of performing photo-ops in military clothing and thick make-up.
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