In recent weeks, devastating accounts have emerged of how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) treats pregnant women in detention. These are not isolated incidents—they represent a systemic failure to protect mothers and birthing people in their most vulnerable moments.
Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus experienced a pregnant person’s worst nightmare. After being detained by ICE in Tennessee while around five months pregnant, she was transferred multiple times between facilities before ending up at Louisiana’s Richwood Correctional Center. For three days, she pleaded for medical attention as she felt pain and no fetal movement. She was finally hospitalized on April 29th, and delivered a stillborn baby. “I had him inside here for three days, in this Louisiana facility, my baby dead in my stomach, inside my stomach for three days, dead,” she told reporters.
Cary López Alvarado, a U.S. citizen nine months pregnant, was detained during ICE raids in California. When she tried to protect her workplace from federal agents, she was physically shoved and lost her balance. “I can’t fight back, I’m pregnant,” she told officers as they handcuffed her. After her release, she was hospitalized with sharp abdominal pain and doctors closely monitored both her and her baby.
One Aurora ICE Processing Center nurse called 911 about a woman four months pregnant who arrived at the facility’s medical unit bleeding and in pain. When the dispatcher asked critical questions about signs of life and fetal heartbeat, the nurse replied: “We don’t have the equipment to do that.” This response encapsulates the inadequacy of medical care and respect for pregnant people in these facilities.
These stories matter because they reveal fundamental truths about how our society values motherhood, regardless of citizenship status. When we allow pregnant women to be denied medical care, to deliver babies while shackled, or to carry stillborn children for days, we abandon our most basic principles of compassion and care. Since January, at least four 911 calls from detention facilities in Colorado, Texas, and Georgia have involved pregnant women in distress, bleeding or suffering severe pain. [WIRED]
The Broader Pattern of Abuse
The conditions in ICE detention facilities create a perfect storm of medical neglect, overcrowding, and institutional indifference that endangers all detainees—but particularly pregnant women who require specialized care. A WIRED investigation into 911 calls from 10 of the nation’s largest immigration detention centers found that at least 60 percent of the centers analyzed had reported serious pregnancy complications, suicide attempts, or sexual assault allegations. Since January, these 10 facilities have collectively placed nearly 400 emergency calls.
Recent reports from Human Rights Watch and other organizations document “harrowing conditions” at facilities including prolonged confinement in frigid, overcrowded processing cells without bedding, adequate clothing, or access to hygiene. Women were detained at male-only facilities for processing, and medical neglect was prevalent with detainees denied essential medications and subjected to long delays for care.
Systematic Erosion of Protections
The current crisis didn’t happen overnight. In 2017, ICE changed its policy to eliminate the presumption of release for pregnant women, removing critical reporting procedures required for oversight despite evidence that such oversight was desperately needed.
More recently, U.S. Customs and Border Protection quietly repealed several rules granting protections to pregnant women, postpartum women, and infants. These included requirements to provide extra medical care and resources, private areas for lactation and breastfeeding, and mandating that supplies like diapers and unexpired baby formula be available in detention facilities.
The Path Forward
We’re calling on our community to:
Support Organizations: Donate to legal aid groups working to protect immigrant rights and document conditions in detention such as CHIRLA, Immigrant Defenders, ACLU and Al Otro Lado.
Advocate Locally: Contact your representatives and demand they support legislation requiring humane treatment of pregnant women in all federal custody. Find your elected official here.
Amplify Voices: Share these stories and ensure that the experiences of detained pregnant women are not forgotten or dismissed.
Every pregnant person deserves dignity, medical care, and the basic human right to safety during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum.
This is a call to action for all of us who believe in the power of community to support mothers and birthing people. We must demand better. We must do better. Because when we fail to protect the most vulnerable among us, we fail our fundamental obligation to each other.
