Alicia reported for her scheduled check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in April, a process she had completed numerous times as an immigrant living in Louisiana for nearly a decade. This time, she was suddenly taken into federal custody.
ICE transported her to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, where agents performed a physical exam that revealed she was pregnant. Despite an ICE directive that generally prohibits the detention of pregnant women, Alicia was held there for three months.
At the facility, away from her two children – a teenager and a boy under 5 – she was given small portions of “substandard” food that left her hungry. She also underwent a medical examination to which she did not consent, and suffered an injury, civil rights groups said in a letter to ICE last month.
The groups demanded that ICE conduct a review to identify and release all pregnant women in its custody. The Independent asked ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, for comment.
Alicia is one of more than a dozen pregnant and postpartum women who reported being placed in restraints, receiving inadequate nutrition, and suffering “medical neglect” at the hands of ICE agents at the Basile facility, and another detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia, according to the letter.
Federal agents detain a woman who is nine months pregnant after she walks out of an immigration court hearing in New York City. An unknown number of pregnant and breastfeeding women have been detained this year, despite ICE’s own directive generally prohibiting their detention, says a letter from civil rights groups (Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty)
“There really is no circumstance where detention is the appropriate setting for someone who is pregnant,” said Sarah Decker, senior staff attorney at RFK Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy organization. The Independent. Decker spoke with Alicia, who is identified only by a pseudonym, while she was in custody.
About a month after being held, Alicia began experiencing severe abdominal pain, vaginal discharge, cramping, and bleeding. She was taken to a nearby emergency room in handcuffs. There, she underwent an invasive medical procedure, without her consent, according to the letter. After the procedure, the medical staff told Alicia, only in English rather than her native Spanish, that she had suffered a miscarriage.
“For her, this was very traumatic, because she was not able to understand why she had the miscarriage, what they did to her,” Decker said. National detention standards require ICE to provide language assistance to detainees with limited English proficiency.
After six hours at the hospital, she was sent back to the Basile facility, where officials told Alicia she would be deported to her country of origin, which her lawyer did not disclose to protect her identity. Although it is not clear why facility officials made this remark, Alicia interpreted the comment as retaliation, to silence her after her complaints of medical neglect and abuse, her attorney said.
In fact, she stayed in the facility for another two months. Relentless symptoms – bleeding, swelling, foul-smelling vaginal discharge and excruciating pain – persisted. The pain became so severe that she struggled to sleep.
When Decker and her team spoke with Alicia in June, “she could barely have a conversation with us, because she was in so much pain and she was crying so much,” the lawyer said. Alicia made numerous sick call requests with the medical staff at the facility, but they went unanswered, according to the letter.
It wasn’t until Alicia was deported in July that she was able to get antibiotics to treat the vaginal infection she had developed from the untreated miscarriage while in ICE custody.
Alicia’s story is a harrowing example of why there are only limited exceptions to detaining pregnant women — if they are a national security concern, or pose an imminent risk of death, violence, or physical harm to someone, according to a 2021 ICE policy.
But even under those exceptions, the agency is required to monitor detained pregnant women to ensure proper care.
A mother hugs her son in a detention court in New York City. The Trump administration has made it more difficult to track down children who are separated from their parents who have been placed in ICE custody. (Getty)
And yet, under the second Trump administration, pregnant women have been repeatedly arrested. The exact number of pregnant women in immigration custody is not immediately clear, and The Independent requested that figure from ICE.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said The Independent on November 6 that pregnant women make up “0.133 percent of all illegal aliens in custody.”
“Pregnant women in custody are also subject to heightened surveillance,” she said. “The ACLU letter includes anonymous, unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims. Pregnant women receive regular prenatal visits, mental health services, nutritional support, and accommodations aligned with community standards of care.”
Data, available from a mix of media, lawsuits and congressional reports, suggest dozens of pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women have been detained so far this year.
ICE facilities have become a “black box,” said Zain Lakhani, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission. The Independent.
The commission launched its Detention Pregnancy Tracker to build a record of the treatment of pregnant women in ICE custody by piecing together information from advocates, health care providers, and labor organizers.
From 2019 to 2024, Congress required DHS to provide semiannual reports on pregnant, postpartum or breastfeeding women in ICE custody, including “detailed justification” for their detention. But Congress did not renew that requirement in 2025.
The exterior of the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana, where Alicia was given her health screening. Pregnant women held at the facility reported “dreaming” about eating meat, with some saying they went weeks without being fed any protein, a lawyer said (AP).
Democratic Washington Senator Patty Murray, and 28 Senate colleagues, wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in September requesting information on how many pregnant women were detained.
Noem has not responded to the letter since November 25, a spokesman for Murray confirmed The Independent.
The senator said The Independent that she is fighting for “stronger oversight and humane treatment” of pregnant women in ICE detention.
“The Trump administration’s approach to immigration is cruelty for cruelty—they’ve been happy to break the law and use overwhelming force against law-abiding immigrants for no reason,” the Washington Democrat said.
Doctors and health agencies recommend certain dietary guidelines during pregnancy, typically advising women to consume at least 300 extra calories per day. Alicia said the portions were small, even just for her, and the food was not always eaten, according to the civil rights group’s letter.
Some pregnant women reported being fed only a small frozen burrito all day, while others said their food was moldy or covered in insects, Lakhani said.
Others reported staples served at ICE facilities included less than a handful of beans, half a piece of white bread, a handful of “soggy” green beans, and “mystery ground meat,” according to Decker. And it is reportedly not uncommon to go long periods without any meat, particularly in Basile’s facility.
“We have had women tell us that they dream of eating meat because they have been without any source of protein for weeks,” said the lawyer.
An ICE directive requires the agency to ensure that detained pregnant women are “housed in facilities appropriate to their medical and mental health needs” and that their “general health and well-being” is monitored.
However, the problem of pregnant detainees going hungry seems to be widespread, far beyond the centers of Basile and Lumpkin.. At an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, pregnant detainees “were not provided with regular access to meals, nor additional snacks, milk, juice, or any extra nutrition recommended for pregnant people,” attorneys said in a legal filing about the center’s unsanitary and overcrowded conditions.
At the Basile facility, Alicia similarly complained about freezing temperatures and unsanitary conditions, Decker said. Federal judges ordered several ICE facilities to improve conditions after troubling reports.
Other detainees reported cases of medical neglect, similar to Alicia’s experience. One man, held at the Broadview facility, reported seeing a pregnant female detainee asking ICE officers for medication and being denied, he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tours ‘Camp 57,’ a new ICE facility at a notorious maximum security prison in Louisiana. Judges ordered ICE facilities across the country to improve their conditions after receiving reports of unsanitary and overcrowded conditions (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
“She asked the ICE officers for medication that she needed, but they would not provide her with any medication,” he said in a statement that is part of the lawsuit surrounding the “crisis conditions” at the facility.
Beyond the harsh conditions, family separation is intrinsically intertwined with the detention of pregnant and postpartum women. Lakhani said the women, who already have children, expressed “high levels of stress and sadness around being separated.”
In July, ICE issued a new version of a 2022 directive on the detention of parents of minor children. The new directive weakened ICE’s obligations, making it more difficult for parents facing deportation to make arrangements for their children.
The 2022 directive stated that ICE “shall afford” parents an opportunity to consult with an attorney to decide the next steps for their minor children, such as who will take care of them, before they are removed from the United States.
Lakhani expressed concern about the lack of long-term tracking of children after parents are obtained by ICE, especially in the confusion of mass arrests.
“There’s not that attention to detail to make sure that if you’re picking up a parent, you know that they’re going to be able to stay in touch with their child, that they’re going to be able to reunite with a child,” Lakhani said.
For Alicia, being separated from her children “caused her extreme psychological distress,” Decker said. “That alone is enough to cause serious complications with a pregnancy, if someone is going through something like that.”
To this day, she is still separated from her children.
This article has been updated to quote the correct ICE directive.