Nearly 30 Senate Democrats sent a letter to the Trump administration urging the Department of Homeland Security to stop detaining pregnant immigrant women in the wake of recent reports that suggest an uptick in immigration arrests of pregnant, postpartum and nursing women.
Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.) and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) co-authored the letter sent to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday morning. The letter, shared exclusively with HuffPost, was signed by 27 other Senate Democrats who demanded that the Trump administration share information about how many pregnant and postpartum women are currently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and what medical care, if any, they’re receiving.
Prior to President Donald Trump taking office in January, ICE was required to report the number and treatment of pregnant, postpartum and nursing women in immigration custody. Under Trump’s administration and his mass deportation agenda, that reporting has stopped and critical oversight departments, including DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, have effectively shut down.
“At this time, we do not know how many pregnant women are in ICE custody, whether U.S. citizen babies have been born in ICE custody, and what provisions have been made for mothers’ and children’s health, safety, and wellbeing,” according to the letter. Murray previously pushed Congress to take action on safeguarding detained pregnant women, introducing a bill during Trump’s first administration to stop the shackling and mistreatment of pregnant women in ICE custody. She reintroduced the bill earlier this year.
See the letter below or read it here. (Story continues below.)
The lawmakers point to ICE’s own pregnancy directive, created in 2021, which says immigration officials should only detain pregnant, postpartum and nursing women when it is absolutely necessary. For the few pregnant women who are detained, it is required that they are kept in suitable facilities that can meet their specific medical needs.
“This is an issue that we can all really agree on — ensuring that pregnant, postpartum and lactating women have access to medical care and sufficient nutrition to sustain healthy pregnancies,” Zain Lakhani, migrant rights and justice director at Women’s Refugee Commission, told HuffPost on Wednesday. The Women’s Refugee Commission and the National Immigration Law Center worked in partnership with Murray’s office to write the letter and call for transparency around conditions for pregnant and postpartum women in detention.
Recent reports suggest ICE is not following its own pregnancy guidelines. An April congressional report from a visit to two Louisiana ICE detention centers observed that the Trump administration “has begun detaining larger numbers of pregnant women in facilities ill-equipped to manage their well-being and safety.” There were 14 pregnant women detained at one facility when Senate Judiciary Committee staffers visited, according to the report. Many of the detainees described poor medical care for pregnant and newly postpartum women.
HuffPost spoke with a postpartum woman who was still nursing her infant daughter when ICE detained her earlier this year. She was taken to an all-male detention facility in Miami, Florida, which was not equipped to handle the specific needs of pregnant or postpartum women. She told HuffPost she was not offered a breast pump and had to expel her breast milk on her own. She and about 30 other women were denied basic care including access to showers and women-only bathrooms.
There has been at least one pregnancy loss reported in a detention center. Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus had a stillbirth while detained by ICE in Nashville, the Nashville Banner reported. Monterroso-Lemus repeatedly had requested medical care when she had pain in her belly and felt no fetal movement, but ICE agents reportedly ignored her. Monterroso-Lemus said she gave birth with her feet shackled to a hospital bed and surrounded by federal guards.
Advocates are increasingly concerned about inadequate prenatal care, dangerous pregnancy outcomes and childbirth conditions in overcrowded immigration detention centers across the country. Lakhani, from WRC, described the issue as a “really significant black box” where, due to the Trump administration continually obfuscating basic oversight information, it’s increasingly hard to find out what’s happening inside these facilities.
To combat this issue, WRC recently launched a confidential, submission-based tracker to help document the conditions of pregnant women detained by ICE. The pregnancy tracker allows attorneys, family members and advocates to share information about pregnant or postpartum women and the type of care they received in immigration custody. One of the primary targets of the tracker is health care providers who may encounter pregnant or postpartum women in a detention facility or hospital, Lakhani said.
“There was really just a dearth of information,” Lakhani told HuffPost. “This was a problem that many, many people were identifying, but they were being identified in very local ways … and there wasn’t really a centralized place where a lot of that information could be housed, and that we’d be able to actually get a sense of what is happening nationwide.”
Learn more about WRC’s detention pregnancy tracker here.
