The Trump Administration Is Hiding How Many Pregnant People Are in ICE Detention

The putrid smell emanating from breakfast turned Daniela s stomach which wailed internally from hunger and nausea For months she had lived mostly on bread and the pantry items she could cobble together from the commissary in her ICE detention facility Pregnant and trapped at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma Washington she felt the gnawing of hunger and isolation This is not a place for me Daniela whose name has been changed to protect her from retaliation from U S Immigration and Customs Enforcement wrote in Spanish in a message to The Intercept She d been having abdominal pain and she caught Covid in early September According to Amanda Heffernan a nurse midwife and professor at Seattle University who reviewed Daniela s biological records at her request for roughly two months Daniela never received a prenatal visit with an OB-GYN Pregnant people generally aren t supposed to be held in immigration detention at all Official guidance in place since directs ICE to avoid detaining pregnant postpartum and lactating women unless their release is prohibited by law or in exceptional circumstances In cases where the regime determines that pregnant women must be detained the guidelines impose strict obligations on detention facilities to monitor their conditions and ensure that facilities meet their mental and physical requirements The Trump administration appears to be ignoring that directive according to immigration experts advocates a pregnant detainee and The Intercept s analysis of congressional reports and letters Taken together the evidence indicates that the Department of Homeland Defense is detaining pregnant women at alarming rates in rapidly deteriorating detention conditions This is the first time I ve seen so multiple pregnant people in ICE detention declared Tania Wolf the Southeast advocacy manager at the National Immigration Project Experts at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Women s Refugee Commission made similar observations Related ICE Targets Unaccompanied Immigrant Children Offering Payment for Deportation There are cases of people who clearly meet the criteria not to be detained and that ICE has gone ahead and detained anyway commented Eunice Cho senior counsel at the ACLU National Prison Project Zain Lakhani the director of migrant rights and justice at the Women s Refugee Commission disclosed her group has noticed a essential increase in the number of pregnant detainees of pregnant women postpartum and lactating women in detention in the months since President Donald Trump returned to office Hard numbers on the number of pregnant women in immigration detention are nearly impossible to find The Trump administration has stopped publishing semiannual reports on the condition and number of pregnant postpartum and lactating women in immigration detention facilities Congress used to require that DHS compile the reports but as of the last funding bill it had dropped the mandate Right now we don t have functional transparency and oversight mechanisms for DHS and for immigration detention mentioned Nithya Nathan-Pineau framework attorney and strategist for the Immigrant Legal Reservoir Center This is the first time I ve seen so multiple pregnant people in ICE detention That leaves the residents unaware of how plenty of people there are like Daniela who noted there were two other pregnant women in her unit at the detention facility The Intercept was not able to speak with the women directly Christopher Ferreira a spokesperson for GEO Group the for-profit prison company that operates Northwest Detention Center and other ICE detention facilities explained The Intercept that GEO provides high-quality services including physiological care governed by standards set by the U S Department of Homeland Guard and independently accredited by the National Commission on Correctional Medical Care Ferreira also noted that at the center where Daniela was detained ICE provides government-administered robustness care to detainees Daniela who is immigrated to the United States in from Venezuela to seek asylum while pregnant with her first child now a -year-old U S citizen She missed her daughter while in ICE detention she reported The Intercept They were kept apart for those two months I have never left her alone Daniela disclosed of her daughter Last week after The Intercept made inquiries to DHS and GEO group Daniela was circulated from ICE custody and reunited with her daughter Detention is inherently dangerous and damaging for children and pregnant women announced Sen Jon Ossoff D-Ga at a press conference in August He was announcing a record his staff compiled over the summer which identified credible accounts of pregnant women being mistreated within immigration detention Pregnant detainees their partners ICE personnel and their attorneys have announced pregnant women being denied adequate clinical care being forced to sleep on the floor and being denied sufficient meals and snacks Attorneys claimed their pregnant clients had waited weeks to see a professional The partner of a woman in DHS custody informed Senate staff that the woman was pregnant and had been left to bleed for days before facility staff would take her to the hospital According to their record once the woman arrived at the hospital she was left alone in a room to miscarry without any water or health assistance for hours A Senate Judiciary Committee analysis issued in May unveiled similar statements of abuse against pregnant women within two Louisiana detention facilities One of the women described in the description who was roughly four months pregnant and had experienced bleeding mentioned she had not seen a specialist in months Another woman detained at the facility who was two months pregnant alleged that she had not been seen by a medical professional since her arrival Multiple women narrated staffers about a pregnant woman who had miscarried while detained and was allegedly still bleeding while being deported Department of Homeland Measure spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin denied statements of the mistreatment of pregnant women There have been no miscarriages on removal flights since President Trump took office McLaughlin wrote in a comment to The Intercept Detention of pregnant women is rare and has elevated oversight and review No pregnant woman has been forced to sleep on the floor Meals are certified by dieticians and they are given their prenatal vitamins These smears about ICE mistreating and denying women clinical care are contributing to our ICE officers facing a increase in assaults against them Access to medicinal care is practically nonexistent within detention facilities disclosed Amanda Diaz organizing director at Freedom for Immigrants an immigrant-led advocacy organization that runs a national reporting hotline for people in detention Health care inside of detention facilities is insufficient in general So when we add in more specified procedures or therapeutic care that s just fully inexistent mentioned Diaz Read Our Complete Coverage The War on Immigrants Diaz s group runs a national detention hotline and she commented that in June they received a call from a woman who was two months pregnant and mentioned she was detained in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center another GEO Group facility The woman revealed she began experiencing abdominal pain and bleeding large blood clots The people around her in her pod and her cell started to call the nurse and the diagnostic care company but they did not have a professional present nor did they have urgent physiological staff there to respond revealed Diaz Diaz reported the woman declared she was forced to wait days to be seen at a hospital Her organization has not been able to get in touch with the woman since her initial disclosure in June Ferreira the GEO Group spokesperson declared that people incarcerated at GEO Group facilities are provided with access to teams of anatomical professionals including physicians nurses dentists psychologists and psychiatrists as well as off-site specialists urgency services and hospitals In March Homeland Assurance reported massive cuts to its civil rights and immigration oversight offices which collected complaints about detention facilities and monitored conditions leaving much of the agency s conduct a black box While the offices haven t been fully shut down according to Nathan-Pineau they re essentially not functioning according to their mission They don t want people to be able to review out what s happening what conditions are like how they re being mistreated mentioned Nathan-Pineau In addition to assertions of inadequate curative care experts also attest to poor food quality and inadequate nutrition within ICE facilities Food is usually expired or moldy or has maggots in them explained Diaz They don t want people to be able to statement how they re being mistreated Seven experts on immigration detention informed The Intercept that the food quality within the greater part ICE detention centers was extremely poor People summary that they re being fed maybe only once or twice a day and that what they re given is like a small sandwich or a burrito and like maybe a juice box and that sometimes the food that they re getting smells like it s gone bad or it might be expired mentioned Nathan-Pineau I saw one overview of a person who mentioned they were given food that had visible mold on it ICE facilities which are often run by private contractors like the GEO Group take the lowest accomplishable bid they can get for a food contractor commented Heffernan who wrote her doctoral dissertation on pregnancy and immigration detention Because of the low-quality meals available one of the only options for people detained in immigration facilities is purchasing food from the commissary often at exorbitant prices It s a giant exploitation machine for private companies because they make the telecommunications and commissary food really expensive she declared In majority of detention centers around the country people are working for like a day and then the can of tuna fish is like It s just a whole racket McLaughlin also denied these statements Another day and another hoax about ICE facilities These FALSE charges about mistreatment and denying pregnant woman clinical care are disgusting Pregnant women receive regular prenatal visits mental physical condition services nutritional sponsorship and accommodations aligned with neighborhood standards of care she wrote in a comment to The Intercept With transparency eroded the massive ramp-up of the Trump administration s deportation machine has almost certainly contributed to an uptick in pregnant women in immigration detention Lakhani pointed to the Trump administration s immigration arrest quota of people per day Given the commitments of the administration to ramping up immigration enforcement she declared she expects to see an extreme escalation Related Private Prison CEO on ICE Contracts We re a Better Deal Than El Salvador s CECOT Experts predict that the latest billion cash infusion from the Big Beautiful Bill for immigration detention facilities is going to make the situation worse The funding change will give immigration enforcement a budget that is percent larger than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons making immigration detention the largest carceral system in the country The issues predate the second Trump administration revealed Heffernan Neither new Democratic nor Republican administrations really take the well-being of detained pregnant folks into account in a very really way she commented Diaz agreed that the lack of compliance preexisted the current administration But she wrote this obstacle is even worse now that ICE is emboldened to act with impunity and zero accountability The post The Trump Administration Is Hiding How Multiple Pregnant People Are in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept