U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested a record number of pregnant people and placed them in detention centers where they receive subpar prenatal and postnatal care. And the agency has lost count of how many have suffered miscarriages.
What’s happening to women who miscarry in ICE custody?
The Trump administration “placed more pregnant immigrants in detention” last fall and winter than at “any time over the previous year,” said The Guardian. In October, there were at least 87 pregnant women and teens in detention, and by November, there were 101, according to government documents obtained by the outlet. ICE reported 18 miscarriages during the first nine months of the Trump administration, but the agency stopped recording miscarriages after Oct. 3. There is no updated data on miscarriages because ICE ended its contract with the Veterans Affairs Financial Services Center, which had been handling medical billing for the agency, according to internal documents.
Detained pregnant women report they are “struggling to access routine and emergency medical care,” said The Guardian. Women who miscarried or were hospitalized for pregnancy complications told the outlet they “did not receive follow-up care, despite experiencing ongoing pain and symptoms.” While it is difficult to attribute the miscarriages to the detention conditions, it is clear these “incarcerated women” are not “getting the prenatal visits that they’re supposed to get,” Deborah Ottenheimer, an obstetrician-gynecologist and medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights, said to The Guardian. They’re not getting “high-risk prenatal visits if they need them.” And if they do miscarry, the “medical care they receive is minimal to none.”
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Center for Reproductive Rights reports from earlier this year also indicate high numbers of miscarriages in detention centers and, in severe cases, “allegations of coerced or unnecessary gynecological surgeries and hysterectomies without proper informed consent,” said Forbes. These reports “raise concerns about compliance with established maternal health standards.”
Is anything being done to improve the problem?
Initially, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, said the agency was tracking miscarriages in monthly reports in response to The Guardian’s follow-up questions about the missing data. Later, the spokesperson confirmed it “does not have data on miscarriages from October 2025 through June 2026,” said The Guardian. DHS has “never before acknowledged” that it lost count of miscarriages, “not even when U.S. senators asked the agency for the data.” It is convenient for the Trump administration that ICE cannot report how many miscarriages happened in its custody, because when “you don’t track something of that magnitude,” you don’t have to be “confronted with the reality of what your policies have yielded,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, the co-chief executive of Texas-based immigration services nonprofit Raíces, to The Guardian. “
In May, Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Jon Ossoff (Ga.) demanded answers from DHS regarding the “appalling and horrific treatment” of pregnant, postpartum and nursing women in immigration detention, in a letter sent to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and private contractors operating an ICE detention facility in Texas. The trio cited “cases of miscarriages, medical neglect and the use of shackles during pregnancy,” said The Latin Times. They also urged the Trump administration to “restore a policy presuming the release of pregnant women from immigration custody except in extraordinary circumstances.”
This letter came right after new legislation was introduced by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) that “would establish care standards for federally incarcerated pregnant people,” including those in ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities, said Mother Jones. The bill builds on one that the “House already passed in 2022,” which only applied to those in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ custody.
Immigration detention is known to foster “medical neglect, abusive conditions” and “utter disregard for the dignity of people,” Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project and the co-author of a letter to ICE documenting these conditions, said in an ACLU report. “What we heard from the pregnant women we interviewed” are some of the “most horrifying stories I’ve heard about detention.”
