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 medical 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 2021 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 government 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 needs.
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 Security is detaining pregnant women at alarming rates, in rapidly deteriorating detention conditions.
“This is the first time I’ve seen so many pregnant people in [ICE] detention,” said 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.
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“There are cases of people who clearly meet the criteria not to be detained, and that ICE has gone ahead and detained anyway,” said 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, said her group has noticed “a significant 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,” said Nithya Nathan-Pineau, policy attorney and strategist for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
“This is the first time I’ve seen so many pregnant people in [ICE] detention.”
That leaves the public unaware of how many people there are like Daniela, who said 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 19 other ICE detention facilities, told The Intercept that GEO provides “high-quality services,” including medical care, “governed by standards set by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and independently accredited by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.” Ferreira also noted that at the center where Daniela was detained, ICE provides government-administered health care to detainees.
Daniela, who is 27, immigrated to the United States in 2023 from Venezuela to seek asylum while pregnant with her first child, now a 2-year-old U.S. citizen. She missed her daughter while in ICE detention, she told The Intercept. They were kept apart for those two months.
“I have never left her alone,” Daniela said of her daughter.
Last week, after The Intercept made inquiries to DHS and GEO group, Daniela was released from ICE custody and reunited with her daughter.
“Detention is inherently dangerous and damaging for children and pregnant women,” said Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., at a press conference in August. He was announcing a report his staff compiled over the summer, which found 14 credible accounts of pregnant women being mistreated within immigration detention.
Pregnant detainees, their partners, ICE officials, and their attorneys have reported pregnant women being denied adequate medical 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 doctor.
The partner of a woman in DHS custody told 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 report, once the woman arrived at the hospital, she was left alone in a room to miscarry without any water or medical assistance for 24 hours.
A Senate Judiciary Committee report released in May found similar allegations of abuse against pregnant women within two Louisiana detention facilities.
One of the women described in the report, who was roughly four months pregnant and had experienced bleeding, said she had not seen a doctor in months. Another woman detained at the facility, who was two months pregnant, alleged that she had not been seen by a doctor since her arrival. Many women told staffers about a pregnant woman who had miscarried while detained and was allegedly still bleeding while being deported.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin denied allegations of the mistreatment of pregnant women.
“There have been no miscarriages on removal flights since President Trump took office,” McLaughlin wrote in a statement 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 medical care are contributing to our ICE officers facing a 1,000% increase in assaults against them.”
Access to medical care is practically nonexistent within detention facilities, said Amanda Diaz, organizing director at Freedom for Immigrants, an immigrant-led advocacy organization that runs a national reporting hotline for people in detention.
“Medical care inside of detention facilities is insufficient in general. So, when we add in more specified procedures or medical care, that’s just completely inexistent,” said Diaz.
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Diaz’s group runs a national detention hotline, and she said that in June, they received a call from a woman who was two months pregnant and said she was detained in the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, another GEO Group facility.
The woman said 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 medical care team, but they did not have a doctor present, nor did they have urgent medical staff there to respond,” said Diaz.
Diaz said the woman said 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 2025.
Ferreira, the GEO Group spokesperson, said that people incarcerated at GEO Group facilities “are provided with access to teams of medical professionals including physicians, nurses, dentists, psychologists, and psychiatrists” as well as off-site specialists, emergency services, and hospitals.
In March, Homeland Security announced 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 report out what’s happening, what conditions are like, how they’re being mistreated,” said Nathan-Pineau.
In addition to allegations of inadequate medical 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,” said Diaz.
“They don’t want people to be able to report how they’re being mistreated.”
Seven experts on immigration detention told The Intercept that the food quality within most ICE detention centers was extremely poor. “People report 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,” said Nathan-Pineau. “I saw one report of a person who said 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 possible bid” they can get for a food contractor, said 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 said. “In most detention centers around the country, people are working for like $1 a day and then the can of tuna fish is like $6. … It’s just a whole racket.”
McLaughlin also denied these allegations.
“Another day and another hoax about ICE facilities. These FALSE allegations about mistreatment and denying pregnant woman medical care are disgusting. Pregnant women receive regular prenatal visits, mental health services, nutritional support, and accommodations aligned with community standards of care,” she wrote in a statement 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 3,000 people per day. “Given the commitments of the administration to ramping up immigration enforcement,” she said, she expects to see “an extreme escalation.”
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Experts predict that the recent $45 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 62 percent larger than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons, making immigration detention the largest carceral network in the country.
The issues predate the second Trump administration, said Heffernan. “Neither recent Democratic nor Republican administrations actually take the well-being of detained pregnant folks into account in a very really way,” she said.
Diaz agreed that the lack of compliance preexisted the current administration. But, she wrote, “this problem is even worse now that ICE is emboldened to act with impunity and zero accountability.”
The post The Trump Administration Is Hiding How Many Pregnant People Are in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.
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