More pregnant women are being detained by ICE. Detention centers aren't equipped

As the Trump administration continues its mass deportation campaign across the country, more pregnant immigrants are being detained.

Under the Biden administration, there was guidance that ICE shouldn’t detain pregnant or postpartum people, but President Donald Trump rescinded a similar Customs and Border Protection policy in early 2025.

Now, more pregnant women are being held in detention facilities across the country, resulting in a slew of lawsuits against the federal government. One is from a woman who miscarried in custody. Another went into labor days after being released.

Amanda Heffernan is a certified nurse-midwife and assistant professor at Seattle University who works at a federally qualified health center that mainly serves migrants and refugees.

Heffernan treats some of the people being held in immigration detention — and she says it’s no place for a pregnant woman.

She does prenatal care, women’s health care, postpartum care and she attends births in the hospital. Before moving to Washington, she did this work in Tucson where, as she told The Cut recently, she sometimes saw Border Patrol agents waiting outside of hospital rooms, guarding patients inside.

Full conversation

AMANDA HEFFERNAN: We're certainly getting indications that more pregnant people are getting detained. It's really difficult to track and there's not a lot of transparency or data available, so it's hard to have any numbers. But for instance, in the last few months, there have been four women, pregnant women that we know of, detained at the Northwest Detention center in Tacoma, Washington.

That's just one detention center among many. And I think also there's a chance that we could have missed people. There's 120 women on the unit where we've been made aware of these four pregnant women over the last few months. ICE isn't obligated to let anyone know if they're detaining a pregnant woman. So it's by word of mouth.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so you're made aware of these women in detention near you there in Washington, and then you try to work with them. What kind of care are they receiving?

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, it's very fragmented. So there are medical units within the detention centers where people are able to see a provider. It can be hard to get an appointment there. There's a lot of stories of people who maybe wait in line all day and then don't get or alert guards to symptoms they're having.

It takes quite a while to be seen. But the thing of note for pregnant people is that those providers are not obstetric providers. It's not a prenatal exam, and there's not an assessment of the wellbeing of the fetus or an ultrasound or anything like that. So that to happen, people have to be taken off-site.

It's very inconsistent. I have spoken to people who were detained for months and were never taken off site for a prenatal visit at all.

GILGER: So what are some of your concerns? Like, what are you seeing in the people that you're working with right now?

HEFFERNAN: Well, one of the things that sometimes folks aren't as aware of if you're not in this field, is that prenatal care has a rhythm to it. Things are supposed to happen at certain weeks of gestation in the pregnancy. You know, you're supposed to be seen once a month at the beginning of the pregnancy, every two weeks in the middle, and every week towards the end, with labs and ultrasounds done at certain weeks of gestation.

And so when people are taken for outside visits, either very haphazardly or not at all, things are missed. And I've also seen several folks who have quite high risk pregnancies who would need additional care or more frequent care than that, perhaps more frequent ultrasounds or different labs, and they're not getting, they're not getting what they need.

GILGER: So what used to happen, like, prior to the Trump administration's deportation policy, was it the case that pregnant people would be allowed to be held in detention, or would they often be picked up by ICE and then, you know, bonded out? Something like that?

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, that's a great question. So towards the end of his second term, President [Barack] Obama instituted a policy which essentially said that with few exceptions, pregnant women shouldn't be detained by ICE.

That policy was maintained through the first year of the first Trump administration, and then it was rescinded. So in 2018 and 2019, we saw a big uptick in the number of pregnant women detained, but as you noted, they usually had a fairly low bond.

And so it seemed that ICE would try to deport them if they could, but wasn't interested in holding them for super long periods of time and certainly didn't want to detain people in their third trimester or people that were imminently going to give birth.

GILGER: Like, they didn't want to deal with the fact that this person might give birth in a detention center.

HEFFERNAN: Right, exactly, exactly.

GILGER: So, Amanda, so you're working with these people who are being held who are in the midst of a pregnancy. I guess the main question here is, is detention a safe place for someone who's pregnant?

And there's a difference here, we should say, between a detention facility, which is often supposed to be kind of short term, and someone who is, say, in prison.

HEFFERNAN: Absolutely. All of a sudden, with second Trump administration, we're seeing a lot more pregnant women detained in ICE facilities, which you're absolutely right, are, are designed for shorter term detention. They're not designed to hold people having, you know, 10-year prison sentences. And I think that's part of the reason why they're not equipped to provide something like prenatal care.

So, no, I don't think that it's a safer, healthy place for any pregnant person. The food is not of good quality. It's extremely stressful. You know, people who've experienced both the criminal carceral system and immigration detention sometimes say that the criminal carceral system is better. And part of the reason is that they knew how long their sentence was going to be and there was at least, they at least had something to wrap their heads around.

GILGER: You've talked about one person you're working with who was told that she might be carrying twins right before she was detained, but has no information, no follow up on whether or not that's the case. That could put you into a high risk category in a pregnancy, right?

HEFFERNAN: Absolutely, yes. And I, I met someone else who had had a history of preeclampsia in previous pregnancies and previous cesarean sections. So, yeah, neither of those women was treated by ICE as if they had a high risk pregnancy.

GILGER: What is this like for these women that you're working with right now? Like, not just physically, like whether or not they're, you know, going through the kind of agreed upon protocol of medical care. How are they handling this emotionally?

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, it's profoundly stressful. Women often talk about feeling depressed and scared. Some of them are separated from their older children. Some of them are already mothers. And that family separation is really difficult. And, and the friends or family that are caring for their children don't always feel comfortable coming to a detention facility to bring the children to visit.

So, yeah, it's profoundly stressful and distressing.

GILGER: Let me ask you, Amanda, what would you say to someone who says, they kind of put themselves in this position, they should have followed the law, they should have done this the right way?

And there's sort of this overarching, I'm sure narrative here about if you're pregnant and you're not here with papers or you came here illegally or whatever it may be, just hoping for citizenship for your unborn child. And lots of debate about that right now with the president's action on birthright citizenship.

Like, looking at that political context, do you think that, that lots of people would say, "fair enough?" Or do you think this is a line that maybe hasn't been crossed before, that is being crossed now?

HEFFERNAN: I mean, I think I would ask people to be human and take a compassionate approach and recognize that, I mean, there's actually some pretty good research that shows that people don't. People don't migrate with the intention of having children in the U.S. so that they become citizens.

Most of the folks that I've spoken with who were pregnant in detention were asylum seekers who fled their countries of origin under great duress and often fear for their lives.

I also, I heard a webinar last week with some folks from RAICES, and Faisal Al-Juburi from RAICES said something that really stuck with me. He said that when you see things like family detention, you know, detention of small children and attention of pregnant women, that it's a testing ground.

It's like the Trump administration seeing how far can we go before people push back. And so I think time to push back.