Pregnant women in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention say in interviews and written affidavits that they have been “shackled around the stomach” and denied adequate medical care, some testifying that they were “ignored when they were obviously miscarrying,” according to Buzzfeed. “Those descriptions were backed by interviews with five legal aid workers, four medical workers, and two advocates who work with ICE detainees.”
One woman, identified only as “E” out of safety concerns, said she was four months pregnant when she began bleeding and called for help. “An official arrived,” she said, “and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t look after me. I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.”
E miscarried, and “about a week after speaking with BuzzFeed News, E gave up her fight for asylum, accepted voluntary departure, and was deported back to El Salvador.” Another woman held in Texas said she was given an X-ray, “despite this being against the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendations. ‘I saw on the machine that [it said] pregnant women should not have an X-ray,’ she wrote.”
Women are also saying they’re being shackled while being transferred, despite it being “prohibited by ICE and CBP’s most recent standards-of-care policies as well as by a congressional directive.” Dr. Anjani Kolahi of the Physicians for Reproductive Health called the allegations “’absolutely medical negligence. Overall [detaining pregnant women] is a cruel, inhumane practice. It’s creating all sorts of unnecessary risk for the women’ and their children, she said.”
“Pregnant women I spoke with in ICE custody often didn't get appropriate nourishment, medical care, or prenatal vitamins,” tweeted Cristina Costantini earlier this year about other pregnant women that have been detained. “Some were even shackled during childbirth, denied breast pumps, and not allowed to hold their babies.”
The allegations come just months after the Trump administration ended a policy that generally, but not always, released pregnant women from detention. But advocates said they began to notice more pregnant women were being detained even before the change was announced, saying “that they first began to notice an increase in pregnant detainees last summer.” Luis Guerra of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) said that “it was a real shock to us at first, but then we just started seeing it more and more.”
According to ICE data “from Dec. 14, 2017, to April 7, 2018, there have been a total of 590 pregnant women booked into custody,” with about 35 in custody as of April. “My soul aches,” E said, “that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did and that they will do nothing to help them.”