ICE’s Growing Detention of Pregnant Immigrants and the Vanishing Count of Miscarriages

In the winter of 2025‑2026, immigration officials under the Trump administration began placing more pregnant migrants in detention than at any point in the previous year. The numbers are stark: dozens of women, many of them teenagers, were booked into ICE facilities across the country, often without a clear plan for prenatal care.

What’s even more unsettling is the agency’s own paperwork. Internal documents obtained by The Guardian show ICE recorded 18 miscarriages during the first nine months of the administration, but after 3 October 2025 the tally simply stops. A change to the medical‑accounting system left the department without any data on miscarriages for the rest of 2025 and most of 2026.

For the women caught in the system, the statistics are more than numbers on a spreadsheet. Anabell, 35, was arrested in Kentucky without knowing she was pregnant. “I was told to take a test during my intake,” she recalls. The result was positive, but a month later she was bleeding heavily, chained to an emergency‑room gurney, and told she was no longer pregnant. She never received an ultrasound or follow‑up care.

Laura, 21, arrived at the Dilley detention center in Texas while in her second trimester of a high‑risk pregnancy. Now approaching her third trimester, she says she still can’t see an OB‑GYN, despite constant abdominal pain and bleeding.

Angie, 26, learned she was expecting weeks after being booked at the Mesa Verde facility in California. Within days, she woke to a gush of brown fluid. Staff told her the miscarriage “wasn’t her fault,” yet offered no medical explanation or treatment.

Doctors warn that a miscarriage without proper follow‑up can lead to infection, retained tissue, and serious complications. “These incarcerated women are not getting the prenatal visits they’re supposed to get,” says obstetrician‑gynecologist Deborah Ottenheimer of Physicians for Human Rights. “If they do miscarry, the medical care they receive is minimal to none.”

Christina Davidson, chief medical officer of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, has warned that detaining pregnant patients poses “serious medical and mental health risks for both the pregnant patient and the fetus.” Delayed or denied care can turn a treatable condition into a life‑threatening emergency.

The Guardian obtained the data after filing a Freedom of Information Act request and, when ICE balked, suing alongside the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. ICE eventually supplied numbers on pregnant, postpartum and nursing women from October 2024 through January 2026, but the miscarriage figures halted abruptly on 3 October 2025. When pressed, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson first claimed monthly tracking continued, then conceded the agency had no data for the subsequent months.

Even senators asking for the figures received no answer. “It’s convenient for the administration that ICE can’t report how many women in its custody had miscarriages,” says Faisal Al‑Juburi, co‑CEO of the Texas‑based nonprofit Raíces. “When you don’t track something of that magnitude, you don’t have to confront the reality of what your policies have yielded.”

For Anabell, Laura, Angie and countless others, the lack of numbers feels like an erasure of their suffering. Their stories, though fragmented, paint a picture of a detention system that is increasingly hostile to pregnant detainees, where basic medical needs are often left unmet, and where the very fact of a miscarriage can disappear from official records.