Every year, the Women’s Funding Network (WFN), the largest alliance in the world dedicated to advancing the role of philanthropy in the fight for gender equality and justice, holds a lobby day to educate and inspire U.S. policymakers on issues that impact women and girls. As part of this year’s event on September 9, Zain Lakhani, WRC’s Director of Migrant Rights and Justice, spoke at the Feminist Philanthropy Senate Briefing. Her powerful remarks, in full below, focused on how the Trump Administration’s immigration policy shifts have impacted women and children.
I would like to begin by thanking the Women’s Funding Network for inviting me here to speak with you today. My name is Zain Lakhani and I direct the Migrant Rights and Justice Project of the Women’s Refugee Commission, which is the only national advocacy organization principally dedicated to ensuring rights and protections for migrant women and girls—in transit, at the border, and in the United States. We also work globally, including in Mexico and Central America, to trace the impact of U.S. policies, including mass deportations and cuts to humanitarian funding, on displaced women and girls.
Your question flagged two rapidly escalating crises that I’d like to touch on today. The first is what I have been calling the new family separation crisis, where parents are being taken into ICE detention and are being deported without being given an opportunity to reunify with their children. WRC and the Washington Office on Latin America recently traveled to reception centers across Mexico and Central America to speak with deported migrants, and we encountered hundreds of parents who arrived in Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and elsewhere inconsolable because they were arrested and deported without being given an opportunity to contact their children or bring their children with them. Some do not even know where their children are or who is caring for them.
I want to stress that this is not supposed to happen. There are protections in place to ensure that parents who are being deported can bring their children with them, if that is their wish, or make alternative care arrangements, if that is their wish. ICE has weakened a lot of the requirements recently, but it is still incumbent upon them to allow immigrant parents to determine what happens to their children when they are deported. But all the evidence that we have collected clearly demonstrates that this is not happening, and that families are being ripped apart needlessly by a mass detention and deportation system that is moving too swiftly for human rights.
The second issue I want to discuss is that of pregnant, postpartum, and lactating women in immigration detention. Since 2021, we have had a policy that prohibits the detention of pregnant, postpartum, and lactating women, except in certain exceptional circumstances. And, if they must be detained, [the policy] imposes strict requirements on detention facilities to monitor them closely, house them in suitable facilities, and provide appropriate care.
We have substantial evidence to suggest that these requirements are not being followed. Pregnant women are being detained in unprecedented numbers, in appalling conditions, and without access to adequate food and medical care. WRC has heard reports of pregnant detainees begging to take an apple or a carton of milk back with them to their cells and being denied—forced to try and meet their nutritional needs with the potato chips and frozen burritos that are the only foods available for purchase, at exorbitant cost, from the detention commissary. In Honduras, we spoke with nursing mothers who were so malnourished from their time in detention, their bodies had stopped producing milk. And these findings have so gravely concerned us that next month we will travel back to Honduras with Physicians for Human Rights to conduct forensic medical examinations of deported pregnant, postpartum, nursing women to document the evidence physically written on their bodies.
I’m sure many of you have also seen the reports published by Senator Ossoff’s office, and by Senate Judiciary staff, documenting the shocking number of pregnant detainees they encountered in detention visits, as well as the appalling conditions in which they are housed. [There have been] reports of overcrowding so extreme that pregnant women are forced to sleep on nothing but a concrete floor. Of a woman left alone to miscarry without water or medical attention for more than 24 hours, her pleas for help ignored. Of pregnant women in acute pain being denied medical care, sometimes for months. Of a woman who was reportedly still bleeding from a miscarriage when she was deported.
We know these harms are occurring—but one of the most substantial challenges we face is knowing the scope and scale of the problem. And that is largely because immigration detention has become a black box. Advocate and legal service providers are no longer able to access these facilities to speak with migrants, monitor their treatment, or provide “know your rights” training as we have in the past. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively gutted most of its own monitoring and oversight agencies, and as you in this room will know all too well, we are no longer getting mandatory reports to Congress that documented vital information about immigrants in detention—including the number of pregnant detainees.
This shutdown of information has placed enormous pressure on advocacy organizations to innovate new methods of monitoring and documentation. My organization, WRC, has filed FOIA requests to get information about the number and treatment of pregnant detainees. We are working closely with Members of Congress who are using their authority to get vital information—and I’m delighted to share that Senator Murray will send a letter to the Department of Homeland Security this week urgently requesting information about their access to healthcare and nutrition. We are traveling to reception centers in Mexico and Central America, to sit in the room as deportees come off the planes, to speak with them and learn about they experienced. I’m also happy to announce that today WRC released the first nationwide tracker to collect real-time information from healthcare workers, attorneys, family members, and other service providers about pregnant women in ICE custody—so that we can shine a light on what is happening in these facilities and fight for women to receive better treatment and care. (You can find that at detentionpregnancytracker.com.)
So to answer your question about how philanthropy and Congress can support this work: first, to philanthropy, I will say that this work is incredibly resource-intensive, and we urgently need your support. In the past month alone, WRC has had to travel to five different cities in three different countries in order learn about what is happening in our own. Advocacy organizations are on the front lines, not only of documenting the harms to women and families, but also of remedying them. Advocates are the ones tracking and locating separated children and working with deported parents and child welfare agencies to reunite parents and their kids. I’ve said repeatedly over the past few months: If the government will not monitor these harms, will not keep families together, will not protect a pregnant woman and her child, we will—but we need your help to do that.
I also want to highlight the critical role of philanthropy in making visible the harms suffered by marginalized populations and ensuring that their needs are centered across the broader movement for social justice. Gender justice funders have long been at the forefront of advancing equality for women and girls who are unseen or overlooked. We need your partnership to ensure that the intersectional needs of immigrant women are elevated within the fight for reproductive justice and gender equality.
And to Congress, I would encourage you to use the powerful tools at your disposal to increase transparency and protections. First, through requiring transparency. As I mentioned earlier, we have lost a lot of required reporting to Congress. And you can demand information, not only through letters and hearings, but also by reinstating those reporting requirements through your appropriations power. Second, through oversight. We would not know much of what we know about pregnant detainees if members of Congress did not exercise their authority to visit detention centers, witness what is happening, and shine your incredibly powerful light on what you see. You are uniquely positioned to ensure that immigration detention is not a black box, however much advocates and legal service providers lose access.
And finally, you can work within your districts to ensure that the human rights of migrants are protected. You can visit the vast array of detention facilities to ensure proper care and custody, and to fight for the humane treatment of migrant families and against the detention of pregnant women in your jurisdictions. As enforcement continues to escalate exponentially, there will be no district that is free from migrants experiencing violence and terror. These are your constituents, and they urgently need your help.
Thank you.