ICE Said She Wasn’t Pregnant. Then She Miscarried.

Via the Phoenix New Times: A Phoenix-area woman was almost three months pregnant when ICE detained her. She suffered a miscarriage at ICE’s Eloy facility.

Since January 2025, ICE has detained and deported at least 363 people who were pregnant, postpartum or nursing. At least 16 miscarriages in ICE detention were recorded in roughly the same period. Since no documents were filed in her case, that number does not include Pastrana.

Pregnancy can be a dangerous time in general, said Zain Lakhani, Director of Migrant Rights and Justice of the Women’s Refugee Commission: “Even under the best of circumstances, women when pregnant are vulnerable to a wide variety of complications that can be hazardous to the fetus or to them.”

Lakhani explained there was a range of requirements:”if you’re going to detain these women, you have to be keeping regular eyes on them to make sure it’s still OK and safe for their pregnancies,” she said. “When you have these women who are really vulnerable to life-threatening pregnancy complications and you’re putting large numbers of them in detention, the risk that something is going to go catastrophically wrong is high.”