Trump’s Deportations Are Ripping Mothers from Their Babies

Physicians for Human Rights [and] the Women’s Refugee Commission … have reported on the treatment of a group that the Trump administration apparently considers a dire threat: pregnant, nursing, and postpartum women.

Melanie Nezer, vice president for advocacy and external relations at the Women’s Refugee Commission, described the conditions that hundreds of these women are facing in U.S. detention centers. Pregnant women and nursing mothers are grabbed from their cars or workplaces by masked agents, hustled into buses or cars and whisked to overcrowded centers. In one Louisiana facility, according to a Senate report, at least fourteen pregnant women were visible during the staff’s visit. A woman who was four months pregnant and experiencing bleeding had not been seen by a doctor for months. Another had a miscarriage and was deported while still bleeding.

Nezer described pregnant women being forced into overcrowded detention facilities with inadequate sanitary facilities, only frozen burritos or potato chips to eat, lack of clean drinking water (except by purchase), and no medical care or medicines. Some pregnant women were sleeping on concrete floors. The WRC spoke to mothers who had been deported to Honduras. Several nursing mothers had seen their milk dry up due to poor nutrition while they were held in detention in the United States. A woman who was four months pregnant was denied medication for gestational diabetes.