Why The Treatment Of Women In Immigration Detention Should Concern Every Woman In America

Forbes: A mother answers the door half-awake in the middle of the night, and within minutes, she’s in handcuffs. By sunrise, she’s in federal custody, and by week’s end, she may be in another state, or another country, and her children and the rest of her family may not know where she is. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. It reflects the documented reality of thousands of women currently held in US immigration detention facilities.

For many Americans, immigration enforcement is a policy debate. For the women inside detention centers, it’s a lived experience of confinement, uncertainty, and documented health risk, and for women across the country, it should raise urgent questions about how power, vulnerability, and dignity intersect.

Data from the Women’s Refugee Commission reveal that ICE operations have averaged approximately 67,000 internal transfers per month, transporting individuals between facilities before deportation. Research published by the National Institutes of Health also shows that detention conditions, including overcrowding, uncertainty about legal outcomes, correlate with higher rates of depressive symptoms and emotional dysregulation. Equally concerning is the impact of separation. Advocacy groups report that parents are often separated from children within days of detention. Research compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that family separation and fear of deportation are associated with increased rates of anxiety, severe clinical depression, traumatic grief, chronic stress, suicidal ideation, and post-traumatic stress symptoms such as hypervigilance, paranoia, apathy, and being withdrawn in both detained individuals and their children.