ICE Stopped Counting Miscarriages in Its Detention Centers

A Special Meal and Zero Prenatal Care

Anabell, a 35-year-old asylum seeker from Nicaragua, didn't know she was pregnant when she showed up for a routine ICE check-in on February 25. She was about to leave when an officer told her she couldn't. A few hours later she was at the Campbell County Detention Center in Kentucky, staring at two positive pregnancy tests, crying.

What she got next, according to the Guardian's reporting: no blood test to confirm a healthy pregnancy, no prenatal vitamins, no scheduled ultrasound. What she did get was a special meal tray with a sticker on it that read "Medical Diet - Pregnancy High Protein w/ PM Snack." A sticker. That's the prenatal care.

A month later, Anabell started bleeding so heavily she was soaking through a menstrual pad every thirty minutes. She was taken to a local ER and chained to a hospital bed. That's where she was told she was no longer pregnant.

Three Women, Three Horror Stories, Zero Accountability

Anabell is not alone. The Guardian interviewed multiple women who described conditions that read less like a government detention facility and more like a deliberate experiment in medical neglect.

Laura, 21, was already in the second trimester of a high-risk pregnancy when she was sent to the Dilley detention center in Texas. She is now approaching her third trimester, still detained, experiencing persistent abdominal pain and bleeding, and according to her account to the Guardian, has not been allowed to see an OB-GYN.

Angie, 26, was booked into the Mesa Verde detention center in California, found out she was pregnant, and then a few weeks later woke up to large amounts of brown fluid. The medical staff told her the miscarriage wasn't her fault. No further treatment is mentioned. That was apparently the end of the conversation.

In each case, according to Deborah Ottenheimer, an obstetrician-gynecologist and medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights, women who miscarry without proper follow-up care, including an ultrasound to confirm that all pregnancy tissue has passed, risk serious infection and life-threatening complications. These women describe receiving nothing close to that standard of care.

The Data Disappears at the Most Convenient Possible Moment

The Guardian filed a Freedom of Information Act request, then had to sue to get the records, working alongside the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. What ICE eventually handed over was data on pregnant, postpartum, and nursing women in detention from October 2024 through mid-January 2026. Miscarriage data, however, cuts off at October 3, 2025. After that date, nothing.

The agency's internal explanation: a change in its medical accounting system. When the Guardian pushed DHS for more information, a spokesperson initially claimed ICE was still tracking miscarriages in monthly reports. Then, when pressed, the spokesperson confirmed what the documents already showed. ICE has no miscarriage data from October 2025 through June 2026. Nine months of missing data. For a program detaining pregnant women at record numbers.

Here's the part that should make your blood pressure spike. DHS never disclosed this gap voluntarily. Not in press statements, not in response to congressional inquiries. US senators asked the agency directly for this data. The agency did not tell them it had stopped counting. According to the Guardian's reporting, this is the first time DHS has publicly acknowledged the gap at all.

Record Arrests, Zero Oversight

Government documents obtained by the Guardian show the Trump administration placed more pregnant immigrants in detention last fall and winter than at any point in the previous year. More pregnant women detained than ever before. Fewer safeguards than ever before. And now, officially, no data on what happens to their pregnancies.

Christina Davidson, the chief medical officer of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in July that detaining pregnant patients poses serious medical and mental health risks to both the patient and the fetus, and that lapses in care at detention facilities could turn treatable conditions into life-threatening emergencies. That's not an activist position. That's the chief medical officer of the country's leading OB-GYN professional organization describing what the evidence shows.

Faisal Al-Juburi, co-chief executive of Raices, a Texas-based immigration services nonprofit, put it plainly to the Guardian: "When you don't track something of that magnitude, then you don't have to be confronted with the reality of what your policies have yielded." That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a description of how bureaucratic accountability works, and how easily it can be dismantled by simply choosing to stop counting.