ICE Breaks Last Year's Record of Pregnant Detainees, Then 'Loses' Nine Months of Miscarriage Data

The Agency That Counted Until It Didn't

Here's the timeline, and it's a doozy. According to government documents obtained by The Guardian, ICE recorded 18 miscarriages during the first nine months of the Trump administration. Then, after 3 October 2025, the counting just stopped. Nothing. No data on miscarriages through June 2026.

This was not a quiet period. The same documents show ICE had placed more pregnant immigrants in detention that fall and winter than at any time in the previous year. So the agency locked up record numbers of pregnant people and, during the exact stretch when it was doing that, lost the ability to say what happened to them.

That's not a gap in the record. That's a hole where a record is supposed to be.

Blame the Billing Department

ICE's internal explanation is that it switched medical billing providers in October. That's it. That's the whole alibi. The agency's medical claims processing has been delayed for months, and apparently miscarriage tracking was riding along on the billing system like a stowaway.

Immigration attorneys and former government officials called this odd but plausible. Sit with that for a second. The federal agency responsible for the health of people it holds in cages was tracking pregnancy loss through the department that handles invoices. When the invoices broke, so did the memory.

Imagine a hospital telling you it lost track of its patient deaths because it changed accountants. Nobody would accept it. Somehow we're supposed to nod along when ICE says it.

The DHS Spokesperson Speedruns Three Positions

The communications work here deserves its own category at the awards. When The Guardian asked about tracking after 3 October, a DHS spokesperson first said the agency was tracking miscarriages in monthly reports. Then, later, the same spokesperson confirmed what ICE's own internal documents already said: there is no data for October 2025 through June 2026.

So the official line went from "we're tracking it" to "actually, we aren't" in the span of a follow-up question. And the agency had never acknowledged the gap before The Guardian's reporting. Not even when U.S. senators asked for the data.

Then, for good measure, DHS added that claims of subprime care for pregnant detainees are "FALSE," in all caps, as if capital letters were medical records. You can't tell us the numbers are missing and also guarantee the care was fine. Pick one.

What Detained Women Say Is Happening

The missing data isn't an abstract bookkeeping problem. Detained pregnant women told The Guardian they were struggling to get routine and emergency medical care. Medical experts said lapses in care during pregnancy, and during and after a miscarriage, can turn treatable conditions into life-threatening emergencies.

That's the part the billing excuse can't launder. A miscarriage without proper follow-up care can become a hemorrhage or an infection. The people most likely to suffer that are the ones locked in a facility where the agency can't or won't say how many of them there are.

Rep. Brittany Pettersen put it plainly: she's "devastated for the people who have gone through this, who've lost pregnancies unnecessarily, who have been left without the medical care that they need after miscarrying."

Ignoring Its Own 2021 Rulebook

Pettersen, Joyce Beatty and Robin Kelly sent a letter to ICE's acting director, David Venturella, cosigned by 64 other representatives. It points to a 2021 directive telling ICE to avoid detaining pregnant, postpartum and nursing immigrants "unless release is prohibited by law or exceptional circumstances exist."

The same directive requires ICE to closely monitor and document the health of every pregnant person in custody and to keep evaluating whether detention is medically advisable. So the rule on the books says don't detain them, and if you must, track them closely. The agency instead detained record numbers and lost the tracking.

The lawmakers want to know on what grounds ICE is holding pregnant immigrants at all. They also want to know what steps, if any, the agency has taken to recover the missing data, and when ICE leadership first learned about the tracking failures. The deadline to answer is 6 November.

How We Even Know About This

Worth remembering how this came out. The Guardian filed a Freedom of Information Act request, then sued alongside the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to get data on pregnant people in ICE detention and their health outcomes. The agency did not volunteer any of this. A news organization had to take it to court.

DHS also would not confirm to The Guardian whether it had even received the congressional letter. That's a fine preview of how the November 6 deadline may go.