Donald Trump’s government is detaining pregnant immigrants, despite guidelines that prohibit this practice, and subjecting them to mistreatment and lack of access to basic medical care, according to several human rights organizations.
Authorities, in turn, are sending underage immigrants who are pregnant, many as a result of rape in shelters in Texas, where abortion is prohibited in most cases, according to activists.
The complaints come at a time when the current Government maintains a record number of immigrants in detention, with almost 70,000 people in these centers in the month of February, according to data from the TRAC center at Syracuse University.
Jesús González, a social worker with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, said in a call with reporters that pregnant women held at the Eloy detention center, on the outskirts of Tucson, do not receive the necessary medical care.
González also recounted the case of Esther, an immigrant from the central region of Africa, who became pregnant after being raped following a kidnapping while waiting in Mexico for an appointment to request asylum in the United States.
In the United States, he was detained by immigration authorities and during that period he did not receive “any type of medical care, except prenatal vitamins.”
Lupe Rodríguez, executive director of the organization National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, for her part, said that earlier this year, her organization received a complaint from a detained immigrant who, despite having a high-risk pregnancy, did not receive medical care for four months and was forced to “sleep on the floor and starve.”
According to the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) own guidelines, the Government should not “detain or arrest” pregnant, postpartum, or breastfeeding people, except in exceptional circumstances.
However, between January 2025 and February of this year, authorities detained 498 people in these conditions in immigration detention centers, according to data provided by the Department of Homeland Security to Senator Patty Murray.
Prevent abortions
Yvonne Rodríguez, director of the organization Reproductive Freedom For All, echoed a report published in the local media The Texas Newsroom, where it is reported that the Government transferred more than a dozen pregnant minor immigrants to a shelter in south Texas, where abortion is prohibited.
Half of the minors, the local media highlighted, became pregnant after sexual abuse.
This practice, explained Brigitte Amiri, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), represents a change compared to the practices adopted by the previous Government which, to comply with a court order, sought to place pregnant minors in shelters where abortion was legal.
“Young women who come to the US seeking safety should be treated with respect and dignity, and the Trump administration should not politicize their health care,” Amiri said on the call.
