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ICE’s Detention of Pregnant People Continues a Disgraceful American Tradition

We are seeing yet another example of state-sanctioned violence against the reproductive futures of those deemed outside the national body.

Federal agents detain a nine-months-pregnant woman after exiting a court hearing in immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York, on September 11, 2025.

When Cecil Elvir-Quinonez was pulled over for speeding on New Year’s Eve, the 25-year-old mother was thinking of her two children in her back seat—a 5-year-old son and a 5-month-old infant she was still breastfeeding. Weeks later, she was still thinking about them—only now, having been arrested and transferred to ICE custody, she was languishing in a privately run detention center in Louisiana, far from her Florida home, and facing deportation to Honduras, a country she had not seen since she was a child. She had also just learned that she was pregnant. In correspondence with The 19th, Elvir-Quinonez wrote that she had received no medical attention despite experiencing persistent bleeding and cramping, and being forced to skip meals due to the unhygienic conditions of the facility. 

Her story is not an isolated one. A monthlong investigation by the office of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, which was released last year, found 41 allegations of physical or sexual abuse and 32 reports of mistreatment of children and pregnant women. And in October, the ACLU documented a series of disturbing allegations from multiple women and pregnant people held at two privately owned ICE detention centers—the South Louisiana Processing Center (Basile) and the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia.

According to the ACLU, three pregnant women reported ICE agents using restraints, such as shackling, even as the women were having a miscarriage; one pregnant woman said she had been held in solitary confinement for days; two women reported medical interventions without informed consent or appropriate translation services; and almost all women interviewed talked about inadequate or denial of prenatal care, medical neglect from health professionals, and limited nutrition and medications, including prenatal vitamins.

The detention and inhumane treatment of migrant women and pregnant people by the US immigration authorities is part of a continuous history of state-sanctioned violence used to regulate the reproductive futures of those deemed outside the national body, turning the “border” into a site of direct domination over the migrant body.

Since 2021, the detention of pregnant, postpartum, and nursing individuals has been governed by ICE Directive 11032.4, which, in theory, requires specific humanitarian standards to be met if detention is deemed necessary, including providing appropriate medical and mental healthcare, regular medical evaluations, prohibiting restraint use, and obtaining informed consent before any medical examination and treatment.

This directive came after legal and medical advocates like ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights, raised concerns about the conditions of ICE facilities and the growing number of pregnant people in ICE detention centers. Between October 2017 and August 2018, 1,655 pregnant women were detained by ICE, a 215 percent increase from the........

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