Topline
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has “lost count” of how many pregnant women and teenagers in detention centers have suffered miscarriages under its care, a new report claimed Tuesday, after civil rights agencies sounded the alarm on pregnant detainees being denied prenatal care while in custody.
A makeshift memorial for detainees who died under United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody is seen outside the agency’s facility in Portland, Ore., Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.
San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Key Facts
The Guardian on Tuesday published a report, citing government data, that showed ICE stopped recording data on miscarriages in October after 18 women lost their pregnancies during the first nine months of the Trump administration.
The Department of Homeland Security first told the outlet that while it wasn’t publishing data on lost pregnancies, it was tracking miscarriages in internal monthly reports, but later admitted even that data doesn’t go past October 2025.
The acknowledgement marks the first time DHS has ever admitted it lost count of miscarriages, even when U.S. senators asked the agency for the data, and comes less than a year after the American Civil Liberties Union called on the agency to address its systemic neglect of pregnant women.
And while ICE has kept no data on the problem, pregnant women have disclosed that they miscarried while detained or were hospitalized for pregnancy complications but received no follow-up care while in the custody of ICE, even when they experienced ongoing pain and symptoms.
Even before it stopped tracking the miscarriage data, DHS was keeping track of it only through its medical billing provider, internal documents revealed to the Guardian show.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“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,” Faisal Al-Juburi, the co-chief executive of Raíces, a Texas-based humanitarian aid and immigration services non-profit, told the Guardian.
Key background
Under President Barack Obama in 2016, ICE issued policy guidelines creating a presumption against detaining pregnant women unless there were extreme criminal or national security threats. Trump ended that policy in his first term and the policy led to a sharp increase in the number of pregnant women in custody, drawing heavy backlash and resulting in congressional proposals like the Stop Shackling and Detaining Pregnant Women Act. Biden restored the policy in 2021 but the number of detained pregnant women surged again in Trump’s second term. And while DHS has historically submitted twice-yearly reports to Congress on the detention of pregnant people, those regular public disclosures stopped in 2025. Congressional Democrats and Senate committees have repeatedly pressed DHS for exact oversight metrics on maternal health, but because so many reporting requirements have been rescinded and other ways advocates used to collect information have been cut off—like direct monitoring inside detention centers—it’s hard to know exactly how many of these women are being held.
BIG NUMBER
DHS data released to Congress in February showed at least 498 pregnant, postpartum and nursing people were “booked out” of ICE facilities (meaning that they were detained and then left) between January 2025 and February 2026. More than 360 were deported and, as of the reporting data of Feb. 16, 121 were actively in ICE custody. Of those, nine were in their third trimester. By comparison, figures submitted to Congress during prior administrations showed significantly lower numbers—such as just 158 pregnant, postpartum and nursing women detained in the first half of Fiscal Year 2024.
TANGENT
It’s impossible to attribute a miscarriage solely to the conditions in immigration detention, but multiple reports from whistleblowers and civil rights organizations say it’s clear detained women aren’t getting the medical care they need. The ACLU said it has found widespread neglect of pregnant women, including being served “inedible” food and having no access to prenatal vitamins. One woman told the nonprofit she told agents about heavy bleeding when she was two months pregnant, and medical staff “took her to a small room and left her bleeding alone without providing her any food, water or pain medication.” She was later taken to a hospital and required a blood transfusion because she had suffered a miscarriage.
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