Recent actions from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have shown immigration officials are testing the limits of their power, including stalking undocumented immigrants outside churches but not going inside. In other cases, ICE is flat-out ignoring ICE policy:
Despite a department policy discouraging the prolonged detainment of pregnant women, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has routinely arrested them since President Trump took office and commenced his assault on immigration. The continued detention of pregnant women prompted a coalition of several legal advocacy groups to file a complaint with the Department of Homeland security on Tuesday.
As of mid-September, there were 33 pregnant women who were held in ICE detention centers across the country, The Center for Investigative Reporting noted. Between January and April of this year, ICE detained 292 pregnant women—35% more women than it had in the same time period last year.
Thomas Homan, who was the highest-ranking official at ICE under President Obama (and is now acting director under Trump), signed a memo in August of 2016 that instructed ICE officers to avoid detaining pregnant women for long periods of time. “Absent extraordinary circumstances or the requirement of mandatory detention, pregnant women will generally not be detained by ICE,” the memo read.
But according to further analysis from Huffington Post, more than 500 pregnant immigrant women have been detained by ICE over the last fiscal year. In one instance, a detained woman from Honduras suffered a miscarriage when she began to bleed but was not allowed to see a doctor until three days later.
Huffington Post:
[Jennye Pagoada López] said she asked agents for help, but was forced to stay in the holding room all day, until around 5 p.m. Instead of sending her to a doctor or releasing her with a notice to appear in immigration court, which often happens with asylum-seekers, agents then transferred her to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, outside San Diego. “They took my information, my fingerprints, photographs,” she told HuffPost. “And I told them, ‘I’m bleeding.’ And they kept telling me to keep waiting.”
She wasn’t able to see a doctor until three days later, and it wasn’t until another three days after that that another doctor informed her that she was no longer pregnant. “They didn’t do anything,” Pagoada told HuffPost. “They didn’t even give me pills for the pain.”
“It’s incredibly disturbing to keep hearing these stories,” said Katharina Obser of the Women’s Refugee Commission. “Detention is traumatizing regardless. But particularly for women who are pregnant, there’s an additional issue that their health and the health of their children are at risk … There’s a concern that these kinds of stories will continue unless ICE follows its own guidelines.”
Women’s Refugee Commission and a coalition of six other groups have now filed a complaint with DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties demanding an investigation:
“We are gravely concerned with the agency’s failure to abide by its own policy against detaining pregnant women, the detention conditions that have been reported by pregnant women in various detention facilities across the country, and the lack of quality medical care provided to women who are pregnant or have suffered miscarriages while in custody,” the complaint reads.