Immigrant Women in ICE Detention Deserve Protection

Labor rights activists have long used International Women’s Day, March 8, to highlight gender and racial inequities in the world’s biggest economy. This year, the spotlight should fall on the rising number of immigrant women in U.S. detention—many of them workers who keep the country’s care economy running while earning some of its lowest wages.

For several years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was required to report the number of pregnant women in its facilities twice a year to the U.S. Congress, but that mandate lapsed at the end of 2024. The agency has since stopped reporting those figures. Demands from some members of Congress for information about women in detention, including how many have been pregnant and how many babies have been born in detention, have been ignored.

ICE arrests and its treatment of protesters have had a chilling impact on some U.S. residents’ access to education, health and other services. Advocacy groups have reported that some women are too frightened of being arrested by the authorities to report domestic violence or to access reproductive health services, undermining the U.S. government’s obligation to take effective action to prevent gender-based violence. 

Experiences relayed to journalists and human rights groups, as well as some Congressional reports, show that women are being held in immigration detention while pregnant. This should happen only in rare and exceptional cases, if at all, according to ICE’s own policy and to be consistent with international human rights standards. 

Medical neglect in U.S. immigration detention, sometimes deadly, is a real problem. My organization, Human Rights Watch, along with other groups, has documented extremely poor and degrading conditions for immigration detainees.

Pregnancy increases the risk of many health complications and detention can lead to psychological stress and other strain from lack of adequate food, community, and sleep, along with generally poor detention conditions.  

Hundreds of families have been detained with harmful consequences, including for children. Women have also been separated from their children, including toddlers and babies dependent on the bond they have with their mothers. Pregnant teen girls, an investigation recently revealed, are being sent to a site in Texas where among other things, they face a ban on safe abortion care. 

Without stronger oversight and accountability, advocates warn the situation could worsen. ICE is hiring large numbers of new agents, shortening training periods to deploy them more quickly, and expanding detention capacity, including through an estimated $45 billion allocated for detention facilities. ICE usually receives about $10 billion a year. In 2025, Congress approved an additional $75 billion for the agency to spend over the next four years.

The U.S. Congress should help to protect immigrant women and community members who are trying to support them. They should review ICE enforcement practices—such as the use of masks by agents and racial profiling—and consider legislation that strengthens protections for women in particular. 

Policies that ignore the harm to immigrant women are bad for us all. Protecting the most threatened among us will help protect everyone.