The woman looked down at her lunch and, as hungry as she was, knew she couldn’t eat it. The chicken at the ICE immigrant camp was pink, cold and watery, the vegetables overcooked and falling apart. She placed a hand on her expanding belly and worried, as she did every day — would she be able to nourish her baby inside?
Maria had been in ICE detention in Texas for six months. When agents arrested her in October 2025 at a check-in in Dallas, she said she told them she was pregnant, but they handcuffed her anyway and bussed her to the Bluebonnet Detention Center north of Abilene.
For months, she tried to do what she could for her baby, but her options were limited. The camp’s commissary sold mostly junk food. Her prenatal vitamins were refilled inconsistently, she said. She felt her stress and anxiety wearing on her body, spiking her blood pressure, but could not stop worrying about what would happen when she went into labor — no one would tell her the plan for her baby’s arrival.
As weeks turned into months, Maria’s anxiety grew along with her belly.
Maria, who asked to be identified only by her first name and speaks Spanish, said through an interpreter that her life became “like a nightmare” at Bluebonnet. Her stress and malnutrition were evident in her medical records. The documents show she developed high blood pressure, gestational diabetes and gained only half the amount of weight that a pregnant person should by their third trimester.
In April, at eight months pregnant, ICE abruptly released Maria without explanation. She returned to her home in North Texas, but her ordeal has not ended.
“Since I came into the country, I did everything right, and I haven’t done anything wrong. I did everything right. That is what has bothered me most,” Maria said. “And that it wasn’t fair that my son — and, well, all of my family and my son and my baby — that we all went through what we have gone through, because it has been a great suffering for everyone.”
Maria’s attorney, Paul Zoltan, said ICE should never have detained her, not only because of her pregnancy, but because she was simply doing what she was supposed to in reporting to the ICE office.
“They detained her because the agency no longer prioritizes the removal of ‘the worst of the worst,’” said Zoltan, who has represented Maria since 2023.
Maria’s story is but one example of the troubling conditions for pregnant women in ICE custody amid President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign, according to experts, attorneys and immigrant advocacy groups. In July 2025, an investigation from U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s office found that pregnant women in ICE detention reported not receiving proper medical care, were denied snacks and adequate meals, and were forced to sleep on the floor due to overcrowding.
Across the country, ICE has come under fire for mistreatment of pregnant women and their babies. Judges have weighed in on whether or not ICE is even allowed to detain pregnant people, citing a 2021 policy largely barring the agency from doing so. ICE’s response to allegations of mistreatment and illegal detainment of pregnant people has been unclear and, at times, contradictory.
It’s unclear exactly how many pregnant people are detained. Congress previously required DHS to release data on how many pregnant, postpartum and lactating people were detained each year. That ended in March 2025.
Responding to pressure from some members of Congress, DHS said in a letter earlier this year that from January 2025 to February 2026, there were 498 pregnant, postpartum and nursing immigrants “booked out” of ICE custody — meaning they were detained and then released. In the first month and a half of 2025, ICE deported 363 pregnant, postpartum or nursing women. The agency has not provided up-to-date information on the number of pregnant people or the conditions they face.
Bluebonnet facility referred questions to ICE; ICE did not reply to requests for comment. In August 2025, the Department of Homeland Security denied the allegations of abuse made in Ossoff’s report on pregnant detainees.
“ICE detention facilities have higher standards than most U.S. prisons that detain American citizens,” a public statement attributed to DHS’s then-Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “All detainees are provided with comprehensive medical care, proper meals, and are given the opportunity to call their family members and attorneys.”
When ICE agents arrested Maria, she had thought the most eventful part of the day would be the doctor’s appointment to confirm her pregnancy. She had to stop by ICE’s Dallas Field Office for her annual immigration check-in first, which usually took about 30 minutes.
But she never made it to the doctor’s appointment. At the ICE building, she said officers took her to a backroom where she learned she was going to an immigrant camp.
Maria’s husband, Hugo, was waiting outside in the car. The couple came to the U.S. from El Salvador, and Maria had applied for asylum in 2012 on the basis that she suffered abuse from a family member in El Salvador. She has no criminal history, and according to court records, her case was ongoing. She always had all her documents ready for inspection. She and Hugo have a 9-year-old son, who is a U.S. citizen.
None of that seemed to matter to the ICE staff who questioned her in Dallas, she said. She also told two people, including someone she believes was an ICE officer, that she was pregnant.
“He said, ‘either way, I’m going to detain you,’” she said.
As the hours passed, Maria managed to send a note to her husband telling him not to come inside because he might be detained, too. He was forced to leave to take care of their then-8-year-old son.
“I was coming back home broken, frustrated, in fear,” Hugo said, speaking through an interpreter.
Maria said she spent the next few nights sleeping on the floor, first at the Dallas office and then at Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, a town of about 2,500 located three hours west of Dallas-Fort Worth. At one point in fiscal year 2025, Bluebonnet was one of the most overcrowded facilities in the country, according to data analysis by Trac Reports. According to ICE’s contract with Management and Training Corporation, which runs the facility, Bluebonnet can hold at most 1,000 people. At its highest, the facility held 206 more people than it should have.
After Maria slept for two nights on the floor, her back and stomach aching, officers transferred her and the rest of the group to a dormitory-style unit.
A lawyer picked up her case and filed an emergency motion in November seeking Maria’s release. In December, U.S. District Court Judge James Wesley Hendrix denied the petition.
The day Dan Gividen, one of Maria’s attorneys, got the denial, he said he cried for the first time in decades. He knew firsthand that ICE lacked the resources or medical staff to care for a pregnant woman. He saw those limitations, he said, when he served as a senior-level attorney for ICE from 2011 to 2019.
“I mean, you had barely enough medical people [or] facilities within the detention centers to handle the number of detainees that they had two years ago. It’s always been lacking to begin with,” Gividen said.
While in ICE custody, Maria developed health problems that can complicate a pregnancy, especially for a woman like her — at 41, she was considered a geriatric pregnancy with higher-than-average risk. Blood tests in October 2025 showed she had low iron, according to her medical records. She said ICE provided prenatal vitamins and iron supplements, but not consistently. When she ran out, she would sometimes wait up to 15 days for a refill. In March, blood work showed she had high blood sugar. In April, she tested positive for gestational diabetes.
She asked repeatedly what would happen once she went into labor, but said she never got a clear answer. For months, she did not know where she would give birth or what would happen to her baby afterward. At one appointment, a doctor told Maria she needed to make plans for someone else to care for her baby because children were not allowed at the immigrant camp. Maria said she felt that “all that pressure, that thought, that was what mostly increased my [blood] sugar.”
While at the facility, her main concern was the food. Pieces of chicken appeared undercooked with “a lot of water still coming out of them.” She was nervous about eating any of the meat in case it wasn’t cooked enough.
Dr. Carolyn Sufrin is an OB-GYN and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who studies healthcare for pregnant women in custody. Sufrin said eating undercooked meat is dangerous for anyone, but especially for pregnant people, because they can get much sicker than the average person. Pregnant people also need to eat more calories and more micronutrients, like calcium and iron, to make sure the fetus grows properly.
Maria was able to see a physician at an OB-GYN office each month of her pregnancy, but said it was impossible to care for herself and her baby the way she needed to while in ICE custody.
In December, Maria told physicians at Shannon Medical Center that she felt weakness and fatigue, according to medical records. The doctor told ICE to give her two Ensures per day. In December, Maria said, ICE gave her one or two Ensures per week. When her blood sugar tests came back high, however, she said they took those away.
During pregnancy, the average person should gain 25 to 35 pounds by the third trimester, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Maria’s medical records show that by her third trimester she had gained only 15 pounds.
A representative for Shannon Medical Center referred questions to the marketing department, which did not respond to interview requests.
Pregnant people in carceral settings frequently have trouble getting the medical care they need, Sufrin said. Even when all policies are followed, she said, “being pregnant and experiencing incarceration or confinement is incredibly and profoundly stressful and traumatizing for individuals.”
Data on pregnancy outcomes for people who are in prisons and jails is limited, although there have been occasional reports from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. But, Sufrin said, “we know nothing about what’s happening in immigration detention facilities.”
Even DHS itself does not seem to know crucial information about the pregnant people it has detained. The agency reported 18 people miscarried in the first nine months of the administration, according to The Guardian, and records show that it stopped tracking miscarriages after October 2025.
Maria’s experience with poor food quality mirrors reports from advocacy groups and the Senate investigation.
The Women’s Refugee Commission, a research and advocacy organization, leads perhaps the most robust data collection on conditions for pregnant and postpartum people in ICE custody through their Detention Pregnancy Tracker.
Zain Lakhani, director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said the tracker has revealed that access to sufficient nutrition has been a major problem for pregnant people.
“No one expects the food in detention to be great,” Lakhani said. “We’re not just talking about food that is bad. We’re talking about food that is moldy, we’re talking about food that is frozen or inedible or insect infested, right? This is not just bad food. This is food that you cannot eat.”
Lakhani said some women have told her that the protein they received was raw chicken, or they’ll get a bean and cheese burrito covered in mold.
On April 8, Maria’s OB-GYN scheduled a C-section for late May, she said. Two days later, Maria was released from Bluebonnet, records show. She and her lawyers say ICE did not give a reason for why she was released.
For the first few days after her release, Maria said she felt like her body was home, but her mind was still at Bluebonnet. Their son, who woke up screaming for his mom during the first months of Maria’s detention, would not leave her side.
She and her husband were joyous at being reunited, but worried about her pregnancy. With seven weeks left before her due date, Maria had to quickly find new healthcare.
“They detained me just like that, they released me like nothing had happened,” she said in April. “And now I am on my own to figure out having my baby because now they are not going to be responsible anymore. And I lost my job, I lost my insurance because they detained me.”
Zoltan, Maria’s attorney in her immigration case, said ICE would never have detained Maria or prioritized her removal under any other administration. At any other time in his 30 years of representing immigrants, Zoltan would have expected Maria to be permitted to stay in the U.S. because she has an American citizen son and more than a decade of law-abiding behavior.
“They don’t care,” Zoltan said about ICE under the current administration. “If they can get their hands on a warm body, that body is going in a cage.”
On June 2, Maria gave birth to a baby girl. While the family is relieved to have Maria home with her baby, they live in constant fear of ICE appearing at the door and shattering their lives.
Maria’s immigration case had crawled forward while she was in custody. In March, immigration Judge Matthew Andrasko denied her petition to stay in the U.S. and issued a removal order. She appealed, but in July, the Board of Immigration Appeals denied that, as well.
Maria has another appointment with ICE this month, and she and her husband worry she will be detained again. They want to stay in the U.S., she said, to give their children a better future. Her son has astigmatism, dyslexia and persistent ear infections, and she said he would not receive the care he needs in El Salvador.
But at this point, Zoltan said, Maria has virtually no recourse. Like thousands of other immigrants, he said, she faces an unrelenting bureaucracy, impassive to something as inconsequential as one family’s suffering.
Kaley Johnson is a reporter based in Texas. She can be reached at kaleyalyssajohnson@gmail.com.