ICE Jail Policies for Pregnant People Built on Legacy of Eugenics, Critics Say

While detained at Michigan’s North Lake Processing Center, Lucia learned she was pregnant — a nightmare scenario for her and many other women who are held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody while pregnant.

“I prayed every day for God to take care of my little angel,” said Lucia, who is using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation and harm.

Originally from Venezuela, Lucia left the political turmoil of her home country in 2022 as the COVID-19 pandemic also abruptly ended her ability to study nursing.

“I left because I was looking for a better future,” she said.

She was in the U.S. for three years before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rescinded Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for multiple countries, including Venezuela, in February 2025. An ICE traffic stop that year in Detroit landed Lucia in detention, just weeks after her partner was also detained by ICE.

Lucia was transferred to four different detention centers before arriving at the South Louisiana Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana. She described her time there as “horrible.”

“I saw many high-risk pregnancies,” Lucia said.

Her own pregnancy was classified as high-risk due to a previous miscarriage. Lucia told Prism that she met dozens of pregnant women while in detention.

“I saw a woman who gave birth,” she said. “I saw her in a wheelchair with her newborn crying, and a nurse was taking her somewhere. I never saw her or her baby again.”

A recent investigation from The Guardian corroborated Lucia’s claims. ICE is arresting a record number of pregnant women and teenagers who cannot access the medical care they need, according to the reporting. At the same time, the agency appears to have lost count of how many people had miscarriages after October 2025.

In an emailed statement to Prism, a DHS representative said that “being in detention is a choice” and that “pregnancy in ICE detention is exceedingly rare.” The spokesperson also alleged that pregnant women receive regular prenatal visits, mental health services, and nutritional support.

“Claims that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false,” the representative said. “For many illegal aliens this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”

According to experts and advocates, the racist cruelty and abusive immigration policies women in ICE detention face are built on a legacy of eugenics, an ideology that aimed to “improve” the human population based on white supremacy.

An Alarming Escalation

Often referred to as “Basile,” the South Louisiana Processing Center is the single women-only immigrant detention center in the state. In July, videos created by women detained at the facility went viral, exposing inhumane conditions and alleging sexual abuse.

Basile is located in rural Louisiana and has an extensive history of denying migrants access to food, interpreters, and medical care. The facility is 1 of 10 ICE detention centers in Louisiana, known as the “incarceration capital” of the U.S. for having the county’s highest rates of incarceration.

Documents from DHS released earlier this year further corroborated Lucia’s account of meeting a large number of pregnant women in detention.

According to government records, ICE detained approximately 498 pregnant, postpartum, or nursing immigrants between Jan. 1, 2025, and Feb. 16, 2026. The detention of pregnant people shows an alarming shift away from Biden-era policies that required their immediate release from federal custody.

Louisiana is often at the center of allegations of reproductive injustice in detention. Over the last year alone, detained women in the state have made serious allegations of medical neglect and sexual abuse. This includes the case of a Jane Doe, who alleged last year that she was sexually abused and threatened by Manuel Reyes, Basile’s former assistant warden. Trans immigrants have also alleged that Reyes “ran an off-the-books late-night work scheme” that coerced them into “physically and psychologically painful labor.”

For women detained at Basile, it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction, due to ICE’s extensive history of malpractice and dishonesty.

Lucia told Prism that this reality, paired with the everyday mistreatment of detained immigrants, has fueled an environment that is full of medical mistrust. As an example, when she was first detained at Basile, she said that women inside instructed her not to accept any vaccines or medications from the medical staff because they would “make you miscarry.” Because Prism would not reveal Lucia’s identity to DHS, the agency said it could not comment on any of her claims.

Allegations of medical abuse have been documented at other detention centers. For example, in 2020 at the Irwin County Detention Center, ICE contracted an OB-GYN named Mahendra Amin to provide care to detained women. He was later found to have carried out invasive and unnecessary gynecological procedures on detained women without their full and informed consent.

The mistreatment of pregnant people in detention was a daily reality that also shaped the views of women inside, according to Lucia. She said she once witnessed guards push a pregnant woman into solitary confinement, where she remained for several days.

“She was crying and telling me to please talk to an officer. She had gone three days without food,” Lucia recalled.

ICE did not respond to requests for comment and neither did GEO Group, the private prison company in charge of Basile.

GEO Group profits tremendously from overseeing a vast network of ICE’s detention centers. In August, GEO Group reported total revenues of up to $732.1 million — an increase of nearly $96 million — over the same period last year. President Donald Trump owns stock in GEO Group and other private prison companies financially benefiting from his immigration policies. A GEO Group subsidiary even donated more than $1.4 million to Trump’s political operation in July after his administration awarded the company detention contracts amounting to $165 million a year.

The money flowing from the detention system does not improve the healthcare detained migrants receive, according to Lucia and immigrant rights advocates.

Lucia said she was allowed just one prenatal medical visit during the four months she was detained in Louisiana. Medical services for pregnant people are typically accessed off-site, as detention centers do not employ OB-GYNs as staffers. According to Denáe Hebert, a medical advocacy program volunteer with the grassroots organization Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention, healthcare providers at nearby hospitals told her that a guard must be present during all appointments with detained immigrants. This is one of the detention system’s many overlaps with the carceral system.

In both settings, Hebert said having a guard in the exam room obliterates any possibility of confidentiality between the patient and their medical provider. Even more troubling, Hebert said, is that detained people likely don’t receive even a fraction of the healthcare they need. Hebert told Prism that she’d heard rumors from people detained in Basile that ICE has refused to pay for at least one person’s surgery.

Last year, DHS left thousands of medical claims unpaid when the agency abruptly ended its payment processing system for outside providers. Hebert and other advocates fear that this has delayed critical medical services for detained immigrants. An investigation from the Los Angeles Times detailed 2,267 unpaid DHS and ICE medical claims from last year, most of them related to pregnancy and maternal care.

“These are for-profit detention facilities,” Hebert said. “When you create an environment where that is the structure, it necessitates poor treatment. The primary objective is saving and making money, not doing what is best for the people within those facilities.”

“Nativism and Eugenics Co-created Each Other”

A system that allows private prison companies to financially benefit from detention, and detains immigrants in remote areas with little outside oversight, is poised to usher in human rights abuses, said Alexandra Minna Stern, the author of “Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America” and UCLA’s dean of the humanities.

The eugenics movement began in the 19th century with British scientist Francis Galton, who believed the burgeoning field of heredity should be used to control human populations so that they could “be better,” Stern said. What constituted “better,” according to Stern, was based on ableism and racial hierarchies.

By the 20th century, the eugenics movement was global. The U.S. eugenics movement shaped sterilization campaigns and immigration laws. However, as Public Health Post reported, forced sterilization is “not a relic of our distant past.” California, a trailblazer in the eugenics movement, forcibly sterilized 150 incarcerated women between 2006 and 2010. Stern’s Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which for 10 years studied eugenic sterilization in the U.S. during the 20th century, informed the historic California reparations bill that compensated survivors.

Immigrants’ legitimate mistrust of healthcare providers and institutions speaks to broader, historical reproductive injustices against Black and Brown communities, according to advocates.

For centuries, women of color have been the target of eugenics. This includes enslavers’ reproductive violence against African women during the early colonial period until chattel slavery was abolished in 1865, the mass sterilization of Puerto Ricans through the 1960s, and eugenics policies that sterilized Mexican women in California and Indigenous women nationwide through the 1970s.

Women who were detained at Basile while pregnant told Prism that they were regularly berated by guards; forced to wear shackles on their wrists, hands, belly, and feet; and were made to eat inedible food that, in Lucia’s case, made her vomit. They also reported a lack of language access, adding to their isolation.

Experts have long said that detention is dangerous for women’s health, especially for those who are pregnant. Not only can psychological stress affect health during pregnancy, but ICE has a documented practice of subjecting women to unsafe conditions and denying prenatal care.

Lucia still remembers comforting a friend who miscarried while detained.

“She slept in the same block as I did. We would talk, and we would touch each other’s belly,” Lucia recalled. “She lost her baby, and it was her first pregnancy at 22 years old.”

Miriam, who is using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation, is a Nicaraguan doula and organizer with Louisiana’s Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition (SEDND Coalition) that supports people impacted by detention. She told Prism that she has witnessed abuse and eugenic harm — and not only in detention.

Lucia was in her 20s and still pregnant when she was released from ICE custody. For the remainder of her pregnancy, Miriam supported her as a doula and interpreter. This included several instances when Miriam said she had to intervene during medical appointments because staff at the local public hospital repeatedly asked Lucia if she wanted a tubal ligation, even after she said no. Miriam said that medical staff again brought up the procedure after Lucia gave birth.

“I thought: Are you offering this to any of your white patients, or is this just because she’s a younger, Brown woman?” Miriam said.

According to Lucia, being an immigrant and monolingual Spanish speaker from a Latin American country only seemed to worsen the treatment women received in healthcare settings. This was especially true in the detention system, she said.

“I remember a woman who needed a translator being berated by an officer for not eating fast enough. He threatened to throw her plate in anger,” Lucia said.

According to Stern, the eugenics movement has always operated in lockstep with immigration law. The professor attributed “nativist” restrictive immigration policy in the early 20th century to eugenic ideals of racial purity in the U.S. However, Stern noted, “nativist” is a misnomer because white Anglo-Saxon elites were not native to the U.S.

“Nativism and eugenics co-created each other, and they worked hand in hand,” Stern said, citing the 1917 Immigration Act as a policy directly shaped by eugenic goals. The law distinguished between “classes of aliens” who were “defective” and thus, should be excluded from admission to the U.S.

In “Eugenic Nation,” Stern also characterizes the earliest forms of border enforcement, carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS), as a “eugenic endeavor.” In 1917, this included harsh quarantine measures such as kerosene baths that USPHS forced upon Mexican migrants traversing the Texas-Mexico border. Under the guise of “defending Texas” from “infected and disease-ridden Mexicans,” USPHS officials also enforced physical examinations and brandings with permanent ink. Today, medical examinations are still required as part of immigration proceedings.

Fatima Khan, a New Orleans-based immigration lawyer who previously represented detained immigrants in Louisiana, cites the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as another example of anti-immigrant policies operating in unison with eugenic projects. For a time, the law banned Chinese migration to the U.S.

“The underlying tone was that the people who were coming to America really did want to control the makeup of the society, and it went down to race, but also religion, values, and land ownership,” Khan explained.

Like many before her, Khan traces the origins of laws related to racial superiority and migration to the trafficking of enslaved Africans.

“We can’t deny that this is baked into it,” Khan said. “We know that the criminal legal systems, especially in the South, developed from slave patrols.” Today, criminal and immigration law are so enmeshed, there’s a phrase for it: crimmigration. The overlap in these systems is perhaps most apparent in the hundreds of 287(g) agreements local law enforcement agencies have entered into with ICE, allowing them to carry out immigration enforcement.

Today, eugenics rhetoric is easy to spot in immigration discourse at the highest levels of government.

For example, Trump continues to challenge birthright citizenship and has publicly stated that immigrants are “coming in with bad genes.” Khan said these racist and xenophobic dog whistles are the same as those perpetuated by eugenics and racist movements focused on racial purity.

Over hundreds of years, eugenics transformed into policy, practice, and law, as illustrated by today’s immigration quotas, surveillance systems, detention centers, and instances of modern-day slavery.

Hebert told Prism that detention centers, along with the policies and laws that shape immigration enforcement and mass incarceration, are “inherently eugenicist.”

“Folks are demonized solely because they weren’t born here, and they don’t have whatever paperwork the current administration deems that they should have,” the volunteer said.

“I Never Wish This on Anyone”

With no human rights framework guiding their treatment, women in detention have found ways to affirm their humanity and show care for each other.

Lucia said that in detention, women were given a meager amount of toiletries intended to last the whole month but were never enough. The women often banded together to buy hygiene items they could share, and they combed and styled each other’s hair.

These are just small examples of solidarity between detained women, moments that were plentiful and brave in the face of cruelty and dehumanization.

Hebert told Prism that volunteers routinely see women translating for each other during visitation or when filling out forms, writing letters, or talking to officers.

“We’ve seen cases where folks are so ill or in so much pain that they’re not able to care of themselves … and folks who are detained with them will assist them, walking them to the bathroom and helping them shower or bringing them food,” Hebert said.

Similarly, when Miriam visits detention centers in Louisiana and Mississippi as a representative of the SEDND Coalition, she routinely encounters detained people who ask for help for those they’ve become friends with inside. More broadly, detained people show each other care by sharing resources, being a listening ear, forming networks, organizing hunger strikes, and even helping their friends inside who are struggling with suicidal ideation.

In an immigration system structured to divide people and destroy their care for each other, detained women such as Lucia banding together and taking care of each other can be an act of courage and a vision for the future.

It’s easier for Lucia to be joyful now that she is free from the literal and figurative shackles of detention.

“When I got out, I felt so happy because I had my son in my belly, and I thank God that I am out of that detention center. I never wish this on anyone, I never want to go back,” said Lucia. During an interview in February, the young mother smiled as she sat at her dining room table with her giggling 8-month-old son, the two of them now far removed from the harm they endured.

After her release from detention when she was seven months pregnant, Lucia gave birth in Louisiana and has since raised her child in the state. However, at the time of publication, she was making arrangements to return to Venezuela with her American citizen son. Many of the friends she made at Basile remain detained.

Louisiana remains the center of detention and incarceration systems in the U.S. An investigation from the New Orleans-based nonprofit newsroom The Lens found that ICE apprehensions in Louisiana are at an all-time high. And in the deportation hub of Alexandria, a family detention center was recently approved to move forward on contaminated land. The SEDND Coalition and other groups are fighting the project while providing support to people currently detained in the state.

Louisiana’s newly approved family detention center, which will detain mothers alongside their young children, brings eugenics to the forefront once again.

Miriam, who is organizing against the family detention center, said that after centuries of eugenics, any hope for justice requires dismantling the idea that immigrant families and women of color’s reproductive choices are problems “that need to be managed.”

For families such as Lucia’s who have survived these systems, it’s perhaps more difficult to envision the long arc of justice. She can think only of the pregnant women who remain locked behind bars and the freedom they desperately yearn for.

”They have to have faith that they will get out,” she said, “that all women everywhere get to be free. … That is what is important.”

Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.