Two weeks after arriving in the US seeking asylum, E, 23, found herself in a detention cell in San Luis, Arizona, bleeding profusely and begging for help from staff at the facility. She was four months pregnant and felt like she was losing her baby. She had come to the US from El Salvador after finding out she was pregnant, in the hopes of raising her son in a safer home.
An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they werent doctors. They wouldnt look after me, she told BuzzFeed News, speaking by phone from another detention center, Otay Mesa in San Diego. I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldnt eat, I couldnt do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.
Stuck in detention and having lost her baby, E says she wouldnt have come to the US seeking a safer life if shed known what would happen. She asked that her full name not to be used out of fear of repercussions while in detention and for her family back home.
My soul aches that there are many pregnant women coming who could lose their babies like I did and that they will do nothing to help them, she said.
About a week after speaking with BuzzFeed News, E gave up her fight for asylum, accepted voluntary departure, and was deported back to El Salvador.
In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly introduced the zero tolerance immigration policy that has led to children being separated from their parents at the border, sparked national outrage, and triggered an executive order from President Trump. While the national focus has been on family separations, another Department of Homeland Security policy quietly introduced by the Trump administration five months earlier has devastated women fleeing violence in their home countries: the detention of pregnant women not yet in their third trimester.
In a congressional hearing in May just weeks before the news broke that immigration officials were separating immigrant families Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Congress about the care she said ICE provided to pregnant detainees.
We provide them with prenatal care, we provide them separate housing, we provide them specialists, we will take them to appointments if they need to go somewhere else, we provide them counseling, Nielsen listed.
They are not only given adequate care in facilities, but it is much better care than when they are living in the shadows.
Its a lie. They didnt give me anything, said Rubia Mabel Morales Alfaro, 28, who was in ICE detention from around Dec. 23 to March 15 this year. E also said she had received none of the services. If they had had that, I would not have lost my son. I dont understand why they wont take care of pregnant women, she said.
"There are so many horror stories of medical neglect that Ive heard inside [detention centers] that I cant even remotely fathom a scenario where a pregnant woman would be better off in detention than being released, Luis Guerra, a legal advocate at Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), told BuzzFeed News.
Three lawyers and two medical workers who work with detainees told BuzzFeed News that the treatment of pregnant women was substantially different before Trump took office. Pregnant women were often released from CBP centers faster than other detainees, particularly after August 2016, when ICE issued a policy limiting detention of pregnant women to only extraordinary circumstances or cases of mandatory detention. Often it took only a phone call to the center to get a pregnant woman released on parole, Linda Rivas, the executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, told BuzzFeed News. After Trump entered the White House, these calls stopped working, she said. And after the new policy was announced, advocates stopped having a reason to think they would.
