Pregnant and shackled in ICE facilities

Women are held for months in dire conditions, advocates say. Some have miscarried.

- BY RACHEL URANGA

KARLA GACHET For The Times

LORENA PINEDA returned home to Van Nuys after months in custody.

Lorena Pineda was five months pregnant when masked agents picked her up on a street corner near a San Fernando Home Depot in June.

An agent grabbed her from the vending stand she ran with her sister-in-law and put her against a car. “Be careful,” she told him. “I'm pregnant.”

“Don't think I am going to let you go because of that,” she recalled him saying.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy states agents shouldn't detain, arrest or hold pregnant, postpartum and nursing mothers for “administrative violation of immigration laws” barring “exceptional circumstances” or if their release is “prohibited by law.”

But pregnant women are increasingly picked up, deported and detained under the Trump administration, advocates and lawyers contend.

Pineda, 27, was held at a downtown L.A. processing center before being transferred to San Bernardino, flown to Atlanta and then to a staging facility in Alexandria, La., and then taken on an hours-long ride to a rural part of that state — where for 3½ months she watched her belly grow and her dreams of life in America fade.

The American Civil Liberties Union has documented more than a dozen cases of what it says are pregnant women housed without proper medical care at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., and the ICE processing center in Basile, La., where Pineda was held.

In one case, a woman was shackled while she miscarried.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Eunice Cho, a lawyer with the ACLU and coauthor of a letter sent to acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in October asking that pregnant detainees be released.

Photographs by KARLA GACHET For The Times