Between January 2025 and February 2026, ICE systematically detained, deported, and denied medical care to pregnant and postpartum women in what multiple human rights organizations described as "family separations 2.0." Government data obtained through litigation and FOIA requests revealed the scale: 363 pregnant, postpartum, and nursing women were deported between January 1, 2025, and February 16, 2026. By late September 2025, 16 miscarriages had been recorded in ICE custody. As of February 16, 2026, 86 detainees identified as pregnant remained in ICE detention, including 9 in their final trimester.
The medical neglect documented by Physicians for Human Rights, the ACLU, the Women's Refugee Commission, and Human Rights Watch was systematic rather than incidental:
ICE violated its own stated policies requiring that agents ask anyone they arrest whether they have children and ensure parents have the opportunity to arrange care for their children before deportation. In documented cases, parents were arrested and deported while their U.S. citizen children were left behind with no arrangements for their care. In July 2025, a woman identified as Alicia was deported and separated from her children, later seeking hospital care for a severe infection acquired while in ICE custody.
The crisis represented a second iteration of the family separation policies that provoked international condemnation during Trump's first term in 2018, but with key differences: rather than a formal policy announced and then reversed under pressure, the separations in 2025-2026 were the byproduct of systematic policy choices -- ending prosecutorial discretion for pregnant women, massively expanding detention, defunding medical care in facilities, and accelerating deportation flights -- that produced the same result through operational cruelty rather than explicit directive. The diffuse nature of the policy made it harder to identify a single order to challenge in court, even as the aggregate harm exceeded the 2018 separations in both scale and severity of medical consequences.
The deportation of pregnant women to countries with limited medical infrastructure -- often after denying them care for pregnancy complications acquired in U.S. custody -- created life-threatening situations that amounted to what reproductive rights organizations characterized as state-inflicted reproductive harm.