What Happens To The Women ICE Detains?
Her family posted her bond, but Andrea wasn't released. She told HuffPost she kept asking the officers why she was still in jail, but they didn't give her any information. She was scared and confused. She had never spent a night in jail before. When the cops finally told her she was being released to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Andrea had a panic attack.
Andrea, 32, who is being identified with a pseudonym because she fears for her safety, was born in Argentina and moved to the U.S. when she was 3 years old. She has lived in the U.S. essentially her entire life, and is currently a Green Card holder with permanent resident status.
When ICE arrived at the county jail, all Andrea could think about was her three kids: her 8-year-old, 2-year-old and her 3-month-old who she was breastfeeding at the time. I need to be with my kids, she kept thinking.
ICE shackled Andrea's wrists, ankles and waist, and loaded her onto a bus with a group of other immigrants headed to Krome Detention Center ― a men's detention center in Miami with a long history of allegations of inhumane conditions and sexual abuse, according to Human Rights Watch.
When they arrived, Andrea said she and about 30 other women were kept in a small room meant for visitors because it was the only way to separate them from the larger male population. She had no bed, no shower, no access to the outdoors. There were no windows in the visitation room, making it impossible to tell what time of day it was. The women were repeatedly denied access to a shower because officers said it was a male-only facility with nowhere for women to bathe.
Andrea wasn't given a breast pump, so she had to expel her breast milk on her own. The facility provided menstrual pads, but supplied the room of more than two dozen women with only 15 pads at a time. There were cameras directly above the toilets, which the women had to share with the other male detainees. Andrea said the men would sometimes stand on tables or chairs in order to look into the stalls while women were using them. They would lick their lips and say vulgar things to the women.
'I felt like a sitting duck,' Andrea told HuffPost. 'There was no type of privacy anywhere. You're not human when you're in there.'
Around 56,000 people have been detained in ICE custody on any given day since President Donald Trump took office. They are held in the upwards of 175 facilities across the country that detain immigrants ― a sprawling network of county jails, state and federal prisons, military bases, and dedicated immigration detention centers.
Many of the people who are detained are women just like Andrea. They called the police for help, but local law enforcement turned them over to ICE. They languished for weeks or months in overcrowded detention centers sometimes not equipped with gender-appropriate care. They were pregnant or postpartum and were offered little to no prenatal or maternal health care. They were ripped away from their children and families, not knowing when they would see them again.
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to HuffPost's request for comment for this story.
In the early days of Trump's deportation agenda, the country watched in horror as immigrant men were shackled and flown to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Their humanity was stripped away as guards shaved their heads and crammed them into prison cells to sleep on overcrowded, metal bunk beds. The administration weaponized these images, using them as fodder to further the lie that Trump's immigration crackdown was to protect Americans from 'criminal illegal aliens.'
But we rarely saw images of women being detained or deported. The few that were circulated included Rümeysa Öztürk being pulled off the streets by officials in broad daylight; a woman clutching her newborn in the middle of the street as ICE arrested her; a mother sobbing and saying goodbye to her family after she was detained in immigration court.
As of late June, there were around 22,000 women in ICE detention, according to data from Detention Reports, a platform that analyzes publicly available data on immigration detention. ICE does not provide data on the gender breakdown of people in immigration custody, and the agency did not respond to multiple requests for the information. The fact that no one seems to know how many women are in detention is cause for concern and inherently part of the problem, advocates tell HuffPost.
There are an estimated 56,000 immigrants in detention every day, meaning women make up about 40% of detained immigrants ― likely the largest population of women in detention in the history of U.S. immigration enforcement. They must navigate increasingly punitive immigration systems, which are operating with less and less oversight thanks to Trump's policies.
'If you're a woman that lives in a precarious situation ― you are afraid of your perpetrator, you are afraid of deportation, you are afraid to be sent to jail, you are afraid to lose your kids ― [it] exacerbates the levels of violence and the levels of impunity that we are seeing in this country,' Elida Caballero Cabrera, a longtime immigrant and women's rights advocate and lawyer with the Women's Equality Center, told HuffPost.
'And who are the people that are being affected the most? Immigrants, undocumented immigrants, but especially immigrant women.'
A Rights Rollback
Women face unique harms in immigration detention, often experiencing violence that is exacerbated by a number of factors such as being women of color, mothers, survivors of gender-based violence or the primary caregivers in their families. Immigration attorneys and advocates fear women will suffer the greatest consequences from Trump's mass deportation agenda because of issues like rampant sexual abuse and a lack of proper gender segregation that leads to worse conditions for women. The number of pregnant and postpartum women in detention has also likely skyrocketed, advocates told HuffPost, and they're increasingly concerned about inadequate prenatal care, dangerous pregnancy outcomes and childbirth conditions.
These issues are the direct consequences of Trump's policy decisions to roll back protections for immigrants detained by ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Trump rescinded an immigration memo in May that was meant to protect vulnerable populations, including limiting the time pregnant and postpartum women could be in CBP custody. A similar ICE directive regarding pregnant and postpartum women is still in place, though advocates suspect it's not being followed.
A congressional report published after an April visit to two Louisiana ICE detention centers observed that the Trump administration 'has begun detaining larger numbers of pregnant women in facilities ill-equipped to manage their well-being and safety.' There were 14 pregnant women detained at one facility when Senate Judiciary Committee staffers visited, according to the report. Many of the detainees described poor medical care for pregnant and newly postpartum women.
The Women's Refugee Commission recently traveled to Honduras to speak with deported citizens who corroborated that ICE detention is not giving adequate care to pregnant women, new mothers and infants.
There has been at least one pregnancy loss in a detention center since Trump enacted his mass deportation agenda. Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus had a stillbirth while detained by ICE in Nashville, the Nashville Banner reported. Monterroso-Lemus repeatedly had requested medical care when she had pain in her belly and felt no fetal movement, but ICE agents reportedly ignored her.
She gave birth surrounded by federal guards who, she said, shackled her feet to the hospital bed. While Monterroso-Lemus was grieving in the hospital, ICE agents reportedly arrived at the detention center to try to deport her to Guatemala.
DHS and ICE did not respond to HuffPost's request for comment about Monterroso-Lemus' experience.
ICE recently declared millions of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond hearings, which will keep more people — including undocumented pregnant women like Monterroso-Lemus — in detention for longer periods. This could put more women and their pregnancies at grave risk.
'The health risk that poses and the conditions that exist in detention right now make folks particularly vulnerable to really horrific outcomes,' Zain Lakhani, the migrant rights and justice director at the Women's Refugee Commission, told HuffPost.
Local law enforcement agencies can opt into what are known as 287(g) agreements with ICE, which empower local authorities to identify and detain immigrants on behalf of the federal agency. As of last month, over 730 state and local law enforcement agencies in 40 states have 287(g) agreements with ICE.
This has had an outsize impact on immigrant survivors of domestic violence, who are reportedly not calling the police, going to the hospital after being assaulted or renewing restraining orders against their abusers. The threat of detention or deportation by local police working for ICE has left many immigrant victims of domestic and sexual violence too scared to seek help ― fearful they could end up like Andrea, detained for months for seeking safety from their abuser.
There have also been multiple reports of men impersonating ICE to attack and kidnap immigrant women. Immigration officials are often seen fully masked and wearing plain clothes ― making it increasingly hard to identify who is carrying out arrests. 'ICE's tactics of plain clothes arrest, family separations and intimidation just blur the lines between state and vigilante violence, and put immigrant communities ― but especially women ― in grave danger,' said Caballero Cabrera, from Women's Equality Center.
In March, Trump shut down the government agencies that once monitored detention facilities for human rights abuses, meaning serious issues such as sexual violence, exploitation and medical neglect are very likely to go unchecked. The watchdog agencies ― sometimes the only recourse for immigrants subjected to inhumane conditions ― were 'bureaucratic hurdles' that were 'roadblocks to [immigration] enforcement,' a DHS spokesperson said at the time.
'This is an intentional action by the administration and not an unintended consequence to mass detention,' the Democratic Women's Caucus wrote in a July letter demanding an investigation into ICE's and CBP's alleged abuse of women. 'Your disregard for women's health and safety is not just a one time instance, the abuse and neglect are part of a larger, systemic failure to treat women with dignity, compassion, and basic medical care.'
A recent WIRED investigation of 911 calls from the 10 largest immigration detention centers in the country found that at least 60% of the facilities reported serious pregnancy complications, sexual assault allegations or suicide attempts.
Despite all this, the GOP's new tax bill just handed immigration officials $165 billion, including $45 billion for new detention facilities and $30 billion to hire more ICE agents.
'They're creating this black box of impunity, where they're keeping women who are pregnant or who have advanced health needs,' Lakhani said. 'There's no one watching for human rights abuses.'
A History Of Violence
Many women have been detained in facilities not equipped to handle the specific needs of women. Before Trump took office, there were only a handful of immigration facilities that would accept women, but that number has exploded since ICE began operating under a mandate to detain 3,000 immigrants a day.
More and more women are now being sent to all-male or formerly all-male facilities where overcrowding has made conditions horrible for women. The number of detainees at Krome, where Andrea was held, has increased by 249% since Trump's inauguration, according to Human Rights Watch.
Beatriz, an immigrant from Mexico who is using a pseudonym because she's facing deportation, saw the consequences of overcrowding firsthand while finishing a prison sentence at a federal prison in Miami. FDC Miami, which houses both men and women, started detaining immigrants for ICE while Beatriz was there. When Beatriz first arrived in April 2024, several floors housed male inmates and one floor housed female inmates. In the spring of 2025, as more immigrants were detained in FDC Miami, the facility moved more men to her floor.
She said FDC Miami split the women's floor in half to make more room for male ICE detainees, limiting female inmates' movement and access to recreation rooms.
Beatriz said the prison guards were overworked from the influx of ICE detainees. 'A lot of the officers stopped working… because they were tired and working more than the hours they were supposed to work,' she told her attorney in a call from ICE detention, in response to HuffPost's questions about her experience. 'Officers started acting bad with us… because they were tired. Sometimes they used to be in their office sleeping when we needed something.'
The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) declined to comment on the specific conditions Beatriz described at FDC Miami, but told HuffPost that humane treatment of people in BOP custody is a top priority.
'It is the mission of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to operate facilities that are safe, secure and humane,' BOP spokesperson Emery Nelson told HuffPost. 'We take seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted in our custody, as well as maintaining the safety of our employees and the community.'
When Beatriz finished her sentence in June, ICE picked her up and brought her to the same Orlando county jail where Andrea was initially held. She was later moved to another county jail that rents beds to ICE. She is still there, facing potential deportation.
Similar to high rates of sexual violence in the U.S. prison system, a lack of oversight and deeply disproportionate power dynamics between detainees and guards often leads to exponentially high rates of sexual assault and rape.
'Sexual abuse is part of the systemic abuse of the immigration detention system,' Stacy Suh, the program director at Detention Watch Network, a national organization working to end immigration detention in the U.S., told HuffPost.
Sexual abuse and systemic reproductive coercion has often gone hand-in-hand with the U.S. immigration enforcement machine. In 2020, during Trump's first administration, immigrant women at the Irwin Detention Center in Georgia were subjected to excessive and invasive gynecological procedures, including unnecessary hysterectomies. The reports were later corroborated by a Senate investigation. The non-consensual hysterectomies performed on immigrant women five years ago are akin to the U.S. government-backed forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
'It's no surprise that when you have an entire system that is designed to dehumanize and punish people that sexual violence would be rampant in a situation where no one has any privacy,' Suh said.
Beatriz, now 49, fled Mexico when she was 15 years old to escape years of sexual and physical violence. As an adult, she was convicted of a drug offense and incarcerated for over a decade at a federal prison in Northern California called FCI Dublin. There she says she was repeatedly sexually abused by Darrell Wayne Smith, one of the prison guards who allegedly used her and other inmates' immigration statuses against them. He allegedly threatened to alert ICE about inmates' immigration status or promised to help with citizenship if they did sexual favors for him.
Beatriz's attorney, Susan Beaty, told HuffPost Beatriz was interviewed by the U.S. attorney's office, the FBI and the Department of Justice about her sexual abuse allegations against Smith. Beaty, a senior attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice who has worked with FCI Dublin victims for years, said Beatriz's story is one of hundreds of inmate allegations of sexual abuse at FCI Dublin.
Sexual abuse perpetrated by prison staff at FCI Dublin was so commonplace that inmates and guards dubbed it 'The Rape Club.' In a class action lawsuit filed by former FCI Dublin inmates, women described rampant sexual abuse and exploitation at the facility, including alleged instances where prison staff used immigration status to exploit and abuse inmates.
'The federal criminal investigation has made clear that FCI Dublin staff explicitly target immigrant women for abuse, leveraging the threat of deportation,' according to the suit, which the U.S. government later paid out a $116 million settlement to more than 100 survivors. 'In relevant instances, officers told survivors that they 'looked in their files' and knew that they were subject to immigration detainers, or they threatened to notify immigration authorities if survivors reported their abuse.'
FCI Dublin eventually shut down in April 2024 after the director at the time said she was unable to fix the prison's issues, which included the culture of sexual abuse. Ten prison guards, including the warden and chaplain, were charged with sexually abusing inmates; the majority have been convicted or pleaded guilty.
Smith, who maintains his innocence, was charged with 15 counts of sexual abuse of five inmates ― the most counts of the nine other prison guards, according to court documents. Smith is accused of masturbating while watching women shower, forcing inmates to perform sex acts on one another and himself, and withholding mail if women didn't show their breasts to him or do sexual favors, court documents show.
His first trial ended in a mistrial in April; his new trial is scheduled for September. Beatriz did not testify in Smith's first trial and has not been subpoenaed to testify at his second one.
'He was like, 'You think that you're special? You think that you're different? There's no difference. I can go over there [Mexico] and I can find you,'' Beatriz recalled Smith telling her. 'Not even when you're gonna get deported, when you go to Mexico, you cannot even be safe.'
Despite Beatriz working with federal investigators to put the FCI Dublin abusers behind bars, ICE detained her immediately after she was released from prison, and she now faces deportation.
Less than a year and a half after FCI Dublin shut down due to prison staff using women's immigration status to target them for sexual abuse, the Los Angeles Times reported in February that the Trump administration was looking to reopen FCI Dublin as an ICE detention center. The Bureau of Prisons told HuffPost there were no plans to reopen FCI Dublin, and ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Immigration advocates and FCI Dublin victims are still deeply concerned that the idea isn't dead, with ongoing protests outside of the closed federal facility. Some pointed out that ICE is aggressively looking for bed space in Northern California since the agency currently has zero detention facilities in the area.
'The story of abuse at FCI Dublin is also very much a story of abuse of immigrant women,' Beaty, who has represented hundreds of FCI Dublin victims, told HuffPost. 'The prison has become a symbol of prison staff sexual abuse, and to put anyone back in that facility would be deeply inhumane.'
Beatriz qualifies for a U visa, part of federal protections to ensure undocumented immigrant survivors who report crimes are provided a path to citizenship. The U.S. government declined to certify Beatriz's U visa, despite working with officials in the federal investigation into sexual abuse at FCI Dublin. She's still pursuing other asylum paths. If she goes back to Mexico, she's terrified she will face the same type of sexual and physical violence that forced her to flee when she was 15.
'Dozens of immigrant women [from FCI Dublin] have reported abuse to federal authorities and then just been discarded and deported,' Beaty said.
Women who emigrate to the U.S. are five times more likely to be seeking asylum from gender-based violence like domestic violence and sex trafficking.
In a major decision this month, the Department of Justice denied asylum to a woman from El Salvador who was a victim of gang violence. The ruling signals that future asylum cases based on gender, like domestic and sexual violence, will be harder to win ― rolling back decades of work acknowledging women's rights as human rights.
During the first Trump administration, the DOJ ruled against an asylum seeker named Anabel on similar grounds. The 2018 decision was eventually overturned, and Anabel received asylum.
'I have felt very glad that my case has been able to help other women escaping similar situations of violence,' Anabel said during a press call with reporters this month. 'But now I am hearing that this government is trying to do the same thing to another woman, putting her life in danger, and using her case to close the door to other women.'
'When they tell people they have to return to the country they have fled, where there is so much violence, many are sent back to die.'
'I Feel Really Lost'
Andrea was released from ICE custody 2 1/2 months after she was detained. She spent her first week at Krome, the men's facility, then was transferred to a detention center in Houston, Texas, where she stayed until April. Immigration officials cited a decade-old cannabis conviction as the reason they detained her, but it was eventually resolved since her case had been expunged.
By the time Andrea arrived home, her baby had started crawling and sitting up on her own. She was devastated she had missed such big milestones. Andrea's boyfriend watched the kids while she was gone, as did her mother and several other family members who had stayed in Florida for nearly three months to help out.
She's happy to be home, but things simply aren't the same. 'I wake up from nightmares crying. The smallest things make me cry now,' she said. 'I'm anxious all the time. I can't eat. I feel really lost after everything.'
Her kids are struggling, too. All three seem to be glued to her side every waking moment, fearful she's going to disappear again. Her 2-year-old has a meltdown every time she uses the bathroom. Her oldest son gets nervous when she leaves the house.
'I did my whole life here. I grew up here. I have more American in me than I do Argentina,' Andrea said. 'America is a country I devoted my whole life to and it turned its back on me.'
Need help? Visit RAINN's National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center's website.
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