The right's pro-life hypocrisy: Pregnant women face harm in ICE custody
Instead, on June 8, she was shoved to the ground and shackled in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in Hawthorne. A U.S. citizen, nine months pregnant, she was held for nearly eight hours before being hospitalized with stomach pain. ICE agents alleged she was obstructing their access to two undocumented immigrants in a public parking lot, one of them her boyfriend.
There's a quiet violence in how ordinary this has become. A technical violation — no threat to public safety, no criminal record otherwise — somehow became enough to justify brute force. López Alvarado's story joins others: pregnant women pulled from cars, cuffed on asphalt and pushed onto the ground. These moments don't just reflect a lack of trauma-informed training among agents who could have made a conscious choice to de-escalate the situation, they suggest something more deliberate: the rescission of ICE's own 2021 11032.4 directive, meant to shield pregnant people from exactly this kind of harm.
What frustrates me most, however, is a deeper hypocrisy in the moral fabric of the political right, especially those who claim to be 'pro-life.' I am disappointed in their severely myopic definition of the phrase, their selective drawing from conservative theology to protect only the fetuses deemed to be future children of white American citizens, while permitting violence to mothers and children who do not visually check said boxes.
To be pro-life means to stand for the right to life; it is a conviction in the inherent dignity and consistent worth of all human beings. It means advocating for lives of safety: in immigration, in our daily lives and, most directly for me, as a medical student and future physician, in health care.
An unborn child's worth should not disappear the moment their mother enters a detention center or is perceived by ICE as potentially undocumented. During President Donald Trump's first term, the detention of pregnant women rose by 52% after an Obama-era policy that generally directed immigration officials to release pregnant women from federal custody was rolled back.
Advocacy groups have long documented the inadequate medical care and dangerous conditions faced by detained women, leading to irreversible psychological trauma, physical harm and even miscarriages. Perinatal mood disorders, such as maternal depression, have been linked to hypertension, preeclampsia and gestational diabetes. For pregnant undocumented women, who already have baseline trauma from arduous immigration journeys where rape and disease are common, incarceration and the constant fear of deportation can serve as powerful stressors, contributing to a heightened risk of cardiovascular complications and, possibly, premature births.
Along the border, immigration holding cells, colloquially referred to by migrants as hieleras or 'freezers,' often lack basic sleeping accommodations, showers and hygienic products like soap. Migrants spend up to several nights in congested quarters where infections spread quickly.
For these women, it seems that their lives — and the lives of their children — are conditional.
I chose to become a physician because there is relief in knowing the field of medicine endures on treating every human, regardless of their their past, politics or papers. Illness and death are universal, and in their universality, there is fairness. This vulnerability connects us far more than our ideologies divide us: I may never know whether my patient voted to build a wall or supported LBGTQ+ rights, and I also do not wish to know.
What I owe, to myself and others, is to defend life with integrity. When advocacy on behalf of a patient falls short, the opposing party must be held accountable — whether it's myself, a colleague or a politician.
López Alvarado ended up giving birth to a healthy baby girl, and the family has set up a GoFundMe to help cover medical costs and child care. Her boyfriend remains in detention out of state, unable to help with raising the child.
Clarity doesn't come from choosing sides — it comes from choosing people. In every room, the fundamental respect of personhood — not politics — must lead. We are bound to complex social systems where race, socioeconomics and sex will always be relevant.
Life does not begin and end in a womb. It is lived along borders where families are being torn apart; in mothers who have miscarried in detainment centers whose prayers say: 'When I die, bury me in comfy clothes and make sure my shoes are tied tight, because I have a long overdue play date with a little child.' When you hear someone is undocumented, let your first response be humanity, not fear or violence.
There is enough space for all of us to win, even in a nation as broken as ours.
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Brennan has rejected the allegations as 'baseless.' The task force examined every possible angle, Miller said, including whether Trump and his campaign somehow conspired with the Kremlin to skew the election outcome. They did not find intelligence to support that scenario, she said. After sifting through all the intelligence and publicly available information, the team concluded that Russia had waged a large-scale information warfare campaign to undermine America's democratic process, damage Hillary Clinton's candidacy and boost Trump's chances. 'The paper was multiple pages long, but the summary of it is 100% they tried to influence the election, and 100% we can't say if it worked unless we polled every voter,' Miller said. 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Durham's team questioned Miller for hours. They asked her questions about whether she had an anti-Republican bias that influenced how the assessment was written, Miller said. 'I was answering questions like, 'Tell us how you hate all Republicans, and that's why you wrote this paper.' Actually, if you look at my registration, I'm a Republican.' Miller was never charged with any crime and she said she was never disciplined in any way over the intelligence assessment. She retired during the Biden administration after 39 years with the CIA. Earlier this month, Ratcliffe declassified an internal 'lessons learned' review looking at how the intelligence assessment was drafted. The internal review found that some standard procedures were not followed and that the report was rushed, but did not question the conclusions of the assessment. Miller said no one at the CIA contacted her for the internal review. The CIA declined to comment. Nine years since the 2016 election, Russia is likely pleased to see yet more political acrimony in Washington over what transpired, according to Miller. 'Putin and his BFFs in the Kremlin are toasting vodka shots as we speak at the turmoil this is creating,' she said.