F our days before Christmas in 2017, Rubia Morales-Alfaro crossed into the United States through a hole in the border wall that separates Tijuana and San Diego. She was 27 years old and filled with courage, hope and a rather naive view of America’s immigration system. She was also several weeks pregnant. For months, she and her partner, Miguel Hernandez, had traveled from El Salvador through Guatemala and then Mexico. Sometimes they stopped to work along the way, cleaning tables and toilets. All Morales-Alfaro possessed were the clothes on her back and a rucksack filled with a few provisions. She also had an ultrasound printout from a Tijuana clinic showing the growing fetus in her womb. Her goal was to seek asylum in the U.S. “My idea was to surrender to immigration and to have them help me and help me do everything legally,” she later said in a depo- sition proceeding. The gambit was “risky,” she admitted, but what wasn’t for someone like her? “Any type of trip coming here is risky,” she said, “because we’re illegal aliens.” She was afraid, she said, but she “trusted in God.” Trusting in God is one thing. Trusting in America’s brutal deportation regime is another. Border Patrol agents picked up Morales-Alfaro within 10 minutes of her crossing the border. What she experienced next is horrifying and tragic, and the subject of an ongoing court case. Morales-Alfaro said Border Patrol personnel shoved and kicked her and kept her in inhumane conditions. After she was transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the medical care she needed was either delayed, inade- quate or outright denied to her. Roughly three weeks after she entered the country, she collapsed and was taken to a hospital. She miscarried while chained to a stretcher. In 2020, Morales-Alfaro sued the federal government and private prison contractor CoreCivic over her treatment. Last month, despite a mountain of legal paperwork demonstrating the harm she’d suffered, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to toss her claim. Morales-Alfaro could not prove that her alleged mistreatment caused her baby to miscarry, the court said. Her attorney, who is considering an appeal, worries the ruling will greenlight similar abuses of undocumented pregnant women. The evidence of such abuses isn’t hard to find. Department of Homeland Security once barred the detention of pregnant women in most circumstances, but as DHS scrambles to fulfill Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, pregnant and nursing women are again in the crosshairs of masked, heavily armed immigration cops. Pregnant immigrant moms have been arrested, detained and deported. Expectant mothers have been deported to Colombia, Venezuela and parts unknown. In April, ICE “deported the Cuban-born mother of a 1-year-old girl who was still breastfeeding, separating them indefinitely.” In May, an African woman in the third trimester of pregnancy had been detained by the Border Patrol along with her four children in a window- less cell with one toilet. That same month, the Nashville Banner reported that “a preg- nant Tennessee woman” was deported to Guatemala after she had a stillbirth in custody, while a Guatemalan woman who gave birth to a baby girl at the Tucson Medical Center was saved from immediate deportation when Tucson’s activist and political class rallied to her cause. Pregnant American citizens have not been immune. In June, ICE agents detained heavily pregnant California native Cary Lopez Alvarado, assuming she was present illegally. Just two weeks away from giving birth, Alvarado said the feds put her in “a chain from my hands under my belly that went all the way to my legs,” which is contrary to ICE’s stated protocols. Morales-Alfaro’s ordeal occurred in the early days of the first Trump administra- tion. Now, in Trump’s second White House stint, things have arguably gotten worse. Trump’s nativist crackdown on immi- grants has sent a rotten system into over- drive, running apparently roughshod over immigration agencies’ own policies about handling expectant mothers. For an administration and a Republican Party that often touts the concept of fetal personhood and the rights of unborn babies, it sends a clear message: In ICE custody, a pregnant woman’s rights — or those of the developing child in her womb — aren’t worth much. PREGNANT WOMEN ON ICE “Over and over,” according to a sworn statement Morales-Alfaro made while in ICE detention, she told the immigration agents who arrested her that she was pregnant. Still, a female officer “kept shoving me and yelling at me to ‘walk faster,’” Morales- Alfaro said. Before being chained and hauled away, “the female officer pulled me by my hair, shoved me to the ground and kicked me in the back.” (In her deposition, Morales-Alfaro pointed to her hip when asked where she was kicked.) Morales- Alfaro repeated that she was pregnant. “That is your problem,” Morales-Alfaro said the agent replied. “Not mine.” Morales-Alfaro said she was placed into “a very cold room” as punishment for speaking without permission. (This Border Patrol practice of using hielaras — Spanish for “freezers” — has been documented and condemned by groups like Human Rights Watch and No More Deaths.) The cold bean burrito she was given to eat upset her stomach. She complained of “pain in my abdomen” and “headaches, dizziness, and nausea.” Guards ignored her. On Christmas Eve, three days after she entered the country and was detained, Morales-Alfaro was transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center, an ICE facility in San Diego run by the private prison giant CoreCivic. In court filings, CoreCivic claimed that Morales-Alfaro was treated well, given a bottom bunk to sleep on, placed on a higher-calorie “pregnancy diet,” allowed to order junk food from the commissary and permitted to roam her confines during waking hours. If she complained of health issues, she was directed to a facility clinic run by ICE Health Services Corps. Morales-Alfaro painted a much less humane picture in her lawsuit. She said her requests for medical assistance were often ignored by CoreCivic staff and the food she received was “nearly inedible,” “nutritionally deficient” and “full of starch filler.” She and other detained pregnant women “received no fresh fruit and no fresh vegetables.” She was handcuffed or shackled when being transported to ICE custody or when going to and from the hospital. That Morales-Alfaro was incarcerated at all was a problem. The incarceration of pregnant migrants — who are largely being held as civil detainees, not criminal ones — has been denounced by numerous medical and civil rights organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the New Times Photo Collage (Adobe) MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE Under Donald Trump, ICE is waging war on pregnant migrants. BY STEPHEN LEMONS
