14 July 10th - July 16th, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | gave birth to a healthy baby girl. That daughter is a U.S. citizen by birthright, though a recent pro-Trump ruling by the Supreme Court puts that status at risk. ‘WE CARE DEEPLY’ Seven years after Morales-Alfaro’s harrowing experience, little has improved. Pregnant migrants continue to face rough treatment in detention centers that shouldn’t even be housing them. Monica Cordero of Arizona’s Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a nonprofit group that provides legal services to detained migrants at ICE facilities in Florence and Eloy, said her colleagues continue to encounter pregnant detainees. “We don’t think people should be detained generally, especially medically vulnerable people,” said Cordero, who is an adult legal program director for the organization. “And I think pregnant women fall into that sort of category.” Cordero could not speak about the specifics of how pregnant detainees are treated, but she’s heard a litany of other complaints. Migrants have told the Florence Project about overcrowding and about people “stuck in detention longer than usual.” Migrants complain about not being able to obtain medical care and about “substandard food or not enough food to serve the population.” In an email, CoreCivic public affairs manager Brian Todd did not directly address the overcrowding allegations or a question about how many pregnant women are currently housed in the compa- ny’s immigration detention centers. Todd said staff at the Central Arizona Florence Detention Complex “offer comprehensive care to pregnant detainees” and that all facilities “provide three nutritious meals a day,” including “more than a dozen thera- peutic diets.” “We care deeply about treating people in our facilities humanely and providing them with a safe, clean and dignified envi- ronment,” Todd said. However, the Hilton CoreCivic ain’t. And anyone who thinks houses of deten- tion can in any way be “dignified” should read up on the Stanford Prison Experiment, particularly as ever more ordinary people end up behind CoreCivic’s walls, sometimes just because they showed up to their appointed date at immigration court. As masked, thuggish ICE agents tackle harmless street vendors, pedestrians and motorists in a frenzy to fulfill detention mandates, the number of detained people has skyrocketed. Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse recently reported that, as of June 1, ICE was detaining 51,302 people, “the first time that the total number of detainees has surpassed 50,000 since September 2019.” Sixty-five percent of those detained by ICE in Fiscal Year 2025 so far have had no criminal convictions, according to the libertarian CATO Institute, and 93% have had no violent convictions. They’re just plain ol’ immigrant moms, dads, college kids — and, you guessed it, pregnant women and nursing mothers. In 2022, four years after her miscarriage and release from ICE custody, Morales- Alfaro remained haunted by the experi- ence. “I always have nightmares,” she said in her deposition. “I’m always remem- bering that, and I cannot get over it. My life changed a lot because I never expected that. I was just expecting help, but that didn’t happen.” Morales-Alfaro went into ICE custody with an unborn kid in her belly. When she emerged, the baby was no more. She wasn’t the first migrant woman to lose a preg- nancy while in — and arguably because of — ICE detention. Many others have suffered the same tragedy. As long as the U.S. decides it needs to lock and chain up vulnerable pregnant women, more preventable miscarriages are likely to occur. At least for migrants, protection of the “unborn” by a putatively pro-life Republican regime is, apparently, non-existent. This story is part of the Arizona Watchdog Project, a yearlong reporting effort led by New Times and supported by the Trace Foundation, in partnership with Deep South Today. Miscarriage of Justice from p 13 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. (Charles Reed/Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
