ICE Detains Pregnant U.S. Citizen During Los Angeles Crackdown

A U.S. citizen in her ninth month of pregnancy was hospitalized with sharp stomach pains after being arrested — and later released — by ICE agents who accused her of obstructing the arrest of her undocumented husband. 

In an incident that was captured on video, 23-year-old Cary Lopez, her husband, her cousin, and a coworker of her husband were arrested just outside of their workplace in Hawthorne — a city in Los Angeles County — by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents wearing face coverings and sunglasses. 

ICE has been conducting large-scale raids and arrests of undocumented people at workplaces in the Los Angeles areas. Protests against the arrests grew increasingly volatile over the weekend after the president federalized the National Guard — and later deployed active duty U.S. Marines — to the city in what local officials called an excessive and incendiary response to the unrest. Members of the military are slated to accompany ICE on raids and arrest operations, despite not being authorized to participate in civilian law enforcement activities. 

Lopez, who was about a week away from her due date at the time of the arrest, attempted to stop the agents from entering. “I was blocking the doors because they were trying to forcibly open them, but I told them they were on private property,” she told NBC4 . 

“They had us all surrounded,” Lopez added. “I had lost my balance because he was kind of shoving me away from the door […] That’s when I kind of leaned forward, trying to protect the stomach. I wasn’t resisting or anything […] I can’t fight back, I’m pregnant.”

Following the arrest, Lopez told NBC4 that she began to experience sharp pains in her stomach, and spoke to the news station from the hospital where her pregnancy is being monitored. 

It’s not the first instance in recent weeks in which ICE — which displays the motto “honor first” on its vehicles — manhandled a pregnant U.S. citizen. According to a March report from the Idaho State Journal, Kayla Somarriba – a 25-year-old who at the time was seven months pregnant — was driving her undocumented husband and brother in law to a court hearing in Spokane Valley, Idaho, when they were surrounded by about a half dozen ICE and Department of Homeland Security vehicles. Agents claimed to have an arrest warrant for the two men and demanded that they get out of the car, but refused to show the warrant to Somarriba. When the three occupants refused to exit the vehicle, agents shattered the windows in order to drag them out, and her husband was shocked with a stun gun. “I even offered to show them my passport, my husband’s work permit and social security number, but they didn’t want to see it; they just kept saying they are criminals and that they can’t be in the United States,” Somarriba told the Journal. 

The mistreatment of pregnant U.S. citizens by ICE agents emboldened by the Trump administration reflects a larger pattern of abuse against migrant women who remain in their custody. Last month U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) quietly repealed several rules granting protections to pregnant women, postpartum women, and infants that came into contact with the migrant detention system. These included requirements to provide extra medical care and resources, private areas for lactation and breastfeeding, and mandating that supplies like diapers and unexpired baby formula be available in detention facilities. 

This May, Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus experienced a stillbirth in her fourth or fifth month of pregnancy while being held at a Louisiana ICE detention center after what she told The Nashville Banner were days of pleading with staff for medical attention. “They didn’t give me medical attention — nowhere. Not in Louisiana, not in Alabama. I was in Alabama too, sleeping on the floor,” she said.

“I started suffering from insomnia, from anxiety. Then I felt like I was having a stroke, and they still didn’t give me a medical exam,” Monterroso-Lemus, a mother of six recalled. She began having contractions, and says she was told by staff that the pain was normal because her baby was growing. “When I was delivering my baby, they didn’t even give me a little privacy,” she told the Banner. “Imagine, [a guard] was sitting right there, watching me day and night. One time, they even shackled my feet because they thought I might escape. Like I was some kind of criminal. I told them, ‘What you’re doing to me isn’t right.’”

She was deported to Guatemala shortly after. 

The Trump administration claims publicly that their large-scale operations targeting undocumented migrants are focused on finding and detaining known and notorious criminals, but it’s clear that the administration’s tactic is to cast a dragnet through immigrant communities, and then insist that all those detained are criminals under their immigration status alone. A U.S. Citizen? Pregnant? No criminal record? All are fair game to the Trump administration in their mission to purge the nation of undocumented immigration.