"Are Girls Being Impregnated Inside ICE Detention Centers?"

September 21, 2026|QLP News Room

This piece is about pregnant women and teenagers ICE has detained, and about a federal agency that admits it stopped counting its own detainees' miscarriages. It would be easy to stop there and call the deeper question — whether any of these pregnancies resulted from assault in custody — simply "unproven," and leave it at that. We're not going to do that, because "unproven" is exactly the outcome a detention system produces when it decides not to look. That isn't a hypothetical. A few hundred miles up the coast from some of the facilities in this series, ICE's own contracted operator was caught doing precisely that, in a case where the evidence was sitting in a bag, untested, while investigators wrote "unsubstantiated" anyway.

What's Confirmed

Documented fact: Reporting cited at least 87 pregnant women and teenagers in ICE detention in October 2025, rising to 101 by November 2025. ICE recorded 18 miscarriages among detained women in the first nine months of the current administration — then, per a DHS spokesperson's own on-record acknowledgment, simply stopped recording the figure after October 3, 2025, and had no data covering the months since, including in response to direct inquiries from sitting U.S. senators. Separately, advocacy and legal groups that have interviewed detained pregnant women have documented denial of prenatal vitamins, invasive procedures performed without documented informed consent, and instances of shackling during miscarriage.

Why "ICE Found No Evidence" Isn't the Reassurance It's Built to Sound Like

Documented fact: In May 2026, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights published "Scrapping the Standards," a records-based investigation into how GEO Group — the same company profiled elsewhere in this series as ICE's largest detention contractor — handles sexual abuse allegations at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. Researchers obtained records on 229 known reports of sexual abuse or assault at that single facility between January 2015 and February 2025. Of the 172 cases with a recorded finding, only 19 were ruled "substantiated." Of the 51 allegations specifically against staff — the people with the most power over detainees, and a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 2243 if true — exactly one was substantiated. At least 54 cases never got referred to police at all, with staff citing the complaint as "non-physical" as their reason not to call. Only 5 of 58 sexual-abuse incident review forms even contained a recommendation for preventing it from happening again.

Documented fact, and the case worth sitting with: In June 2024, a detained man reported being forced into oral sex on four separate occasions and preserved a semen sample himself as evidence. Two months later, in August 2024, GEO's internal investigation concluded the allegation was "unsubstantiated" — before that sample had been sent for DNA analysis. When Tacoma police eventually ran it in November 2024, the DNA matched his accused rapist. By then both men had already been deported. The file was closed anyway, with a note explaining there was "no good contact information for either subject" and the case would be "cleared resolved." A finding the facility had already recorded as "unsubstantiated" was never reopened, even after its own evidence said otherwise.

On the record: Angelina Godoy, the UW Center for Human Rights director who led the investigation, put the pattern plainly: "They have these elaborate accountability mechanisms and choose simply to ignore them." GEO Group's response to the report, in full, was that the company "mandates zero tolerance towards all forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment" in its facilities — a policy statement, not an accounting for the case above, or the other 89 the same report found unsubstantiated.

Crowd at an ICE OUT protest under Abolish ICE street signs in San Francisco

Public Pressure, San Francisco
Demonstrators at an "ICE OUT" protest, January 2026. The pattern documented in Tacoma is part of why calls like these keep growing, not shrinking. Photo: E mln e, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What Attorneys and Detainees Are Saying, On the Record

Documented fact: Separately, three men detained at the same Tacoma facility filed suit against GEO Group, alleging guards engaged in sexual assault, violent beatings, and retaliation — and that Tacoma police let GEO investigate itself rather than sending independent investigators. One detainee's complaint describes a guard grabbing and holding his genitals under his clothing. Another plaintiff, Javon Gordon, alleges he was slammed face-first into concrete and kneed while handcuffed after protesting guards trashing his belongings, including his Bible, and that footage of the beating was later shown to incoming staff as an example of how a detainee "could be taught a lesson." According to the reporting, Tacoma police closed the case without ever interviewing the alleged victims or witnesses. Attorney Colin Prince, who represents detainees in that suit, said it's about GEO Group's "longstanding policies and practices of failure to investigate and discipline employees" — not one bad incident, a pattern.

"All My Homies Hate ICE" Sticker

A blunt, pro immigrant response to a system that stopped counting its own miscarriage data, and whose own contractor closed an assault case before testing the DNA it already had. Simple, durable, and easy to spot on a water bottle or laptop.

➔ View the Sticker

➔ Browse the Anti-ICE Stickers Collection

What We're Not Saying — And Why That's Not the Same as "Nothing Happened"

We are not naming a specific pregnancy among the 87 to 101 women and teenagers documented above as having resulted from an in-custody assault. No one — not the University of Washington researchers, not the attorneys suing GEO Group, not the advocacy groups interviewing detained women — has put forward that specific case in the public record, and we're not going to invent one where none exists. But the absence of that specific case is not evidence that nothing happened. It's the predictable output of a system that, per a university research team with direct records access, closes sexual-assault investigations before its own evidence is tested, decides not to call police over allegations it privately labels "non-physical," and marks a file "cleared resolved" once the people involved have been deported and can no longer be reached to ask. If you're reading ICE's silence, or its stopped miscarriage count, as proof that pregnant women and teenagers in its custody are safe, that's not a conclusion the record supports — it's the story a system tells about itself when it has decided investigating isn't worth the trouble.

Abolish ICE protest sign carried during a Minneapolis demonstration

Sustained Public Pressure
A demonstrator's sign at a large Minneapolis march against federal immigration enforcement, January 2026. Photo: Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Bottom Line

The documented facts stand on their own: pregnant detainees in the dozens, a miscarriage count the government admits it stopped keeping, and — at a comparable ICE-contracted facility with the records to check — a demonstrated pattern of closing abuse investigations before the evidence is even examined. We're not going to pretend a system with that track record has earned the benefit of the doubt on this question. If a specific, individually-documented pregnancy case tied to in-custody assault becomes part of the public record, we will name it and update this piece. Until then, the responsibility for that silence sits with ICE and its contractors, not with the women whose miscarriages stopped being counted.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the Tacoma pattern prove a specific pregnancy here was caused by assault?

No, and we're not claiming that. What it shows is that the same kind of institution responsible for these women's custody has a documented record, at a comparable facility, of closing sexual-assault cases before testing its own evidence — which is exactly why an absence of "confirmed" cases here shouldn't be read as reassurance.

Why did ICE stop tracking miscarriages?

ICE has not published an explanation for why tracking stopped specifically on October 3, 2025, beyond a spokesperson's after-the-fact acknowledgment that the data no longer exists for the months since — including after senators asked for it directly.

Are minors included in the pregnancy figures above?

The reporting we reviewed used the phrase "women and teenagers" for the detention counts without a published age breakdown distinguishing adults from minors within that combined figure.

Who's actually held accountable when these investigations fail?

Per the UW Center for Human Rights report, in a decade of reporting at the Tacoma facility, only two cases out of more than 150 led to prosecution — and both involved GEO Group employees as the alleged victims, not detainees.

"Plant Flowers Not Fascism" Sticker

A gentler design for a heavy topic — a reminder that the alternative to the pattern documented above isn't complicated. This Abolish Ice Sticker is a quiet way to say what kind of world you'd rather be building.

➔ View the Sticker

➔ Browse the Anti-ICE Stickers Collection

Every Abolish Ice sticker and magnet purchase from our Anti-ICE Stickers collection helps fund the reporting and continued development of this public resource.