PREGNANCY IN DETENTION • MEDICAL NEGLECT
She was miscarrying in the middle of the night. CoreCivic employees left her bleeding alone for hours.
After hours of waiting alone, Lucia was transported to an emergency room
in shackles — only after losing enough blood to need a transfusion.
Miscarrying in ICE Detention
This account is a lightly edited excerpt from a letter from several advocacy organizations including the ACLU to officials including Todd Lyons, the Acting Director of ICE. The full letter, which includes several stories of pregnancy in CoreCivic and GEO Group facilities, is available here.
In January 2025, “Lucia” came to the United States seeking a better life for herself. At the border, immigration officials released her into the United States, requiring her to wear an ankle monitor and to comply with supervision orders. To Lucia’s surprise, immigration officers came to her home a few weeks later and took her to be detained at CoreCivic's Stewart ICE Processing Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, only a few days after she had attended her scheduled ICE check-in appointment.
Although Lucia did not realize it at the time, she was pregnant and began to experience symptoms typical for the first trimester of pregnancy, including vomiting and pain in her abdomen.
Lucia made multiple medical requests to see a doctor at the detention facility, but was not given an appointment for several weeks, at which time medical personnel confirmed that she was approximately two months pregnant. Less than two weeks later, Lucia began to experience heavy vaginal bleeding and cramping in the middle of the night.
Although Lucia requested immediate medical attention, she was not taken to see medical staff until the middle of the next day. However, medical personnel merely took her to a small room, and left her bleeding alone without informing her of what was happening. Medical staff did not give her any food, water, or pain medication for several hours.
Much later that evening, after a significant loss of blood, Lucia was transported to an emergency room approximately an hour away, with her arms and legs shackled.
At the hospital, Lucia required a blood transfusion because she had lost so much blood. Medical staff at the hospital informed Lucia that she had suffered a miscarriage. She was given pills for pain at the hospital and was then returned to the detention center. Lucia has experienced abdominal pain and heavy bleeding even a month after her miscarriage.
“Although Lucia requested immediate medical attention, she was not taken to see medical staff until the middle of the next day.”
WHY CITIZENS BANK
Citizens Financial Group's subsidiaries have helped finance CoreCivic since at least 2012.
In 2019, eight major U.S. banks pledged to cut ties with CoreCivic and GEO Group. Citizens chose to stay the course.
Today Citizens plays an expanded role in the industry, also acting as a key partner to CoreCivic's main competitor, GEO Group. In the past year alone, Citizens has helped GEO grow its credit line by over $200 million.
As Citizens continues to tout its commitment to fostering strong communities, the for-profit prison companies it backs have been the subject of credible allegations of medical neglect and other human rights violations going back decades.
Data provided by DHS to Senator Patty Murray suggests that between January 1, 2025, and February 16, 2026, 498 pregnant, postpartum, and/or nursing immigrants were held in, and released from, ICE custody — 363 of whom were deported. Another 121 remained in detention, including nine in their third trimester of pregnancy.
ICE provided data on miscarriages for only a portion of that period, from January 1, 2025 to September 28, 2025.* During that time, there were 16 miscarriages in detention.
*Deaths rates in detention have climbed sharply over the last year. According to NPR reporting on ICE data, more people have died in detention since October than in the entire previous fiscal year.
When Medical Neglect Is the Norm
The New York Times reports that ​“a federal lawsuit and more than two dozen interviews with lawyers, detainees and their family members and elected officials depict acute deficiencies that they believe contributed to deaths [in privately run detention facilities]. They describe some of the country’s largest immigrant detention facilities as places where disease and illness are rampant and detainees are often denied sufficient food, clean drinking water, medications and medical care.”
Allegations of medical neglect by for-profit prison operators — and authorities' own findings of CoreCivic and GEO Group's repeated failures — are not new. Within years of its founding, CoreCivic (then the Corrections Corporation of America) had already settled its first major lawsuit, brought by the family of a young woman who died due to complications from an ectopic pregnancy — after being left screaming in her prison cell for nearly 12 hours before being transported to the hospital.
As the medical neglect of vulnerable people in for-profit ICE detention facilities continues, it's time for the banks that still finance them to decide whether they want their brands permanently tied to these failures.
Citizens Bank is a key financial partner to CoreCivic and GEO Group.
More of our neighbors' stories
“It’s just one of the worst feelings. Here I am on deployment, on active duty, and they are abusing my mom.”
Reyna's son returned from his deployment to learn of her abuse by a GEO Group employee. GEO monitors more than 180,000 people in their communities, with few guardrails against abuse.
“I want to get out and eat pizza and bananas. I really want to go to school. I miss my friends from school.”
Thousands of children have been put in ICE detention since 2025. Five have been held for more than nine months at a CoreCivic facility in Texas, where they describe medical neglect, inedible food, and trauma.
