Black, Pregnant, and Detained

In March of 2021, RAICES (Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services) filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Homeland Security after Immigration and Customs Enforcement halted their policy against detaining pregnant people and their infants. In 2020, ICE detained over 2,000 pregnant people, twice as many as the previous year, without offering any prenatal care, and coinciding with a demographic shift that meant 80% of the pregnant people detailed were black women. Black, Pregnant, and Detained was a Mother’s Day campaign created by RAICES in 2021 to raise awareness about the rapidly increasing number of pregnant women being detained by ICE.

I collaborated with RAICES, photographer Akilah Townsend, and several of the women whose testimonies were used in the civil rights complaint, and created a series of garments embroidered with the quotes taken from the testimonies. The quotes were sewn on the same type of garments people in detention are forced to wear. On July 9, 2021, the Biden administration announced it was barring ICE from detaining pregnant, or nursing people, absent “exceptional circumstances.”