To the members of the England Authority Board of Commissioners:
by Lauren Pope
—
My name is Lauren Pope, and I am a Louisiana resident, a mother of 6, and the Executive Director of Rehumanize International. Like many of you, I am pro-life and care deeply about unborn children and their mothers. In February of this year, I spearheaded an open letter to the Trump Administration signed by over 35 pro-life organizations, including Live Action and several state Right to Life groups. In it, we called upon the executive branch to follow the ICE directive which stated that they would “not detain individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum or nursing unless release is prohibited by law or exceptional circumstances exist.”
In a follow up interview in the New York Times, the administration confirmed that, despite reports to the contrary, the directive would be followed.
Unfortunately, a recent article in The Guardian reveals that pregnant women are still being held in detention and, horrifically, they are suffering miscarriages during their time at these centers. Louisiana leads in the number of these miscarriages, with the South Louisiana Processing Center in Basile currently holding the highest number of pregnant detainees in the country. Given the fact that the administration continues to detain pregnant women in violation of the directive, we can expect that pregnant women will also be detained at the center in Alexandria.
You have an opportunity to stop this from happening by refusing to allow such a center to be built and operated. Women report being shackled and left in cold holding cells while they bleed out during these miscarriages.
"Many of the pregnant women that we've met at Basile have told us that they disclosed their pregnancy to ICE officers, that they had to advocate for access to prenatal care and access to a gynecologist, that they needed emergency care for complications. So ICE is clearly aware and I think their desire to kind of obfuscate the access that people have to this data is intended to cover up the level of life-threatening medical neglect that's happening in these facilities."
–Sarah Decker, senior attorney at the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, whose clients are detained at the South Louisiana processing
center in Basile
I call upon the members of this body to seriously consider the harm such policies cause. You are an unelected body tasked with overseeing an airfield, and I am sure you never anticipated being at the center of this debate. Nevertheless, you have a choice as to whether to help expand detention and deportation operations in this country. Under the current administration, that means detaining pregnant women. These women are being medically neglected and shackled. The resulting miscarriages are not simply incidental. They are the foreseeable consequence of detention and not just spontaneous miscarriages that happen to take place in ICE custody. I am writing this letter, in part, so that you can not claim to be unaware of the unborn deaths that you are culpable in causing.Stop this contract. It is within your power to do so. Do not let Alexandria become like Egypt under Pharaoh or Bethlehem under Herod, where innocent children were slaughtered by the government and their mothers could only watch helplessly and weep. I urge you as men of faith and conscience to consider how these decisions will affect your legacy. Stop this contract.
With hope,
Lauren Pope
Executive Director, Rehumanize International
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