Pregnant Immigrants and Their Babies May Suffer Complications from Chronic Stress of ICE Raids, Experts Warn

U.S. immigration enforcement is taking a toll on Dr. Daisy León-Martínez’s patients. The California OB-GYN primarily cares for Latina-identifying pregnant people and those with a Spanish-language preference. 

In the months since President Donald Trump began his mass deportation campaign, some of her patients’ partners have been detained by immigration officials or were removed from the country, she said. Others have left their jobs out of fear of being identified. Some are too scared to travel to essential prenatal and specialist appointments.

“They don’t feel safe in their communities any longer,” León-Martínez told Rewire News Group. “This is leading people to feel afraid to leave their homes, which, in and of itself, is a very stressful situation.”

Stress is bad for human health, and that’s particularly true during pregnancy. As the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement raids continue to expand to include both new cities and more violent tactics, medical providers and public health experts are growing more concerned about maternal “weathering”—the increasingly supported theory that the chronic stress from discrimination causes health decline. 

Coupled with accounts of patients who are delaying or avoiding essential prenatal and birthing care, experts worry pregnant people who feel targeted by the administration’s actions—including documented immigrants whose race, jobs, or neighborhood expose them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and their developing fetuses will face more complications before, during, and after birth. 

León-Martínez, who specializes in high-risk care, said some of her patients with no history of anxiety or depression in previous pregnancies are now experiencing “severe symptoms,” like disrupted sleep, heart palpitations, chest pains, and depression, that make caring for themselves and their children nearly impossible. She added that some patients are “requiring significant care,” including hospitalization, as a result. 

“That tells me that these policies are having very deep effects on our patients,” she said. 

How chronic stress impacts pregnancy, newborns

The concept of maternal weathering dates back to the early 1990s, when public health researcher Arline Geronimus hypothesized that the stress of being exposed to racism, discrimination, and systemic inequality over time could explain why researchers were seeing better birth outcomes in younger Black women compared to those who were older. 

Since then, decades of research have linked stress to poor maternal health outcomes. 

People who experience higher levels of stress in pregnancy are at greater risk of developing conditions like preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure, and pre-term birth, where a pregnant person delivers before 37 weeks’ of pregnancy, León-Martínez said. Research has also linked stress in pregnancy to low birth weight in infants. 

Those outcomes can be serious for both infants and their parents, experts said. 

“People who develop preeclampsia in pregnancy have a higher risk over the course of their life of stroke, heart failure, and premature death due to cardiovascular disease,” León-Martínez explained. In that case, providers may recommend a pregnant person deliver before their due date to protect them, she said.

For newborns, pre-term birth is a predictor of chronic diseases later in life, said Goleen Samari, an associate professor of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California. 

“So if we can prevent issues in childbirth and we can prevent issues around maternal health, we can ultimately help the next generation have less disease burden overall,” Samari added.

How immigration policy ‘weathers’ pregnant people

Racism and discrimination can cause chronic stress, which can “accumulate over time and cause the health of the person that it’s impacting to ‘weather,’ or deteriorate,” Samari explained. “Matneral weathering is referring to that process—that leads to accelerated aging, as well as poor health outcomes during pregnancy and childbirth.”

In the last decade, a handful of researchers, including Samari, have linked specific immigration policies and actions to complications that impact both pregnant people and their newborns. 

A 2017 study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology followed Latina women’s newborns in Iowa after a 2008 immigration raid at a meat-processing plant in the northeast part of the state. Researchers found they had a 24 percent higher risk of being born with a low birth weight than those born a year earlier. White Iowan mothers’ infants did not see a similar increase in risk. 

In 2019, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco identified about 2,300 more pre-term births to Latina women than expected in the nine months following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Trump’s first campaign and presidency were marked by anti-immigrant rhetoric and a slew of related policies, including family separation at the border, travel bans on Muslim-majority countries, and harsher asylum rules.

And research published in Social Science & Medicine in 2020 found “significantly elevated odds” of pre-term birth among Latina women living in California who were exposed to high levels of immigration apprehensions in their county of residence. 

Samari’s research followed pregnant women who were born in one of the majority-Muslim countries affected by the first Trump administration’s 2017 travel ban but resided in the U.S. when the policy was announced. The women had a 6.8 percent increase in their risk of pre-term birth compared to their white counterparts.

‘Complete and utter fear’

There’s little academic research that looks at this issue since Trump’s second election victory in 2024, experts said—in part because of lags in the availability of maternal health data. But anecdotally, providers told RNG that their pregnant patients are stressed. Some are delaying and avoiding care.

Dr. Josephine Urbina saw the impact almost immediately. 

Urbina, an OB-GYN and complex family planning specialist in northern California, has a large number of immigrant patients. She said many of her patients are living “complete and utter fear” of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations since the president’s January inauguration. 

That kind of worry compounds with other stressors, like traumatic childhood experiences and poverty, explained León-Martínez. “It’s that cumulative effect of those short-term and long-term stressors that lead to this weathering kind of negatively affecting or breaking down the health of the pregnant person.”

Pregnancy is a “very vulnerable physiological state,” Urbina added. “Add the chronic stress of, say, being fearful of being detained by ICE … we have definitely seen more pre-term births, more hypertension complications, and more postpartum depression. The stress translates into those complications.”

And prevention and detection of those complications may be delayed or missed altogether because some patients are avoiding essential care out of fear they’ll be targeted, Urbina said. 

Urbina said more of her pregnant patients are missing prenatal appointments or are not following up on referrals to specialists who manage more complicated pregnancies. León-Martínez noted similar trends in the pregnant people she cares for.

Some of Urbina’s patients have delayed coming to the hospital.

“Pregnant patients aren’t avoiding seeking care by choice,” Urbina said. “They’re having to take into consideration the risk of being detained by ICE, as well as trying to navigate a system that’s telling them that they’re not welcome.”

Sweeping raids make research difficult

Making the connection between immigration raids and maternal weathering-related health problems may be harder during Trump’s second term. 

Previous research on stress-related pregnancy complications relied on distinct events that targeted a specific population of people—like the meat-packing raid in Postville, Iowa or the California counties with high rates of immigration arrests. 

But the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement this time around is much larger in scale. Major cities—from Los Angeles and Chicago to Minneapolis and New Orleans—have been swarmed by armed and masked immigration enforcement agents, leaving communities petrified. (The Trump administration is reportedly seeking to deport 1 million people in the span of one year.)  

The widespread operations may impact such a broad swath of people—including U.S. citizens—over such an extended period of time that it could be hard to identify a clear association between immigration policies and pregnancy complications in specific immigrant or other minority groups, experts told RNG. 

Researchers also said that controversial policies that affect many people’s reproductive health care and overall sense of well-being—like abortion bans, Medicaid cuts, and Trump’s battle over birthright citizenship—could muddy the relationship between immigration raids, stress, and pregnancy complications. 

And at least three experts expressed concern about future access to federal data and funding for these kinds of projects.

“My main takeaway is it’s going to be harder to study the impact of this election,” said Alison Gemmill, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health whose research linked poor birth outcomes in pregnant Latinx people to the 2016 election.

‘It’s only going to get worse’

Though raids are taking place in immigrant communities nationwide, Latinx groups have been a consistent focus of the Trump administration’s efforts. People from Latin American countries made up 90 percent of ICE arrestees in the first six months of the second Trump administration, according to a report from UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project. 

Pregnant Latinx people could see more pregnancy complications as a result, experts said. 

“This is a group that historically has good birth outcomes,” said Annie Ro, an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine’s Wen School of Public Health. “And then to add these kinds of stressors, we don’t know how that’ll change—at the population level—what kinds of birth complications and poor birth outcomes they’ll have.”

For frontline providers like León-Martínez, it’s not a matter of if, but when those fears come to fruition.  

“As people experience loss of family members and separation from family, they’re becoming more acutely aware and more afraid,” said León-Martínez. 

That’s making them more likely to avoid coming in for care—even when they know they need it, she said.  

“It’s already manifesting,” Leon-Martinez added. “And it’s only going to get worse.”

The post Pregnant Immigrants and Their Babies May Suffer Complications from Chronic Stress of ICE Raids, Experts Warn appeared first on Rewire News Group.