“Una mujer embarazada necesita el sol”: Pregnant migrant women, carceral capitalism, and immigration enforcement at the US–Mexico border

The US immigration detention and deportation system is a vector for state violence against criminalized, racialized populations, in service to racial capitalism. The immigration policies of both Democrats and Republicans are designed to extract profit from migrants, disciplining them as a deportable underclass of workers while minimizing and externalizing the costs of social reproduction. The detention of pregnant women presents the immigration enforcement system with both discursive and material challenges, as detaining pregnant women entails additional potential costs and exposes the system to public critique on humanitarian grounds. Through an analysis of the experiences of detained pregnant women at the US/Mexico border, we argue that federal immigration policy in USA renders pregnant migrant women disposable and expendable, even during administrations that purport to make humanitarian exceptions for them. We describe and analyze processes of profit extraction, externalization of social reproduction, and symbolic exploitation in relation to the detention of pregnant women from the last year of the Obama administration in 2016 through 2022. Our findings demonstrate that recent Democratic and Republican administrations alike mobilize discursive and material practices to neutralize the challenge embodied by pregnant detainees, preserving and protecting an ever-expanding and privatized immigration enforcement system while causing profound harm to pregnant women and their families.