posted June 24, 2025 09:46 PM            

http://nashvillebanner.com/2025/05/27/iris-monterroso-pregnancy-loss/

On Mother’s Day this year, Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus found herself alone in Guatemala, a country she hadn’t called home in more than a decade. At 38, the once-vibrant, curly-haired woman seemed withered and shaken.

After she was arrested by ICE in Lenoir City, she ended up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana, where she experienced the unimaginable. After pleading for medical help for days, she lost her mid-term pregnancy.

“I had him inside here for three days, in this Louisiana facility, my baby dead in my stomach, inside my stomach for three days, dead,” she said.

Monterroso-Lemus’s experience in detention comes amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants and the mounting claims of abuse and discrimination tied to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests across the country. In Nashville, ICE and the Tennessee Highway Patrol officials recently made 588 traffic stops in predominantly Latino neighborhoods as part of a joint operation that led to the arrests of 196 undocumented residents. Despite claims that ICE was only targeting criminals, fewer than half had prior criminal records. As the Banner reported, in the overnight operation between May 3 and 4, THP made more than twice as many traffic stops as Metro Nashville police did during both days combined, fueling allegations of racial profiling.

Questions remain about the identities of those arrested and what conditions they face once detained. On May 14, ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons announced that nine detainees have died in custody since Trump took office, reigniting concerns about the quality of medical care in immigration detention centers. The deaths have drawn attention to the treatment of immigrants while in ICE custody, including pregnant women, who, under recent Democratic administrations, had been largely shielded from detention.

Building a family
Just a few months ago, Monterroso-Lemus and her partner, Gary Bivens, were planning a future for their growing family. They expected to welcome their baby in August or September. On April 29, their hope of becoming parents together became an impossible dream.

Bivens said he met Monterroso-Lemus years ago while living in Lenoir City, a small suburb near Knoxville. For years, they lived side by side as neighbors. It was heartbreak that brought them together. Bivens is no stranger to loss — his first wife passed away a few years ago. He credits Monterroso-Lemus with saving his life during that dark chapter. After being together for a year and a half, he said they planned to get married.

Then, in mid-March, Monterroso-Lemus was detained by ICE. She said she was initially picked up by Lenoir City Police after missing a court hearing related to a child custody case. She had temporarily transferred custody of two of her six children to her mother and was in the process of regaining it. She said the hearing had been scheduled for a Saturday, and she wasn’t able to attend. Bivens posted her bail, but ICE already had placed a detainer hold on her by then.

“And that’s when the nightmare started,” Bivens said.

A history of neglect and mistreatment
After Monterroso-Lemus was arrested, she was transferred several times. She said she went from Illinois, back to Tennessee, then to Alabama — spending about a week or two in each facility — before she was sent to the Richwood during the first week of April.

The immigration detention facility has a long history of documented abuse. A 2023 report from the Department of Homeland Security cited violations that compromised the health, safety, and rights of detainees. The DHS inspection revealed evidence of unclean living conditions, like filthy showers and torn, stained clothing for detainees. It highlighted inadequate systems for medical grievances, restricted access to legal visits and phone calls, and poor communication between staff and detainees.

Monterroso-Lemus’ account echoed many of those issues.

“They didn’t give me medical attention — nowhere. Not in Louisiana, not in Alabama. I was in Alabama too, sleeping on the floor,” she said during a call from Richwood on May 7.

When Monterroso-Lemus was sent to Richwood, she was four to five months pregnant, according to her medical records. She said she didn’t feel she was receiving the proper care.

Prior to her detention, according to medical records, she received an ultrasound in February after going to the doctor for pelvic pain. Doctors at that time prescribed Tylenol and told her to return if she experienced bleeding.

Once in Louisiana, she said she often felt she was “starving,” and that she wasn’t getting the nutrients she needed, adding that the food was so poor that many detainees would throw it away rather than eat it. She described spaghetti served with tube-shaped ground beef and even cockroaches. She also said she experienced mistreatment and mocking from the guards.

Monterroso-Lemus said she repeatedly asked for an ultrasound to make sure her pregnancy was healthy, but that the staff only monitored her blood pressure and tested her urine.

“I told them to just send me back to Guatemala because I was pregnant and wasn’t getting the medical attention I needed,” she said. “I called Immigration, ICE, I called and sent texts, but still, nothing. They told me I had to wait for my flight. Can you imagine?”

Over time, she began to feel that stress was taking a toll on her health.

“There’s so much pressure in jail,” she said. “I started suffering from insomnia, from anxiety. Then I felt like I was having a stroke, and they still didn’t give me a medical exam.”

She said she was given 12 pills to take daily, though the Banner was unable to independently verify this. She took them for two days before stopping, convinced something was wrong. A few days later, she began pleading for help.

“I begged the doctors,” she said. “I told them, ‘Please, take me to the hospital. I don’t feel well. I’m having contractions.’”

But she said they dismissed her concerns, telling her the pain was normal because the baby was growing.

“I told them it wasn’t normal,” she said. As a mother of six, she is intimately familiar with the pains of pregnancy.

Then, on April 29, she was admitted to Ochsner LSU Health – Monroe Medical Center, a labor and delivery hospital. The physician’s note states that Monterroso-Lemus complained of experiencing no fetal movement, lower abdominal pain and an increase in vaginal discharge for three days before she was hospitalized.

“She states she told the doctor where she is at that this pregnancy didn’t feel right a couple days ago, but nothing was done,” the report reads.

That day she went through spontaneous vaginal delivery after experiencing intrauterine fetal death. The clinical notes state that the pregnancy was “complicated by no PNC,” meaning she had received no prenatal care. She gave birth under the constant watch of two federal guards by her bedside, as the clinical notes confirm.

“When I was delivering my baby, they didn’t even give me a little privacy,” she said. “Imagine, [a guard] was sitting right there, watching me day and night. One time, they even shackled my feet because they thought I might escape. Like I was some kind of criminal. I told them, ‘What you’re doing to me isn’t right.’”

She said she wasn’t allowed to call her partner during her hospitalization, so for two days after, she cried alone.

A spokesperson for ICE initially declined to comment on this case due to privacy, then later told the Banner they would review the case and determine what, if any, further information could be released. They did not provide a further response in time for publication.

Days of silence in Tennessee

Bivens confirmed that he spent days in the dark.

“I was texting and texting and I said, ‘Hey, you know, what’s going on? Are you OK?’” he said.

Finally, a friend of Monterroso-Lemus in detention contacted him to tell him that they had hospitalized his partner because she was having problems with the pregnancy. That same detainee told him that while Monterroso-Lemus was hospitalized, agents arrived at Richwood to try to deport her to Guatemala.

“I think they were trying to take the situation and make it go away,” he said.

Receiving news of the loss, especially from afar, was emotional for Bivens. It was just six days before Monterroso-Lemus lost the pregnancy that he found out they would be having a boy.

Not long after he finally managed to get in touch with Monterroso-Lemus and learn that they lost the pregnancy, he received a call.

“Twenty minutes later, I had a social worker call me and [say], ‘Well, what do you want to do with the baby’s remains?’” he said.

He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“I said, ‘Excuse me? I just found out, like 20 minutes ago, that the baby’s deceased and you’re already calling me?’ That is so disrespectful in my opinion … like they were trying to rush it.”

He wasn’t ready to answer their questions.

“And she said, ‘Oh, well, you can only keep that baby in a cold’ — they call it a cold, a cold crib — ‘for a day.’ I said, ‘Well, so be it,’” he said.

Feeling pressured, he accepted cremation. The next thing he knew, they requested that he pay to have the baby’s remains mailed.

“They actually said I had to pay for the shipment for my baby to come home to Tennessee,” Bivens said, as his eyes welled with tears.

Bivens said what happened to his child, to Monterroso-Lemus, and to his family, makes him wonder about the state of the country he calls home.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s disgusting. I’m beside myself, I really am,” he said. “I’m ashamed to even call myself an American citizen. With what is going on in these facilities? … It’s costing people’s lives. It’s breaking families apart. It’s so inhumane. … It’s un-American. That’s what’s happening.”

A cloak of secrecy
Local advocates and immigration lawyers in Nashville are still working to identify the 196 undocumented Tennesseans detained by ICE in the recent sweep, and to figure out where exactly federal authorities sent them.

Despite repeated requests, ICE has not released a list of detained individuals. As officials drag their feet, some detainees are doing the legwork of identifying Nashvillians in detention and working to get word back to friends and family, as the Banner reported earlier this month. Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell and members of the Metro Council have also formally asked for a list, hoping to give families clarity about their loved ones’ whereabouts, ​​but so far, those requests have gone unanswered.

Allen Shao King, legal director at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), said the lack of transparency has severely hindered efforts by lawyers to provide legal aid. King said many of the calls his team fields begin with, “My husband hasn’t answered his phone and hasn’t come home for 48 hours.”

“Instead of the missing person being missing because of some sort of accident or disaster, they were missing because ICE detained them and took them, whisked them away without any sort of transparency with their operation,” he said.

While King doesn’t have a complete list of those detained or where they are being held, some of those he knows have been detained have reported experiencing poor conditions in detention.

“What we have heard, at least, is that there are people who are being denied medical care who have requested their medical records from ICE, and noted discrepancies on the records from what they actually experience,” he said.

King also said that ICE agents are incentivized to get people to sign documents waiving their rights to an immigration court hearing and accept deportation.

As a result, he said, “It really is in their best interest to make sure that the living conditions are vile and deplorable so that people are more incentivized to take that waiver and give up their right to a hearing.”

For her part, Monterroso-Lemus said she felt pressured by the officials at Richwood to sign documents without being given time to read them. That’s how she ended up being deported to Guatemala shortly after the loss of her pregnancy.

“They told us we had to sign, that we had to do it quickly,” she said.

Grieving together, hundreds of miles apart
For weeks, Bivens’s routine was to check Monterroso-Lemus’ A-number in the ICE system. As long as her name appeared in the directory, he knew she was still at Richwood.

“I’ll sell the house and everything I got, and I’m coming down to Guatemala,” Bivens said. “That’s my intention … because I don’t even want to be here anymore. I’ve never experienced something … so horrific in my life. I don’t even want to be in this country. … I lost all respect for every bit and piece of this country.”

In a remote village in Guatemala, Monterroso-Lemus, reunited with a few of her family members, is navigating both mental and physical health complications from the experience.

Bivens sent her money to buy a cellphone and he set up a GoFundMe to help her access the medical care she needs. He does whatever else he can from afar, as he continues to search for answers and grieve all he’s lost.