The administration that calls itself “pro-life” is systematically killing the unborn.

Women taken into ICE custody are miscarrying. They’re bleeding out in holding cells. They’re being shackled while actively losing their pregnancies. They’re being told to “just drink water” when they beg for medical care.

A coalition of more than 30 pro-life leaders — including Lila Rose of Live Action — just sent a powerful letter to him pleading in plain language:

Unborn children are dying because of this policy.

Policy. Forced abortion as policy.

That letter, dated February 13, 2026, came from Rehumanize International, Secular Pro-Life, and dozens of organizations across the ideological and religious spectrum. These are Trump’s base. And they are telling him to stop killing the babies he claims to protect.

The Policy

ICE’s own directive 11032.4, still in effect, states the agency should not detain, arrest, or take into custody individuals known to be pregnant, postpartum, or nursing, except in exceptional circumstances.

Under the Biden administration, a 2021 guidance had reinforced this presumption of release. That guidance has not been formally rescinded. It is simply being ignored.

I’ll say it again. Trump ICE clearly ignore law and order. They are deployed as a militant unaccountable force to stir chaos for their authoritarian leader.

The Center for Reproductive Rights reports over 1,000 credible accounts of rights abuses in detention over Trump’s first year back in office.

That’s while a DHS reporting requirement that tracked the number of pregnant, postpartum, and nursing people in custody has lapsed. ICE has refused to provide this data to Congress, the pro-life groups, or anyone else who has formally requested it, hiding their crimes.

According to ICE’s own rules, the number of pregnant women in custody should be near zero. Nobody knows what the actual number is. That’s the MAGA plan that is now policy.

The Practice

What the documentation reveals is systematic, not incidental. Colombian immigrant Angie Rodriguez was detained at a routine check-in, discovered she was pregnant in custody, was denied prenatal materials, was not allowed to keep her ultrasound, and miscarried within a month.

Another woman, identified as Lucia, began bleeding heavily at night, was left in a room to bleed alone, was eventually transported to an emergency room in shackles, needed a blood transfusion from blood loss, was told she had miscarried, and was returned to ICE custody where she continued bleeding for another month before being deported.

A 23-year-old Mexican woman miscarried her first child in custody. Despite her partner calling his senator’s office, she did not receive a follow-up for eleven days. Another woman bled for days before being taken to a hospital, where she was left alone without water or medical assistance for over 24 hours while she miscarried.

One pregnant detainee, Marie, was held in solitary confinement for at least three days because ICE agents didn’t believe she was pregnant. She later developed eclampsia — a life-threatening condition characterized by seizures — and was hospitalized after giving birth at risk of organ failure.

Another woman, Neysis Mariena, six months pregnant with twins, was shackled to a hospital bed while experiencing contractions.

Nayra Guzmán was arrested 15 days after a c-section, on her way to the hospital to see her daughter in the NICU. She spent her first night in custody on a bench with no blanket and was given no information about her child.

The Mechanism

This is intentional.

On October 3, 2025, the VA abruptly terminated its longstanding agreement to process medical claims for ICE detainees — an arrangement that had been in place since 2002. The termination came after a right-wing nonprofit, the Center to Advance Security in America, filed a lawsuit about the VA’s role.

According to government documents, ICE was left with no mechanism to provide prescribed medication and no way to pay for off-site medical care. The services it could no longer deliver included dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, and chemotherapy.

ICE contracted a private company to replace the VA. That company says it will not be ready to process claims until at least April 30, 2026. Until then, medical providers have been instructed to hold all claims. Some have simply stopped providing care.

In 2024, the VA processed $246 million in medical claims for ICE detainees. In 2025, despite an 82% increase in the detained population — from under 40,000 to over 73,000 — only $157 million was processed. The gap represents roughly $300 million in either unpaid bills or denied treatment.

Seven immigrants died in ICE custody in December 2025 alone, making it the deadliest month of Trump recorded so far. 2025 was the deadliest year for immigration detainees since 2004.

In Honduras, new mothers deported from U.S. detention centers were so malnourished by American detention that their bodies had stopped producing breast milk.

The Contradiction

The pro-life letter is notable. It doesn’t just recite facts that reproductive rights organizations have been documenting for months. It reveals alignment against Trump. Lila Rose. The founder of Anti-Abortion Uprising. Democrats for Life. The Human Life Review. The Equal Rights Institute. Live Action. These organizations exist to prevent the deaths of the unborn. And they are telling the administration that its immigration enforcement apparatus is doing what it claims abortion does — killing babies — through institutional indifference, medical neglect, and the deliberate withholding of care from captive women.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Academy of Family Physicians have all warned that ending the presumption of release for pregnant detainees puts women and their pregnancies at serious risk. When ICE ended that presumption during the first Trump administration in 2017, detentions of pregnant women rose 52%, from 1,377 in 2016 to 2,094 in 2018.

Research cited by 61 Democratic lawmakers in the Women’s Caucus shows women who are pregnant and give birth while detained experience increased rates of miscarriage, premature birth, and medically unnecessary cesarean sections compared to the national average.

The Trump administration remains silent, and deadly.

The Word for It

When DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin was asked about these conditions, she said in October 2025:

This is the best health care that many aliens have received in their entire lives.

In other words, she’s excusing herself with a racist “othering” premise that non-white (framed as inhuman, or “alien”) mothers don’t deserve care.

ICE will not release the data that would verify claims about conditions. It will not allow congressional oversight visits. It will not disclose how many pregnant women it has kidnapped, or what happens to them and when. It violates its own written policies, refuses to account for the violations, and disputes any documentation.

This is a system known in history. It is performing exactly as designed to detain the most vulnerable people it can find and then eliminating the mechanisms that might keep them alive. The unborn children it claims to protect are dying in government custody, in facilities funded by $45 billion in the reconciliation bill, overseen by an agency whose acting director said he wants deportation to work “like Amazon Prime, but with human beings [treated as inhuman].”

The pro-life movement built its political identity on the claim that every unborn life has value. Now its own coalition is telling the administration that the state is killing unborn children through deliberate neglect.

This tells you everything about what the phrase “pro-life” actually means when someone supports Trump.

White men only.

As a disinformation historian I’m amazed how brazenly Fox News has attacked AOC with ancient information warfare tactics.

Fox isn’t attempting journalism. They aren’t bothering even with propaganda in the crude sense. They are launching attacks as misogynist maintenance by repurposing the pollution of news framework built for Clinton and adapted for Pelosi. This is an ages old form of derangement, now spinning disinformation directed at AOC.

The core finding in the Fox report is that Rubio gave a civilizational heritage speech, supposedly to a standing ovation, and then flew straight to endorse a man he himself called a threat to democracy in 2019. That’s pure failure and should be career-ending exposure of severely flawed character. He is unfit for office. Fox covered the disaster as triumph and the contradictory endorsement as routine. That’s asymmetric information warfare made material.

Across all of history, from Salem to Munich, the structural logic of privileged men attacking women has been identical. They say women are allowed in public space only in a state of conditional legitimacy. Every minute of any performance is still an audition. Every error is grounds for revocation. Every success must be explained away (she’s really a man, she’s really a puppet, she’s really just performing). Meanwhile, a man in the same space exists in a state of default unaccountable legitimacy. His errors are reframed as boldness, pragmatism, or evolution. His successes are evidence of inherent capacity.

Let us recount some of the ways this has manifested, to explain what Fox is engaged in today.

The witchcraft trial structure

The oldest and most direct precedent. The entire framework of early modern witch trials operated on the principle that women in public roles had to demonstrate perfection to justify their presence, while any error — verbal, behavioral, physical — was evidence of fundamental unfitness that confirmed what the accusers already believed. The accused couldn’t win the evidentiary game because the standard wasn’t evidentiary. It was ontological. You weren’t being tested on what you said. You were being tested on whether you had the right to say anything at all. The “swimming test” logic applies directly: if AOC gives a polished answer, she’s a dangerous demagogue; if she stumbles, she’s an incompetent fool. Both outcomes confirm the predetermined conclusion. If she’s in water and drowns, she’s not a witch. If she doesn’t drown, she has to be killed for being a witch.

Roman political suppression of women’s public speech

Valerius Maximus documented the case of Maesia Sentinas, who successfully defended herself in court around 77 BCE and was immediately labeled “androgyne”. The explanation for her competence had to be that she wasn’t really a woman. Afrania, who regularly appeared in court, was treated as so monstrous that her name became a byword for shamelessness. The Romans went beyond abusing and silencing women, they constructed a framework where female public speech was treated as inherently illegitimate regardless of content. Competence was deviance. Error was confirmation. The Fox article runs the identical logic as such tyranny: AOC’s substantive points about class solidarity and sovereignty are treated as ideological danger from unoriginal thoughts (accusing her of being a Marxist), while her errors are treated as proof she shouldn’t be there.

The “lady orator” problem in 19th century America

When women like Frances Wright and the Grimké sisters began speaking publicly in the 1830s, the opposition didn’t primarily argue with their positions on abolition or labor. They attacked the act of speaking itself. The Congressional clergy’s “Pastoral Letter” of 1837 warned that women who assumed “the place and tone of man as a public reformer” would lose “that modesty and delicacy which is the charm of domestic life.” The content was irrelevant. The transgression was presence. Every Fox article about AOC at Munich is performing this same move today, because they want the story to bury her arguments about inequality or sovereignty, by questioning whether she can be allowed to attend at all. They frame any stumble, even fake ones, to prove she shouldn’t have been.

The “hysterical woman” medical framework

From the mid-19th century through the early 20th, the medical establishment constructed a diagnostic architecture that pathologized women’s public participation. Jean-Martin Charcot’s Salpêtrière demonstrations literally put women on stage to perform irrationality for male audiences. The word “hysteria”, which comes from the Greek for uterus, embedded the premise that female unreason was biological, not situational. When Eric Daughtery writes that AOC “SELF-DESTRUCTED” in all caps, when Clay Travis compares her to a beauty pageant contestant, they’re running the current version: emotional, irrational, performing rather than thinking. Rubio can hedge on China with the identical substance and it reads as a man of measured deliberation because male hesitation is coded as thoughtfulness while female hesitation is coded as vacancy.

Propaganda targeting women leaders in the 20th century

The playbook was industrialized. When Alexandra Kollontai served as Soviet ambassador to Sweden, Western press covered her wardrobe and romantic life rather than her diplomatic work. When Jeannette Rankin voted against entering both World Wars, as the only member of Congress to vote against both, she was framed as emotional and naive rather than principled and consistent. When Indira Gandhi consolidated power, Western coverage oscillated between “Iron Lady” (unwomanly, therefore dangerous) and incompetent dynastic beneficiary (unearned, therefore illegitimate). The frame never settles because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep the target in permanent illegitimacy regardless of performance.

The Hillary Clinton template as direct operational predecessor

The right-wing media ecosystem spent 30 years constructing a framework where Clinton’s every public moment was evidence of either dangerous competence (calculating, cold, ambitious) or disqualifying incompetence (Benghazi, emails, health). The framework was explicitly perfection-or-nothing: a single cough at a 9/11 memorial became weeks of coverage questioning her physical fitness for office. Meanwhile Trump could demonstrate visible ignorance of basic policy, contradict himself within the same sentence, and it was coded as authenticity and strength. The double standard was the product. Fox and the broader right-wing media apparatus refined this into a repeatable methodology during the Clinton years and they’re deploying the same weapons against AOC as the presumptive next target.

The Cold War “useful idiot” feminization

This is where Bishop Barron connects. During the Cold War, the accusation of communist sympathy was routinely gendered. Men who expressed leftist views were dangerous agents. Women who expressed them were naive dupes, as if “useful idiots” who didn’t understand what they were really advocating. Barron declaring that AOC’s class-based analysis is “right out of the Marxist playbook” performs the identical move: we are supposed to believe she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she’s mouthing ideology she doesn’t understand, she’s a vector rather than an agent. It strips her of intellectual authorship of her own positions. Rubio can articulate an ethnonationalist civilizational vision with full credit for strategic intentionality. AOC can’t articulate a class-based internationalist vision without being told she’s accidentally taking credit from a man named Marx.

But wait, this gets worse.

A misogynist architecture is functional infrastructure for the authoritarian aims of Trump. The mechanism by which the Rubio-Orbán story disappeared is a pile-on attack against a woman in politics. Every outlet — Fox, NYT, WaPo, Intelligencer, CNN — spent their Munich coverage budget on AOC.

The swimming test isn’t just unfair to the woman in the water. It’s a spectacle designed to keep the crowd’s eyes off the brazen criminals on shore.

And yet the liberal news also is misogynistic, and takes up the same cause. Ross Barkan in The Intelligencer spends the entire piece explaining what she should have said — which is, almost word for word, what she did say.

Barkan acknowledges that avoiding military conflict is the right position. He acknowledges that Americans don’t want to send troops overseas. He acknowledges that armed conflict with China could trigger nuclear war. He acknowledges that no other 2028 candidate would have answered better. And yet he frames her answer as a “stumble” that demonstrates she “hasn’t yet fully conceived a foreign-policy vision.”

Read his proposed answer: the U.S. should do everything possible to avoid conflict, deploying troops is a last resort, Americans don’t want another war, and any conflict with China could be catastrophic. Now read AOC’s actual answer: “we want to make sure that we never get to that point and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation.” These are the same position. The difference is delivery speed and the number of verbal fillers. Barkan is grading presentation, not substance, while claiming to grade substance.

In the final paragraph he admits the quiet part:

It’s not clear many other potential 2028 candidates would have delivered better answers than AOC, even if they may not have paused for so long.

So the issue isn’t what she said. It’s that she paused. He then lists Newsom, Shapiro, Whitmer, and Trump as equally unprepared on this question. But the article isn’t headlined “Democrats Have No Taiwan Policy.”

It’s headlined with AOC’s name. She carries the individual accountability for a collective gap — the swimming test again. If everyone would have failed, why is only she being tested?

What Barkan never mentions: Rubio’s functionally identical China hedge at the same conference. Rubio’s immediate trip to Budapest to endorse Orbán. The contradiction between Rubio’s own 2019 letter on Hungarian democratic erosion and his 2026 endorsement.

The fact that the Fox article sourced exclusively from partisan operatives. The Washington Post calling AOC’s discussion of oligarchic power “conspiratorial language” in the same week the Secretary of State was literally campaigning for an authoritarian. None of the structural context that would frame this as an asymmetric accountability operation rather than a discrete performance failure.

The misogynist outlets maintain their attacks on American women in leadership the same way a road crew maintains a highway without asking where it leads. The cost of the Rubio asymmetry is concrete — while everyone was grading AOC’s appearance, the Secretary of State was a total disaster, endorsing an authoritarian dismantling democracy in a NATO ally, and nobody headlined that.

Apparently they were too busy with their hate rally to notice.

A new PRRI report on Christian nationalist ideology has some important insights into the Trump administration base.

First, the correlation numbers are unmistakable. Trump favorability and Christian nationalism are r=0.80 and Republican legislative representation is r=0.75. That’s structural alignment. The ideology and political machinery are functionally the same thing measured in two different ways.

Second, authoritarian consolidation is growing by exhausting opposition. There’s no actual growth of the Christian nationalists, as instead there’s a consolidation of power by a small elite (similar to Hitler in 1933 rapidly dropping in popularity while seizing power). Adherent/Sympathizer numbers held steady at ~32%, but the people actively pushing back dropped from 32% to 26% over two years.

…State Department analysis noted that Hitler maintained control through “mass propaganda, backed by the energetic activity of the ‘Brown Shirts’, and with the tacit acquiescence of the Reichswehr.” Not popularity. Force plus institutional capitulation.

Third, decline in “Rejecters” may correlate to the political violence of Trump’s loyalists. A shocking 30% of Adherents supported political violence under Biden, yet they holstered their guns after Trump won. Violence is expressed purely as an instrument to take power, not any other principle. It’s strategic loyalty to an authoritarian who will end democracy, deployed when out of power, unneeded when in power.

Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, Vermont and Oregon give away the whole thing. Despite mega attempts to grow congregations, they are among the least churched states in the country with low evangelical density. Trump support requires disinformation methods about economic grievances, anti-establishment anger, rural resentment of urban governance. Theological propaganda isn’t as effective yet the Trump authoritarian trigger still hits.

The fourth point makes the first point far more alarming. The strong correlation means Christian nationalism is THE dominant authoritarian channel nationally despite two strong secular outliers pulling the number down. Vermont and Oregon prove that Trump disinformation channeled as Christianity isn’t required, yet nobody is bothering. The theological framework works too well. It remains the primary delivery mechanism to coordinate dangerous authoritarian nationalist cells.

The outliers also expose what Christian nationalism actually does functionally: it provides moral permission structure. Vermont and Oregon Trump voters have to justify their support through economic or anti-establishment arguments that can be challenged empirically. In comparison the Christian nationalists don’t because they believe God called them to exercise dominion, end of discussion.

The Trump fascist movement needs the theology even when the politics could theoretically stand alone. The theology makes their authoritarianism unfalsifiable.

And that brings us to why CBS just censored Rep. James Talarico, a man of the faith in Texas, running for Senate. Actual Christians completely destroy the Trumpistan plans driven by these nationalist groups.

Civil rights are enshrined in constitutional amendments and federal law. They’re not a partisan position.

A judge in Texas saying “I admire King”, while simultaneously ruling that an MLK image is too politically inflammatory for his courtroom, is a contradiction that only works when already you decided that the people invoking civil rights are the problem.

It’s racism from the bench.

Full context matters enormously here. This is for a case that the Trump government calls their first federal prosecution of people who oppose fascism. To be clear, the government’s official framing calls them an “antifa cell,” which means the prosecution literally is naming opposition to fascism as the crime.

The jury pool was already expressing anti-ICE and anti-Trump sentiments, adjacent to anti-fascism. Judge Pittman, appointed by Trump, was already frustrated with lawyers questioning the jury pool over the difference between noise, protests and riots, which goes directly to the defense theory. Then he noticed MLK on the defense lawyer’s shirt and used it as a procedural vehicle to reset the jury pool. The first one appeared hostile to Trump’s un-American fascism, so this judge threw them out.

None of the defense attorneys asked for a mistrial. The prosecution didn’t ask either. Judge Pittman declared one alone sua sponte, something he admitted he’d never done before, over a shirt depicting American civil rights leaders. And he’s now threatening to issue sanctions against the defense lawyer who wore it, notably, in honor of Jesse Jackson passing away that morning. It should have been a day of mourning. Instead this federal judge was so disturbed by the image of MLK in his courtroom that he blew up his own trial.

It’s racism from the bench.

This judge’s recent record is also important. We are talking about the same man who was found by the Fifth Circuit to have abused his discretion in sanctioning lawyers. He sanctioned another attorney in this very case last month. There’s a pattern of him using procedural authority to punish defense counsel in a politically charged prosecution.

Is it any wonder he was appointed by Trump to rule against anyone opposed to fascism?