Anabell is free — but she still cannot see the medical file from the eight months that changed her life. In a new urgent action dated November 2, 2026, Amnesty International demanded that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) immediately release the medical records of the 35-year-old asylum seeker from Nicaragua, who was released from detention on October 30 after a judge ruled her arrest unlawful. Amnesty says that without those records she cannot fully understand the treatment she received in custody, or what happened to her pregnancy.

Source: Amnesty International, Nov 2 2026

Her detention began on February 25, 2026, when ICE agents arrested her following a routine check-in — the kind of appointment asylum seekers are required to attend while their cases move forward. She was taken to the Campbell County Detention Center in Newport, Kentucky. Soon after her arrest, during a medical examination, two pregnancy tests came back positive, the Guardian reported from her account: she learned she was pregnant inside detention.

Eight months inside, as reported by Amnesty and the Guardian

According to Amnesty International's urgent-action documents and the Guardian's investigation, Anabell received no prenatal care and no prenatal vitamins in detention despite federal policies requiring them, and she was made to carry heavy objects. In late March, after she submitted an urgent medical request describing severe bleeding and significant pain, she was taken to an outside hospital. She learned she was no longer pregnant while shackled to an emergency-room bed, through a Spanish interpreter on the phone, according to the Guardian's reporting of her account. These are her and her lawyers' accounts as reported by Amnesty and the Guardian; ICE's response to them is addressed below.

After she returned to the detention center, Amnesty says, she experienced continuing pain, numbness, vomiting and hair loss with little follow-up medical attention, and she was placed in solitary confinement twice. Her attorneys last spoke with her on September 9, Amnesty reported in its September action, and said her physical and mental state was seriously declining.

The fight over her own medical records

The records dispute is older than her release. According to Amnesty's urgent-action documents, her attorneys requested her medical records twice in April 2026 and again in June, and members of Congress requested them in July — and the facility refused to provide them. That refusal is why Amnesty's November 2 action, issued after she walked free, is aimed squarely at the records: the organization says ICE must hand them over immediately so she can understand the treatment she received and pursue the obstetric and medical care she still needs. In the reporting reviewed for this story, ICE had not publicly answered Amnesty's November 2 demand.

The wider picture: pregnant women in ICE detention

Her case sits inside a much larger pattern that the Guardian documented through government records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. ICE recorded at least 18 miscarriages in its detention centers between January and September 2025, but its data stops on October 3, 2025: internal documents attributed the gap to a change in the agency's medical billing system, after ICE ended its contract with the Veterans Affairs Financial Services Center and a private company, Acentra Health, took over claims processing. Data released by the Department of Homeland Security after a Senate inquiry, cited by Amnesty, shows ICE deported at least 363 pregnant, postpartum or nursing women between January 1, 2025 and February 16, 2026, and that 2,686 pregnant women were in ICE custody as of mid-February 2026, including nine in their final trimester. A 2021 ICE directive instructs the agency to avoid detaining pregnant people except in exceptional circumstances; in more than a dozen cases reviewed by the Guardian, attorneys said they received no clear explanation of how that test was met.

Source: The Guardian, via Amnesty International urgent-action documents

What happens next

The immediate question is narrow and concrete: whether ICE releases the records. Amnesty's campaign continues until they are handed over, and her lawyers' earlier requests — and those of members of Congress — remain on the record if the dispute moves into court or Congress again. For the Punjabi and wider immigrant communities who read this site, the practical lesson is the one her case makes plain: keep your own copies of every medical and legal document at every check-in, because getting them back afterwards can take months of pressure. Awaaz Punjab will update this story if ICE responds to the November 2 demand.