The putrid smell emanating from breakfast turned Daniela’s stomach, which wailed internally from hunger and nausea. For months, she had lived mostly on bread and the pantry items she could cobble together from the commissary in her ICE detention facility. Pregnant and trapped at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, she felt the gnawing of hunger and isolation.

“This is not a place for me,” Daniela, whose name has been changed to protect her from retaliation from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in Spanish in a message to The Intercept.

She’d been having abdominal pain, and she caught Covid in early September. According to Amanda Heffernan, a nurse midwife and professor at Seattle University who reviewed Daniela’s medical records at her request, for r

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