Leya called 911 in July 2025 after her boyfriend punched her in the face, a few feet from their month-old daughter. Deputies photographed her bruised face and arrested him.

Nine months later, in Michigan, he called the police on her during an argument. This time officers arrested Leya. Kent County's jail honored an ICE request to hold her. A day later she was in an immigration detention center 80 miles away, separated from the baby she was still nursing. On video calls, her daughter stopped calling her "Mamá."

She was never convicted of anything. That's the story ProPublica tells about a group of women locked up together at the North Lake Processing Center in west Michigan — women who say they were victims of abuse, not abusers, and who ended up in ICE custody anyway.

What the administration changed

For decades, bipartisan coalitions in Congress have supported the Violence Against Women Act, which gives immigrant victims of domestic violence and other serious crimes a path to legal status. Past administrations, in ProPublica's words, "treated victims as just that, people who needed help, not as targets for deportation."

The Trump administration ended that in its first weeks:

• On Inauguration Day, it rescinded the guidelines that largely kept immigration agents from making arrests at sensitive places — including domestic violence shelters and hospitals.
• About a week later, it eliminated key protections for people applying under the Violence Against Women Act and for other crime victims. For the first time in decades, immigration authorities could more freely arrest, detain and deport them.

Federal agents have since made arrests outside specialized domestic violence courts. And the administration has pushed more local police and jails into its deportation campaign.

How a victim ends up in a cell

The trap works like this. In much of the country, police are encouraged — and in 24 states, required — to arrest someone when they have reason to believe a domestic assault happened. Scenes are chaotic, both people accuse each other, and sometimes the victim is the one in handcuffs. If she's an immigrant, the jail can hand her to ICE — even if prosecutors never file a charge.

All three women in one chain of phone calls an immigration attorney received in May said they had been trying to get out of abusive relationships when local police arrested them. In all three cases, the charges were dropped or never filed. One was picked up by ICE at a routine check-in after her case was dropped. Local officials handed the other two directly to ICE.

Kent County, where Leya was arrested, doesn't even have a formal agreement to help ICE. Its sheriff announced in 2019 that the jail would stop automatically honoring ICE holds after a U.S. citizen — a Marine combat veteran — was transferred into ICE custody. Yet in the first six months of 2026, the county jail turned over more immigrants to ICE than it did during the entire Biden administration, according to ProPublica.

The result: abuse goes unreported

Advocates across the country told ProPublica they are seeing signs of an alarming increase in domestic violence victims being detained and deported — and many immigrants staying with their abusers rather than risk calling the police.

"It's just probably the most dangerous time for immigrant women right now who are victims of domestic violence," said Migladys Bermudez, the Michigan attorney who took Leya's case.

"Certainly more immigrant survivors are feeling like the violence and abuse they experience behind the closed door is somehow more tolerable than the violence and abuse they could experience if they tried to leave," said Casey Carter Swegman of the Tahirih Justice Center, which advocates for immigrant survivors.

Advocates told ProPublica that makes whole communities less safe, because immigrants are afraid to call the police when their partners hurt them.

The White House's answer

Asked about it, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said ICE is targeting the "worst of the worst." A Homeland Security spokesperson said: "we will never apologize for deporting illegal aliens, because that's how we save lives."

But Leya and Pilar, another woman at North Lake who says her boyfriend physically assaulted her, have no criminal records.

A coalition of survivors and advocates sued. In May, a federal judge ordered the government to restore the protections while the case goes forward. The administration has appealed.

Who votes for this

Congress funded the machine doing this. House Republicans passed $70 billion for ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the rest of DHS by two votes, without a single Republican voting no — and with no rules on how it behaves. Some of them have been against protecting abuse victims all along: Trent Kelly, a former prosecutor, voted twice against the Violence Against Women Act.

The facts, in short

Within its first weeks, the Trump administration let immigration agents make arrests at domestic violence shelters and dropped key protections for immigrants applying for legal status as abuse victims. ProPublica found women in a Michigan ICE detention center who say they were trying to escape abusers, were arrested by local police on domestic violence calls, and were handed to ICE even though their charges were dropped or never filed. A federal judge ordered the protections restored in May; the administration is appealing.

Source

Immigrants Seeking Help for Domestic Abuse Are Getting Detained by ICE — ProPublica