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Not a night has gone by over the past year that Gary Bivens hasn’t thought of the son he never got to meet.
The baby’s ashes rest on his bedside table. He’s keeping them there until he is able to reunite with his partner, Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus, so they can bury them together.
“That's where he stays till I can get him to Guatemala,” Bivens said.
It was just over a year ago when Monterroso-Lemus lost her mid-term pregnancy while in ICE custody at the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana.
“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 last year.
Monterroso-Lemus was arrested in Lenoir City, Tenn., for missing a court hearing related to a child custody case, then detained by ICE in March 2025. Her story garnered national attention after the Banner reported on Monterroso-Lemus’ experience in detention. After losing her pregnancy, Monterroso-Lemus was deported.
Since May 9, 2025, she has been back in Guatemala, a country she had not called home in more than a decade. Bivens has not seen her since she was transferred to ICE custody last March.
She now lives in a small home in Petén, a sparsely populated rural region in northern Guatemala, without reliable electricity or running water. But distance, she said, has done little to dull the memories of the nights she spent inside Richwood Correctional Center.
“Here, water only comes twice a week. The floors are dirt. There’s no bathroom,” she told the Banner. “The sadness is swallowing me. I’ve fallen into a deep depression.”
Her grief has been compounded by separation from her other three children: Aaron, Walter and Margarita. They remain in Lenoir City under the care of her mother.
As the Trump administration intensifies its immigration crackdown, reports of women losing pregnancies while in detention have mounted. Department of Homeland Security data shows 16 recorded miscarriages in custody between Jan. 1, 2025, and Feb. 16, 2026. During that same period, ICE deported 363 pregnant, postpartum, or nursing women.
A harrowing experience
Last year Monterroso-Lemus told the Banner that while detained at Richwood Correctional Center, a facility with a long history of documented abuse, she was neglected and denied proper medical care during her pregnancy.
She said detainees often were served inadequate food, sometimes containing cockroaches, and described mistreatment and belittlement by 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?”
More than a month after the Banner published its story, ICE issued a press release, despite previously declining to comment because of privacy concerns. In it, ICE disputed Monterroso-Lemus’ claims. The agency said she received “prenatal care, including an ultrasound and OB-GYN visit, dental care, and medication.” However, clinical notes reviewed by the Banner state the pregnancy was “complicated by no PNC,” a medical abbreviation indicating no prenatal care. The notes also confirm that Monterroso-Lemus gave birth while under constant guard supervision.
Bivens and his attorneys are still seeking her medical records from Richwood Correctional Center to verify what care she received.
In its release, ICE also said Monterroso-Lemus was wanted on an active homicide warrant. Documents reviewed by the Banner show she was charged in a homicide case in Guatemala in 2011 and that the charges were later dropped.
Delayed grief
Monterroso-Lemus and Bivens first met as neighbors in Lenoir City, outside Knoxville.
After Bivens’ first wife died several years ago, he said Monterroso-Lemus helped carry him through one of the darkest periods of his life. They fell in love and planned to marry. Then, she was detained.
For more than a year, they have had to mourn the first son they would have had together from different countries, thousands of miles apart. In that time, both said they have sought treatment for depression.
The baby's ashes sit on Gary Bivens' bedside table. Bivens now plans to leave the United States permanently and move to Guatemala as soon as he can afford to transport their belongings, his welder tools and a generator. But he estimates the cost to make all of that happen is tens of thousands of dollars. He has started a GoFundMe to help cover the costs of transporting their belongings and their son’s ashes.
“I just want to get him back to her,” Bivens said. “She’s very much wanting to have a proper burial. So do I.”
He had hoped to visit Guatemala late last year, but postponed the trip after learning he did not have the proper documentation to travel with the baby’s remains.
Since her deportation, the couple’s relationship has been reduced to phone calls and unstable video connections. Power outages and severe weather in Petén often interrupt their conversations.
“We only see each other via video call, but that’s not the same,” Monterroso-Lemus said. “I tell him that I miss him. I miss him helping me around the house in the morning, and that on Sundays he would bring me coffee in bed. He was so affectionate.”
Monterroso-Lemus said her days are now quiet and mundane. She starts her mornings tending to her nearly 30 chickens, making sure they have food, and spends the rest of the day trying to pass the time.
Life in Petén bears little resemblance to the life the two had been building in Tennessee. Monterroso-Lemus worries Bivens may struggle to adapt to a place without many of the conveniences he has known in the U.S. However, for Bivens, America has lost its way and no longer feels like home.
“I'm ready. Passport in hand. I've got everything,” he said. “I've finally got all the documentation. I'm ready to move on and be with the woman I love. We might have a lot of comfort in the United States … but, I'll pick the person I love. We'll give all that up.”
Calls for protections
Earlier this month, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) introduced the Updated Pregnant Women in Custody Act after reports of miscarriages and allegations of neglect inside ICE detention centers. The bill would establish federal standards for the care of pregnant and postpartum people in custody, expanding protections to facilities run by ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Monterroso-Lemus’ case was among those that drew Kamlage-Dove’s attention.
“These are grotesquely disturbing stories. But the unfortunate thing is that they are far more common than they should be,” Kamlager-Dove told the Banner.
She criticized the Trump administration for reversing Biden-era policies that limited deportations of pregnant, postpartum and nursing women.
“The only reason why you would do that is because you are cruel, and un-Christian,” she said.
The latest available data on pregnant women in ICE custody comes from a Department of Homeland Security response to a Sept. 18, 2025, letter from U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and other lawmakers, but it only runs through mid-February 2026. Without updated data, Kamlager-Dove said the full scope of the issue remains unknown.
She said she’ll keep working to get the bill approved.
“As we consider reconciliation bills and other measures that come before us, if we can squeeze it into a larger bill, we're certainly going to try,” she said. “And if we can't, we're going to continue to talk about it and gin up the necessary support, to try to get it passed, after November when hopefully, we get the gavels back.”
When told about the proposed legislation, Monterroso-Lemus paused.
“Well, that would be good, wouldn’t it? So that the same thing that happened to me, won’t happen again,” she said.
Still, she said she’s not convinced things will get better anytime soon.
“Maybe things will never change, because that’s how it is, when you don’t have papers. They don’t listen to you. They take you out like you don’t have a heart, like you don’t have children, like you don’t have a family. They send you away like that. They don’t put their hand on their heart.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
As we honor those who have served our country and made the ultimate sacrifice, it is also heartening to see the military right a wrong. Chris Davis brings us the moving story of a Purple Heart ceremony two decades in the making. It's worth a watch.
A heartfelt thanks to all who bravely serve.
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