US Deports 8-Month Pregnant Woman Despite Urgent Medical Emergency

ATLANTA – U.S. immigration authorities deported a 21-year-old Colombian woman on Wednesday, despite her being eight months pregnant and in critical medical condition.

Zharick Daniela Buitrago Ortiz was scheduled for a return flight to Colombia on Wednesday afternoon. Her attorney, Anthony Enriquez, said he is filing a lawsuit to halt the deportation and ensure she receives urgent medical care.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed the deportation was proceeding.

Ortiz and her mother entered Texas in November to seek asylum, claiming Ortiz’s father was murdered after publicly speaking out against corruption. While her mother was permitted to continue her application, Ortiz was denied and issued an expedited removal order.

Enriquez alleged that the Trump administration frequently detains and deports pregnant women in violation of existing policies. He further claimed that authorities denied Ortiz medical attention despite her experiencing severe pain, nausea, and vomiting.

The case of Zharick Ortiz is emblematic of a pivot toward an uncompromising, enforcement-first immigration policy under the Trump administration. The expedited removal of a woman in the late stages of pregnancy, despite obvious medical risks, signals that high-level mandates for rapid expulsion are now systematically outweighing humanitarian discretion.

This case exposes a critical disconnect between stated policy and operational reality. While formal guidelines have historically restricted the detention of pregnant women, Ortiz’s deportation suggests those protections have been effectively neutralized by top-down directives to accelerate removals at any cost.

Beyond immediate enforcement, the case highlights a broader strategic offensive against birthright citizenship. By ensuring removals occur before a child can be born on U.S. soil, the administration is operationalizing its long-standing opposition to the 14th Amendment. This turns a constitutional debate into a physical deterrent, leveraging the timing of deportation to preemptively block a child’s path to citizenship—even at the risk of the mother's and infant’s safety.

Furthermore, the divergent outcomes between Ortiz and her mother reflect an increasingly erratic and stringent application of asylum standards. The inconsistency suggests that initial credible fear interviews and screening processes are being weaponized as a tool of exclusion rather than a mechanism for protection, underscoring a broader narrowing of the U.S. asylum window.

This development has sparked widespread concern across immigrant communities, echoing through the phở restaurants and nail salons of Little Saigon. For many Vietnamese-Americans, the shift toward more aggressive enforcement underscores the inherent fragility of the asylum process and suggests that humanitarian considerations are increasingly being sidelined in favor of rigid policy objectives. For families navigating the complexities of the system—whether they are awaiting F2B family reunions or managing the nuances of H-1B, EB-5, or TPS status—this case serves as a sobering reminder of the legal precarity and uncertainty that many still face.