Immigration officials enact policy regarding new mothers

Sayda Umanzor’s baby cried incessantly for several days as she went without breast milk.

CLEVELAND (AP) — Immigration officials have enacted a policy regarding breast-feeding mothers days after a woman in northeastern Ohio was arrested and separated from her crying baby.

Sayda Umanzor admitted being in America illegally when deputy sheriffs and federal agents knocked on the door of a house in Conneaut on Oct. 26.

The 27-year-old woman was breast-feeding her 9-month-old daughter, Brittany, at the time, and the baby cried as her mother and father were led away.

“It was like a piece of me was torn away,” Umanzor said Thursday, speaking through an interpreter.

The baby cried incessantly over the next several days as she went without breast milk, and Umanzor suffered soreness from engorged breasts.

Greg Palmore, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, said the agency had been working on a policy regarding breast-feeding mothers and it was approved Wednesday.

“It basically ensures that you take humanitarian issues involving nursing moms into consideration,” he said Friday. “It also ensures we make contact with state social service agencies to address caregiver issues.”

In Umanzor’s case, she was incarcerated initially in Bedford Heights Jail, which contracts with ICE to hold the agency’s detainees. The jail did not know it had a nursing mother until Monday, when Lucia Stone, a Spanish-speaking representative of the La Leche League of Ohio, alerted them, said jail commander William Schultz.

He said his personnel then accepted a breast pump and tried to work with local Spanish-speaking mothers to get milk to the baby, but the two sides failed to connect, and the milk had to be dumped.