The Trump Administration is Trafficking Pregnant Children to Texas So They Can't Get Abortions
At least half of these unaccompanied migrant kids are rape victims, and all are being denied adequate medical care for high-risk pregnancies in a state with sky-high maternal mortality rates.
As part of its strategy of arresting and warehousing immigrants in abhorrent conditions which are leading to illness and even death, the Trump administration is grabbing up pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children from across the country and shipping them off to Texas so that they can’t get safe and legal abortions — and where they also don’t get adequate medical care.
This is an administration rule: If an undocumented child is pregnant, she goes to a single South Texas shelter in San Benito, where abortion is outlawed and where she will be hours away from the large hospitals that have the kind of specialized obstetric care that pregnant girls need. The girls are being sent to Texas specifically because Texas bans abortion, and moving them there means that they won’t be able to end their pregnancies.
There are reportedly more than a dozen pregnant girls currently being held at this center. Before this policy was put into place, pregnant children who were in the US illegally and without a guardian would be sent to trained foster families or specialized facilities; not anymore. The directive came from Angie Salazar, the director of refugee resettlement, but was pulled directly from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan.
Let’s first wrap our minds around the phrase “pregnant children.” These are mostly rape victims, some as young as 13. Adolescent pregnancies are by definition high risk — pregnancy is a leading cause of death for adolescent girls worldwide. And these are children who are scared and alone, who have traveled very far from home and faced all kinds of trauma and violence along the way (including, often, rape). They are without their parents and facing a life-altering and potentially deadly medical situation that is terrifying in the best of circumstances; they are in the worst of circumstances. They are still going through puberty, which means their bodies are not ready to give birth. They may have sexually transmitted infections from being raped, which can complicate deliveries. And after having control over every aspect of their lives stripped away, from where they live to what has happened to them sexually, the Trump administration is committing what I would qualify as tantamount to a second rape: Saying, just like a rapist does, your body is not yours, and I will do with it what I want.
