Captive and Pregnant: How the Trump Regime Is Denying Abortions to Migrant Children

There is a quiet building in San Benito, Texas, a converted tan-brick Baptist church on a city block near the southern border, where the federal government has been sending every pregnant child in its immigration custody since July 2025. Children’s lawn toys and playground equipment are visible behind a wooden fence. A guard stands at the entrance. Neighbors rarely see the girls inside.

The facility is hours from any major city. The region around it lacks the specialized obstetric infrastructure that high-risk pregnancies require. The state in which it sits bans abortion in nearly all circumstances, including in cases of rape and incest. None of that appears to be a coincidence.

According to a six-month joint investigation by The California Newsroom and The Texas Newsroom, and confirmed by additional reporting from NPR, Houston Public Media, and the Immigration Policy Tracking Project, the Trump administration has been deliberately routing every pregnant unaccompanied minor in federal custody to this single location, a policy enacted over the explicit objections of the government’s own health and child welfare officials, carried out in secret, and now being actively defended with statements that multiple former officials call flatly untrue.[1]

“This is 100% and exclusively about abortion,” said Jonathan White, a former senior federal health official who ran the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s unaccompanied children program during part of Trump’s first term.[2]

He is not alone in that assessment. He is joined by more than a dozen former government officials, health care professionals, civil rights attorneys, and migrant advocates, as well as by current ORR staff, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, who believe the administration has engineered a policy of geographic imprisonment designed to deny vulnerable children a legal medical option without ever having to formally deny it.[1]

Who These Children Are

To understand what is happening in San Benito, it is necessary to understand who is being held there.

Unaccompanied minors in federal immigration custody are, by definition, children who have crossed the border without a parent or legal guardian. Under the law, they fall under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for their safety, housing, and medical care until they can be released to a sponsor, turn 18, or face deportation.[1]

Pregnant unaccompanied minors are, in the words of one current ORR official, “our most vulnerable” population.[2] Their pregnancies are classified as high risk by definition. The typical age of pregnant unaccompanied minors in federal custody is 15 or 16, though they can be younger. The youngest girls currently being held at the San Benito facility are 13 years old.[1]

At least half of those detained there became pregnant as a result of rape.[1] Many do not learn they are pregnant at all until they undergo a medical examination under ORR care. Jonathan White, who spent years running the program, has noted that the government does not formally track the prevalence of sexual assault among unaccompanied girls, but that outside organizations estimate the rate to be between 80 and 90 percent. “When I was in the program,” White said, “about half of the pregnant girls related that their pregnancy was a result of sexual abuse or sexual assault, either in home country or in transit.”[1]

These are not abstract statistics. They are children. They are high school sophomores and juniors, and younger, who have survived persecution, dangerous border crossings, and, in the majority of cases, sexual violence. They are now held by the federal government. And the federal government has placed them, deliberately, in the one American state where they have the least legal recourse over what happens to their bodies next.

The Directive: A Single Email, Issued in Secret

The paper trail begins on July 22, 2025.

On that date, ORR Acting Director Angie Salazar sent an internal email instructing agency staff to send “any pregnant children” to the San Benito facility, operated by a for-profit contractor called Urban Strategies.[2] An internal copy of that email was obtained by The California Newsroom and The Texas Newsroom as part of their six-month investigation. Its contents were never announced publicly. No press release was issued. No official policy change was formally registered with oversight bodies.

The ORR officials who received the directive said they were never given a reason for it.[2] They were not told why all pregnant minors needed to be concentrated in a single location. They were not told why that location was San Benito specifically, rather than any of the dozens of other ORR facilities across the country equipped to care for pregnant minors, including twelve in Texas alone.[3] They were simply told to send the girls there.

“Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety,” one official told the joint newsrooms.[2] Current ORR staff said they are “losing sleep over it, wondering if kids are going to be placed in programs where they’re not going to have access to the care they need.”[2]

The move broke sharply from longstanding federal practice, which had distributed pregnant unaccompanied minors among various facilities across the country specifically to ensure access to the specialized obstetric care that high-risk pregnancies demand.[2]

The Facility: Medically Inadequate by the Government’s Own Assessment

The San Benito facility is not uncontroversial within the federal government. ORR officials have described it as medically risky, and those assessments predate the July 2025 directive.[3]

The building itself is an old converted church in a quiet border town of approximately 25,000 people. It is operated by Urban Strategies, a for-profit contractor whose founder and president, Lisa Cummins, directed all questions about the facility’s ORR contract to the federal government when contacted by reporters.[3] An ORR spokesperson, meanwhile, pointed reporters to Urban Strategies. The result is a circle of deflection, with no party willing to answer substantive questions about who determined the facility was suitable for concentrating the nation’s entire population of detained pregnant minors.

What is not in dispute is the facility’s geographic isolation. The nearest major cities, where Texas’s remaining specialized obstetric care is concentrated, are hours away.[3] Medical emergencies involving pregnancy complications can develop and deteriorate in minutes. Internal ORR officials who spoke with The California Newsroom and The Texas Newsroom said they feel they are “just waiting for something terrible to happen.”[3]

Since the July order, several of the girls have given birth and remain detained at the facility with their infants.[3] None have yet experienced major recorded medical emergencies, but ORR officials are emphatic that this is a matter of fortune, not policy adequacy. As one put it: the facility is “only one high-risk pregnancy away from catastrophe.”[3]

The Strategy: What Project 2025 Planned, and What Is Now Being Executed

The San Benito directive did not emerge from a vacuum. It has a documented intellectual lineage that leads directly through the administration’s pre-election policy planning.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s governing blueprint for the second Trump administration, explicitly called for ORR to stop facilitating abortions for children in its care. It went further, advising the government not to detain unaccompanied children in states where abortion is available. Such a change was possible, Project 2025 argued, because the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision had eliminated the constitutional right to abortion that had previously constrained such policies.[4]

That analysis was correct in one narrow sense: before Dobbs, any attempt to deny pregnant minors in federal custody access to abortion could be challenged on constitutional grounds. The ACLU had done exactly that in 2017, filing a class action lawsuit against then-ORR director Scott Lloyd after he denied girls in custody permission to end their pregnancies, required them to attend counseling emphasizing the benefits of motherhood and the harms of abortion, and personally intervened to persuade individual girls to continue their pregnancies.[3] The court ultimately compelled the government to connect girls to reproductive health services. Lloyd, for his part, said he was “treating all of the children in ORR care with dignity, including the unborn children.”[3]

Jonathan White, who served in government alongside Lloyd, is direct about what the new policy represents: “The administration tried and failed to restrict abortion access for unaccompanied minors in 2017. Now they casually roll out what they brutally fought to accomplish last time and didn’t.”[2]

The mechanism has simply been updated. Rather than denying abortion through direct order, which could be litigated, the administration is denying it through geography. A girl placed in San Benito, Texas, does not need to be refused an abortion. Texas refuses it for the government. The administration never needs to say no. It simply needs to keep her there.

“It’s a choice to ensure zero abortions,” White said. “As long as she is in Texas, she can’t access an abortion, without a federal official needing to deny her an abortion.”[1]

The Regulatory Dismantling Running in Parallel

The geographic strategy is not the only mechanism being deployed. Simultaneously, the administration has moved to eliminate the regulatory framework that previously required ORR to ensure pregnant minors had access to the medical care they needed, including abortion services.

Under 45 CFR 410.1307, ORR was required to transfer pregnant minors to facilities where their healthcare needs could be met, or alternatively to arrange transportation to access such services, including across state lines, even in cases where federal appropriations law prevented ORR from directly funding the abortion itself.[5] The administration is now working to rescind that regulation.

If the rescission is finalized, ORR would be relieved of any formal legal obligation to ensure that a 13-year-old rape survivor in its custody can access reproductive healthcare at all, regardless of which state she is held in.

Liz Wagner, senior federal policy counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the combined strategy what it is: “It’s beyond cruel to trap these girls, some who are victims of sexual assault, in a state where they have no choice over whether to remain pregnant and become mothers. Everyone deserves the right to make these fundamental decisions for themselves.”[6]

The Government’s Defense, and Why It Doesn’t Hold

When The California Newsroom and The Texas Newsroom asked HHS whether the administration was sending pregnant children to San Benito to restrict their access to abortion, spokesperson Emily Hilliard said the allegation was “completely inaccurate.” In a subsequent statement, the department said ORR’s placement decisions are “guided by child welfare best practices and are designed to ensure each child is housed in the safest, most developmentally appropriate setting.”[2]

The government’s own officials, those who work inside ORR, rejected that framing without equivocation. “ORR is supposed to be a child welfare organization,” one said. “Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety.”[2]

The administration’s additional claim, that the San Benito facility has a “long-standing record of delivering high-quality care,” is contradicted by ORR officials’ own characterization of it as medically risky, and by its demonstrated geographic isolation from specialized care.[3] The ORR spokesperson noted that more than 100 pregnant unaccompanied minors were placed at the facility during the Biden administration, a claim that advocates and former officials say misrepresents the nature of those placements, none of which, they note, involved the deliberate concentration of the entire national population of pregnant detainees in a single location, in a single state, for the stated purpose of child welfare.[6]

There is also the question of the Flores Settlement Agreement, the 1997 legal accord that governs how children must be treated in U.S. immigration custody and includes the right to access comprehensive reproductive health services. The settlement remains in effect. Whether the San Benito policy violates it is a question that civil rights attorneys are actively examining.[1]

The Human Reality Behind the Policy

Diana Romero, professor and director of the Center on Immigrant, Refugee and Global Health at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health, describes the administration’s approach in terms that cut through the policy language: forcing any individual to carry a pregnancy to term is an “egregious” violation of rights, she said. Relocating girls from across the country to states with the most restrictive abortion laws “adds a whole other layer of concern.”[1]

Romero also placed the policy within a broader historical pattern: there is a long history in the United States of the reproductive rights of people of color, particularly Black, Latina, and Native American women, being violated by the government. The current policy, she said, represents a continuation of that history, compounded by the additional vulnerabilities that undocumented immigrant status creates.[1]

White offered perhaps the plainest moral assessment: “These are not grown women. They’re little girls. Making the decision for these girls whether they will give birth to their rapist’s baby is an extraordinary human rights problem. Everyone attempts to write their politics on the bodies of these children.”[1]

“Surely,” he said, “a 16-year-old who has been abused and wants to terminate that pregnancy should not be prevented by the federal government from doing so. Because she can’t get to it. They’re literally holding her prisoner.”[1]

What Happens Next

The administration’s regulatory dismantling of ORR’s healthcare requirements continues. The ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights are among the organizations reviewing legal options, though the post-Dobbs landscape has substantially narrowed the grounds on which such a challenge could proceed in federal court. The Flores Settlement remains the most direct legal instrument available, and civil rights attorneys are said to be examining the San Benito concentration policy against its terms.[1]

No congressional hearings have been announced. HHS has not responded to requests for information about how the San Benito facility was assessed for suitability, who approved the July 22 directive beyond Acting Director Salazar, or what medical protocols are in place for obstetric emergencies.

Inside ORR, the officials who spoke anonymously to the joint newsrooms said they continue to do their jobs. They have not been told to stop worrying. They have not been given better answers. They are waiting, in their words, for something terrible to happen.

It has not happened yet. That is the only thing the government can truthfully claim in defense of what it has built in San Benito.

Citations

1. Betancourt, Mark. “Pregnant Migrant Girls Are Being Sent to a Texas Shelter Flagged as Medically Risky.” The Texas Newsroom and The California Newsroom, published via Houston Public Media, February 11, 2026. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2026/02/11/543133/texas-trump-immigration-pregnant-migrants-shelter/
2. Betancourt, Mark. “Pregnant Migrant Girls Are Being Sent to a Texas Shelter Flagged as Medically Risky.” NPR, March 3, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/03/nx-s1-5712323/pregnant-migrant-girls-texas-shelter
3. “Pregnant Migrant Girls Are Being Sent to a Texas Shelter Flagged as Medically Risky.” OPB / NPR, March 4, 2026. https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/04/pregnant-migrant-girls-are-being-sent-to-1-facility-in-texas/
4. “ORR Moves Pregnant Unaccompanied Minors to a Facility in Texas with Restrictions on Abortion Access.” Immigration Policy Tracking Project, updated March 2026. https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/trump-administration-moves-pregnant-minors-in-immigration-detention-to-states-with-restrictions-on-abortion-access/
5. Immigration Policy Tracking Project, citing 45 CFR 410.1307, ORR regulations on healthcare access for unaccompanied minors. https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/trump-administration-moves-pregnant-minors-in-immigration-detention-to-states-with-restrictions-on-abortion-access/
6. “Pregnant Migrant Minors Moved to Texas to Avoid Abortions, Critics Argue.” NewsNation, February 2026. https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/immigration/pregnant-migrant-minors-texas-abortions/