Immigrants who live illegally in southern Texas — and even some legal residents — are struggling to obtain abortions, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a new report Wednesday.
The ACLU said the state’s strict laws mean those seeking to terminate a pregnancy usually travel elsewhere. That’s not so easy for immigrants without documentation who run the risk of getting snared by Border Patrol checkpoints set up on major roads leading away from the border.
It’s also a problem for residents who travel with the migrants, the group said.
Someone driving from Laredo over the state border into Las Cruces, New Mexico, might have to go through six checkpoints, the ACLU said, calling the result a “chilling effect” on immigrant women.
“Some young women are afraid to even travel to a clinic to access their birth control for fear of immigration questioning,” said Lucie Arvallo, executive director of Jane’s Due Process, which works to connect women with birth control or abortion services.
Texas imposes strict limits on abortions, prohibiting the practice save for instances when the woman would die or face severe injury from continuing the pregnancy.
That has sent Texas women fleeing to other states. Nearly three-quarters of abortions performed in New Mexico last year were for out-of-state women, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The ACLU said that could mean a 12-hour, one-way drive for some Texas residents. That burden is compounded for migrants who must run the gantlet of Border Patrol checkpoints.
“Federal interior checkpoints, state anti-immigrant policing and extreme abortion bans combine to create an unnecessary, stressful and dangerous web of barriers to abortion care for people living in border communities,” said Sarah Mehta, senior border policy counsel at the ACLU.
The ACLU urged the Biden administration to stand down on checkpoint enforcement when people are seeking essential care.
The Washington Times reached out to Homeland Security for this story.
Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the checkpoints exist for security reasons. She called the ACLU’s demand “shocking.”
“People who are here illegally and are detected at a checkpoint should be removed from the country. They should not expect to get a free pass to travel throughout the country,” she said. “The truth is that the ACLU wants the entire country to be a safe pace for illegal immigration and this is just another opportunity for them to chip away at what few controls are left for border security.”
She suggested the immigrants along the border in Texas who want to obtain abortions can cross into Mexico, where it has been decriminalized at the national level and some states have fully legalized it in the first trimester.
“These women are not without options, and they’ve complicated their lives by deciding to live here illegally,” Ms. Vaughan said.
Homeland Security does have a sensitive locations policy that prohibits immigration enforcement near schools, hospitals, clinics and other places where people go for services. But the ACLU said that policy doesn’t mean much to border residents who must go through checkpoints to access those services.
Under the law, checkpoints can operate within 100 miles of the border. Agents are authorized to verify the legal status of those traveling and to stop drug smuggling.
They act as a sort of secondary wall, hindering immigrants who made it across the border illegally and want to go deeper into the U.S.
They also create a pocket of migrants who did make it across but are afraid of going deeper.
Immigration and Texas abortion policy have clashed before, particularly in the case of immigrant children who cross the border illegally and without their parents.
Known as unaccompanied alien children, or UACs, they are usually transferred to the Health and Human Services Department for care while the government seeks sponsors to take them in. The Biden administration has been placing pregnant UAC girls in shelters outside of Texas so they can have easy access to abortions if they want them.
Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, has been prodding the Biden administration over that policy.
“The Biden administration is obsessed with increasing abortion on demand and making our border less secure,” Mr. Lankford’s spokesperson said Wednesday.
During the Trump administration, HHS was less lenient on UAC abortion seekers and created new hurdles for them. The ACLU and other immigration advocates challenged that policy, arguing it infringed on the immigrants’ constitutional rights to an abortion.
The Trump administration argued in court that the government had no obligation to facilitate abortions for migrants, adding that girls who wanted one could agree to leave the U.S. for it.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected that argument, finding that the migrant girls had a constitutional right to abortions that would be abrogated by being forced to leave the U.S., often to return to countries with even more restrictive rules.
That case happened before the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the issue to states.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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