Trump and Now-Ousted Noem Have Used Immigration Enforcement as a Weapon Against Reproductive Freedom - Reproductive Freedom for All®

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Trump and Now-Ousted Noem Have Used Immigration Enforcement as a Weapon Against Reproductive Freedom

TO: Interested Parties

FROM: Reproductive Freedom for All

RE: Trump and Now-Ousted Noem Have Used Immigration Enforcement as a Weapon Against Reproductive Freedom

DATE: Friday, March 6, 2026

Trump and Now-Ousted Noem Have Used Immigration Enforcement as a Weapon Against Reproductive Freedom

Yesterday, on the heels of two days of combative congressional hearing appearances, Trump fired Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary and is tapping anti-immigrant, anti-reproductive freedom Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) as her replacement, pending Senate confirmation. As Secretary, Noem caused irreparable damage to immigrant families and communities across the country. Under her watch, federal agents have shot 13 people—killing four—during immigration enforcement operations since September. She weaponized her agency to violate human rights, intimidate pregnant migrant people out of accessing care, and—in partnership with officials at HHS—to systemically deny abortion access to pregnant children in federal custody. While there will be a new head of DHS, this administration’s inhumane anti-immigrant agenda is unchanged.

Reproductive freedom and safety are inseparable—and the Trump administration has spent the past year demonstrating that with relentless cruelty. The same administration that has systematically attacked reproductive freedom is caging pregnant people in dangerous detention facilities, deporting women in medical distress in defiance of court orders, and terrorizing immigrant communities to the point where pregnant people are afraid to leave their homes to see a doctor. These attacks are all part of a broader effort to control our bodies, our neighborhoods, and our lives—and the people bearing the heaviest burden are immigrant women and children who have the fewest resources to fight back.

ICE is Facilitating State-Sanctioned Violence Against Immigrants Who Need Reproductive Care: 

Pregnant people in ICE custody are being separated from their nursing infants, neglected, denied basic medical care, and deported in defiance of court orders—and federal judges across the country are sounding the alarm, ordering the immediate release of women whose detention they have deemed unlawful.

  • Cecil Elvir-Quinonez, a 25-year-old pregnant mother still breastfeeding her infant, spent weeks in a Louisiana detention facility experiencing heavy bleeding and cramps without seeing a doctor. Despite daily requests for medical attention, she was told she needed a referral. Separated from both her breastfeeding infant and her 5-year-old son, she had no access to a breast pump and was forced to manually express milk in the shower.
  • A 21-year-old Colombian woman, eight months pregnant and suffering shooting pain in her abdomen, was deported in defiance of a federal court order issued too late to stop her plane from leaving the tarmac. She had repeatedly requested medical care and been denied it.
  • In Massachusetts, Djeniffer Benvinda Semedo, six months pregnant, was rushed to the emergency room after ICE held her in a temporary holding facility for three days, exacerbating her medical distress. ICE released her only after her attorneys pursued emergency legal action—and she remained hospitalized.
  • Federal judges from Minnesota to California to Nevada have ordered the immediate release of pregnant and nursing detainees, with U.S. District Judge Michael Davis writing that “there is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state.” The Trump administration has given courts conflicting answers about whether its own policy restricting detention of pregnant and nursing women remains in force.

The Trump Administration Is Inhumanely Using Pregnant Immigrant Children as Pawns in Its Anti-Abortion Agenda

New investigative reporting reveals that, since July 2025, the Trump administration has sent more than a dozen pregnant unaccompanied minors in federal custody to a single detention facility in San Benito, Texas via middle-of-the-night transfers. This facility was flagged as medically inadequate by the administration’s own health and child welfare officials.

  • Jonathan White, who ran the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s unaccompanied children program during Trump’s first term, told Texas Public Radio that the directive to concentrate pregnant minors in San Benito is “100% and exclusively about abortion.” Texas has one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country, and the Rio Grande Valley—where San Benito is located—is one of the worst health care deserts in the state.
  • White described the San Benito directive as a continuation of an anti-abortion strategy that began in Trump’s first term, when officials tried and failed to restrict abortion access for unaccompanied minors. “Now they casually roll out what they brutally fought to accomplish last time and didn’t,” he said. Project 2025 called for directing ORR to stop facilitating abortions for minors in federal custody and detaining them only in states where abortion is unavailable.
  • The girls being sent to San Benito are among the most vulnerable people in federal custody. Some are as young as 13, and at least half became pregnant as a result of rape. Their pregnancies are considered high risk by definition—yet the administration chose this facility over dozens of better-equipped shelters across the country, specifically because it sits in a state where abortion is virtually banned.
  • Maternal health experts have underscored that if any of these girls develops an ectopic pregnancy, miscarries, or goes into premature labor, the emergency care she needs could be delayed or denied by doctors wary of Texas’s abortion ban. “You couldn’t set up a worse scenario,” said Dr. Blair Cushing, who runs a women’s health clinic less than an hour from San Benito.
  • Ex-officials and public health experts have condemned the administration’s actions as human rights violations. Diana Romero, professor and director of the Center on Immigrant, Refugee, and Global Health at the CUNY graduate school of public health told The Guardian the “total disregard” for the rights of pregnant and nursing detainees is a “dramatic violation” of international law and public health practices ensuring consensual medical treatment.
  • White, the former ORR official, also told The Guardian that the San Benito transfers are “a choice to ensure zero abortions … as long as [a pregnant child] is in Texas, she can’t access an abortion—without a federal official needing to deny her an abortion.” White called the move “an extraordinary human rights problem” and added that “everyone attempts to write their politics on the bodies of these children.”
  • “This is the federal government using immigration detention policy to advance an anti-abortion agenda,” said Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO Mini Timmaraju. “It’s putting pregnant children in medically vulnerable situations—in a state where abortion is virtually banned—knowing full well what that means.”

Federal Immigration Crackdowns Are Intimidating Pregnant People Into Forgoing Health Care

The devastating reproductive health impact of Trump’s immigration crackdown extends beyond the abuses in detention centers. Across the country, the heightened presence of ICE agents near hospitals and clinics is driving pregnant immigrants to skip critical prenatal care visits, reconsider their birth plans, and suffer more stress-induced complications—forcing impossible choices between their health and their safety.

  • In Minnesota, health care providers have reported ICE agents present in or around at least 11 medical centers in the past month alone. Ana, an undocumented single mother of two from Mexico, switched to virtual appointments in her final weeks of pregnancy after spotting agents near her clinic in early January. At 35 weeks pregnant, she is now reconsidering her birth plan entirely. “My biggest worry: we are going to miss something,” Ana said. “That there’s going to be babies that are going to be too small, moms with diabetes. I fear that moms will develop high blood pressure and end up with seizures.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“
  • The consequences of avoiding in-person care are severe. Midwives and health providers on the ground warn that unmonitored pregnancies risk missed diagnoses, dangerous complications, and—for those who forgo hospital births altogether—potentially dangerous outcomes. “If they decide to do this without the supervision of a health care provider that is used to doing home births, it will be catastrophic,” said Fernanda, a Minneapolis midwife who volunteers bringing food and supplies to pregnant women too afraid to leave their homes.
  • Dr. Chelsea Thibodeau, a Minneapolis-based family physician who provides prenatal and obstetric care at a local hospital, told The 19th that her clinic has seen significant no-show rates and heard from patients who “don’t feel safe coming in.” She recalled a specific patient with a high-risk pregnancy who asked to postpone one of her monitoring appointments, citing concerns about nearby ICE officers: “But in the time between her original monitoring appointment and her rescheduled one, she delivered at 20 weeks, losing the pregnancy,” The 19th reported.
  • Last month, more reporting from The 19th detailed how immigrants in Minnesota have also postponed or forgone abortion care and preventive health visits, including birth control visits and lifesaving cancer screenings. Since December 1, no-show rates at Planned Parenthood health centers in Minnesota have risen by more than 8%, a notable increase leadership attributes to the prolonged federal immigration offensive.
  • Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO Mini Timmaraju addressed the reproductive health impacts of immigration raids in a recent episode of My Body. My Pod, with Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). “It’s actually worse on the ground than what you see, because it is not just a few isolated incidents,” Sen. Smith said. “The ripple effects that are flowing through the community—whether it’s schools, small businesses, restaurants, hospitals, people not being able to get access to their health care because they’re so fearful.”
  • Last month, Timmaraju also joined MS NOW’s Deadline: White House to discuss how the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and reproductive freedom are part of the same authoritarian agenda. “Freedom vs. tyranny, right? Government overreach,” Timmaraju said. “Americans may be conflicted on immigration policy, they may be conflicted on abortion itself, but they are not conflicted about wanting to live in a country where they feel free from tyrannical government.”

Reproductive Freedom for All Is Fighting Back

Attacks on immigrant communities are attacks on reproductive freedom, and we will not stand by while the Trump administration terrorizes our communities and strips pregnant people of the care they need and deserve.

  • In January, Reproductive Freedom for All joined more than 500 partners across the civil rights and progressive movement in urging Congress to rein in ICE and Border Patrol through federal budget negotiations. When violence in our streets escalated, we doubled down and activated our members to contact their Senators and demand they vote NO on the Department of Homeland Security funding bill, which determines federal resources for ICE and Border Patrol. In 24 hours, 6,500 Reproductive Freedom for All members took action, driving over 13,000 messages to Congress. To date, we have driven over 19,000 emails and messages to Congress demanding accountability, and that work continues.
  • Last month, in a coalition action led by the National Health Law Program and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Reproductive Freedom for All again joined partners in demanding Congress fund health care, not more attacks on immigrants and our communities. The letter called on lawmakers to address skyrocketing costs and diminishing access to health care rather than funding weaponized immigration agencies that continue to terrorize our neighbors and communities.
  • Reproductive Freedom for All has lobbied aggressively against DHS funding without meaningful reform, making clear that Congress must not write a blank check for an agency that is caging pregnant people, separating nursing mothers from their infants, and deporting women in medical distress in defiance of court orders. We will continue to stand in the way of this administration’s violence and lawlessness.
  • As part of our longstanding intersectional commitment to immigrant rights, Reproductive Freedom for All has fought alongside partners to push back on the Trump administration’s harmful immigration practices and proactively supported more inclusive immigration laws, including a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. We are following the lead of our partners in the immigrant rights space who possess the strategic vision, subject matter expertise, and on-the-ground knowledge to drive this fight forward.

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For more than 55 years, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) has fought to protect and advance reproductive freedom at the federal and state levels—including access to abortion care, birth control, pregnancy and post-partum care, and paid family leave—for everybody. Reproductive Freedom for All is powered by its more than 4 million members from every state and congressional district in the country, representing the 8 in 10 Americans who support legal abortion.