The Biden administration is reportedly taking action to provide abortions to unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) issued guidance on Thursday stating that unaccompanied children (UC) at the border must be sent to states where abortion is “lawful and available” :
This Field Guidance confirms that ORR staff and care providers must not prevent UC from accessing legal abortion related services and that ORR staff and care providers must make all reasonable efforts to facilitate access to these services if requested by the UC. This may involve transporting a minor to a state in which abortion is lawful and available, if the minor is currently in a state in which abortion is not lawful or available.
The guidance added that “ORR will make all reasonable efforts to secure a legal abortion for a pregnant UC who requests the procedure, taking into account the best interest of the UC” and that it will provide these services to pregnant minors “to the greatest extent possible.”
In June, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving the issue of abortion up to the states. In the midterm elections, abortion was on the ballot in some states.
Illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border surged in fiscal year 2022. In July, Townhall covered how the ORR was looking to protect abortion access for illegal immigrants in the fallout of Roe.
In 2020, the ORR released a policy memo regarding abortion access for this group. The guidance was revisited a year later when Texas, a border state, signed a bill into law that banned abortions after fetal heartbeat detection.
An administration official who spoke to CBS News on the condition of anonymity said that the population of pregnant migrant girls is “relatively small.” The official added that HHS has already transferred some of the pregnant girls from pro-life states to pro-abortion states.
Neha Desai, a pro-abortion lawyer at National Center for Youth Law, told CBS that the pregnant migrants seeking abortions should not “endure the additional trauma of having access to their abortion denied because they happen to be placed in a state that is hostile to their rights.”
“These youth, like everyone, should have access to abortion and reproductive health care,” Desai added. Desai added that many of the migrants she has met decided that “it was best for them not to carry their pregnancies to term.”
Brigitte Amiri, an ACLU attorney who has challenged abortion restrictions for pregnant migrant minors, argued that many of the girls should be allowed to terminate because some of them experienced sexual assault on their way to the United States.
"This is a population that has suffered a lot, and they need to have the ability to make decisions about their pregnancy when they are here in the United States," she told CBS.