ICE’s descent on communities around the country has repeatedly been compared to the rise of fascism in Europe, but there’s a special kind of evil that doesn’t arrive armed with assault rifles and riot shields and pepper spray.
It arrives in a memo. It hides behind paperwork. And it doesn’t announce itself as loudly, opting instead to resign all its cruelty to the rule of law and the bureaucratic process.
The Trump administration has now perfected this dark art, and its latest masterwork is this: The government is now trying to round up pregnant woman — some as young as 13, and many of them rape victims — and shipping them to a single detention facility in South Texas, specifically because abortion is illegal there.
The goal is not care nor captivity. The goal is to make sure these girls have no choice but to carry their pregnancies to term, no matter how they began.
According to The Guardian, unaccompanied minors who “lack immigration documentation” fall under ORR. The office previously maintained facilities capable of caring for children under 18 who are pregnant. Now, pregnant children are being moved to a facility in San Benito, and since abortion is banned in Texas (including instances of rape and incest), the girls will be forced to keep their pregnancies.
As one former official who ran the unaccompanied children program under Trump’s first term put it, with stunning clarity, “this is 100% and exclusively about abortion.”
In case that was not clear, this is the story in plain terms: the most powerful government on Earth is deliberately warehousing raped children in a medically inadequate shelter in a state where even doctors aren’t sure what the law allows them to do.
A disaster waiting to happen
“It’s not good to be a pregnant person in Texas, no matter who you are,” said one nurse midwife who spent five years caring for pregnant migrants in the area, per the original reporting by Kut News. “So to put pregnant migrant kids in Texas, and then in one of the worst health care regions of Texas, is not good at all.”
Sources inside ORR are waiting for something terrible to happen, but that something terrible is already happening.
The forced impregnation and forced childbirth of captive women and girls is the kind of atrocity that appears in war crimes tribunals and genocide textbooks, not press releases from the Department of Health and Human Services. The United States once helped prosecute those cases. Now it’s auditioning for the defendant’s chair.
History has a name for governments that imprison women and girls and force them to give birth against their will. The Trump administration would prefer we not say it out loud. The least we can do is oblige them by screaming it instead.
