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In July 2025, the federal government began detaining pregnant unaccompanied migrant children at the Urban Strategies shelter in San Benito. By the time U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro visited the facility in April, the health department was placing pregnant girls at a different shelter nearby.
Patricia Lim/KUT News
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Patricia Lim/KUT News
The Trump administration is still detaining pregnant migrant youth in a region of Texas where a lack of specialized obstetric care can be life threatening for them, an investigation by The Texas Newsroom and The California Newsroom has found. The practice continues despite vocal concern from current and former government officials, and from members of Congress.
Government records show that in the first ten months of the policy, four of the 21 pregnant girls placed in the region had to be transferred out of state to receive specialized medical care, including at least one abortion, that is unavailable in Texas.
“The first time that happened should have been a wake-up call for the administration, and they should have stopped placing kids in any remote area where they can’t get care,” said Jen Smyers, who during the Biden administration helped oversee the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is responsible for migrant youth who are apprehended by immigration authorities without a parent or guardian.
She called the policy to send all pregnant children to South Texas “enraging.”
This spring, The Texas Newsroom and The California Newsroom published a joint investigation revealing the administration’s policy of detaining pregnant unaccompanied minors as young as 13, at least half of whom were pregnant as a result of rape, at a single shelter in the city of San Benito near Texas’ border with Mexico. The investigation detailed serious concerns that health experts inside and outside the government had raised about the policy, given that adolescent pregnancies are inherently high risk and there is a lack of specialized obstetric care in the region.
Since then, the administration has denied that there is such a policy and said it is ensuring that the girls have access to the care they need.
In an email in September the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees ORR, wrote that “ORR’s policies for placing children in its custody into care provider facilities are based on child welfare best practices in order to provide a safe environment and place the child in the least restrictive setting appropriate for the child’s needs. This is especially true for expectant minors in ORR care.”
Yet the administration’s own records, as well as interviews with multiple government officials, suggest otherwise.
The documents, which were obtained through a public records request, show that ORR explicitly directed its staff in July 2025 to send all pregnant youth to the shelter in San Benito, just outside Brownsville at the extreme southern tip of Texas.
Several months later, internal agency data showed that pregnant girls started being sent to a different shelter nearby instead, according to three ORR officials who asked not to be named because they feared retaliation.
Forty-eight Democratic members of Congress demanded transparency about the policy in a pointed letter to the Department of Health and Human Services back in April. They received a response in September from an assistant secretary at HHS, Alex J. Adams, who wrote that ORR “does not make placement decisions for pregnant youth based on a blanket rule or one-size-fits-all approach” and that it “takes seriously its responsibility to protect the health, safety, dignity, and well-being of every unaccompanied alien child in its custody.”
HHS did not respond to requests for comment about the discrepancy between the statements in Adams’ letter and the government’s own records.
“Obviously, they’re not being honest about their policy,” said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from San Antonio, whose office authored the letter to HHS.
“It’s irresponsible that they would wait several months to respond to basic questions about the care of some of the most vulnerable people within the system,” Castro said, adding that the administration failed to explain “what seems to be an informal but strict policy of sending these girls to deep South Texas, which lacks the medical care that the girls need.”
Unaccompanied migrant children have historically been placed in shelters across the United States, but this summer, the Trump administration began detaining far more of them in Texas. According to internal reports provided independently by two of the ORR officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, 95% of the roughly 300 children apprehended by immigration officials in September were placed in detention in Texas, up from 45% in June.
Advocates for unaccompanied migrant children, former government officials, and some members of Congress have criticized the move, arguing that the state is not prepared to handle an influx of vulnerable children, some of whom need special care.
The fact that ORR has had to transfer several pregnant unaccompanied minors out of Texas to receive medical care, one congress member says, proves their point.
“If the government had to fly or transport these pregnant children across the country to get them the medical care they need, why on earth did it deliberately send them to Texas in the first place?” said U.S. Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat from Southern California who signed the congressional inquiry letter to HHS.
“If there is a 13-year-old girl who has survived rape,” she said, “she should be met with compassion, safety and appropriate medical care. Instead, this administration is placing children like her in a state where they will be deprived of access to basic healthcare. It’s dangerous, and it’s cruel, and there’s no excuse for treating children this way.”
Government records contradict Trump administration’s claims
Unlike Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which detains migrant adults and families in large, prison-like facilities, ORR holds unaccompanied children in group or foster homes overseen by private contractors. Laws, agency regulations and court orders require that the children receive comprehensive healthcare and appropriate education while they’re detained.
In an emailed statement last month, HHS said that placing children in Texas is “operationally efficient” and that ORR’s facilities in the state “provide all requirements and more.” But records obtained through a public information request cast doubt on that assertion.
The records show between July of 2025, when ORR began placing pregnant girls in South Texas, and May of 2026, four of them had to be transferred to other states to receive medical treatment.
That’s roughly one in five of the 21 pregnant girls the agency placed in the region in that time frame, according to one of the ORR officials who requested anonymity.
In detailed notes for one of those cases, ORR staff wrote that a pregnant 12-year-old girl was transferred from the Rio Grande Valley to a shelter in New York on the recommendation of ORR’s division of health. The records note that the child needed access to specialists whose availability in South Texas is “extremely limited.”
An excerpt from an Office of Refugee Resettlement record detailing the transfers of pregnant unaccompanied minors out of Texas to get medical care, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Office of Refugee Resettlement records
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Office of Refugee Resettlement records
In a note for another case, staff wrote that a pregnant girl was transferred to California due to an unspecified “high risk medical need.” In at least one case, a girl was transferred out of Texas because she had requested an abortion, the records show.
Marsha Griffin, a retired professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine, said such outcomes were inevitable. Griffin said the shelters have very few medical staff on hand and the region does not have enough specialized obstetricians.
“Young girls who are pregnant, especially those from 10 to 14 years of age, are automatically a high-risk population,” said Griffin, who oversaw medical students volunteering in ORR facilities in South Texas.
Internal communications, also obtained through a public records request, show that officials in ORR’s own division of health warned the agency’s leadership about the lack of pregnancy-related healthcare in the Rio Grande Valley.
“Texas has one of the worst rates of maternal mortality in the U.S.,” wrote Joanna Gaines, who at the time was ORR’s acting health director, in a July 18, 2025, email to Melissa Johnston, the agency’s head of operations. She added that the state “lack[s] access to quality perinatal healthcare” and that the Rio Grande Valley’s Cameron County “has one of the higher rates of infant mortality in Texas.”
Four days later, ORR issued a directive to begin placing “any pregnant children” at the Urban Strategies San Benito shelter in Cameron County.
An excerpt from a July 18, 2025, email from ORR’s acting health director to Melissa Johnston, the agency’s head of operations, warning about the dangers of detaining pregnant children in South Texas.
Office of Refugee Resettlement records
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Office of Refugee Resettlement records
Tracey Wilkinson, a pediatrician in Indiana who specializes in reproductive healthcare access for minors, said that even if the government is transferring children to get medical care, waiting until they need it puts them in danger.
“When you’re talking about labor or pregnancy complications, every minute counts,” Wilkinson said. “If it was a medical emergency that required this young person to be transported out of the state, the risk to her survival would be lower for no reason other than she was placed in the middle of nowhere, far away from medical care.”
“They are trying to deliberately mislead Congress members”
Shortly after The Texas Newsroom and The California Newsroom revealed the Trump administration’s policy of detaining pregnant migrant youth in Texas, Castro launched an inquiry into the practice. He soon arranged a visit to the San Benito shelter.
But by the time of his visit on April 7, internal agency data showed that ORR had stopped placing newly detained children with known pregnancies at the facility, said the three officials who spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity. Instead, the agency was sending them to a different shelter, in Los Fresnos, just 13 miles away.
Castro said he was not told of the change at the time of his visit, nor was it mentioned in ORR’s formal response to the congressional inquiry last month.
In a recent interview, he described ORR’s handling of his visit to the San Benito shelter as “very secretive” and said he was not allowed to see or speak with any of the children there.
Chu, the Congresswoman from California, said she believed the Trump administration made the location change in order to “deliberately mislead Congress members as well as the public from really knowing where these pregnant children have been.”
An HHS spokesperson did not respond to that allegation, or to earlier questions about the location change, writing only that “there have been no operational changes regarding the placement of pregnant unaccompanied children.”
Compass Connections, the San Antonio-based nonprofit that operates the shelter in Los Fresnos where pregnant girls are now being held, is one of the largest ORR contractors; it has been awarded over $1.9 billion in federal grants to house and care for unaccompanied minors over the past four years, according to figures the government has released on USASpending.gov. Asked whether it agreed to accept all pregnant unaccompanied children at the Los Fresnos shelter and how they’re being cared for there, the company referred the newsrooms to HHS.
In his letter responding to the congressional inquiry, Assistant Secretary Adams wrote that “placement and transfer decisions are individualized and consider the child’s safety, medical and behavioral health needs, pregnancy-related needs, available services, legal access, family unity, least restrictive placement requirements, and the best interest of the child.”
“In California, they would have more access to all reproductive healthcare”
California Congress members and advocates said the state offers much more support for pregnant girls in federal custody than they can receive in Texas.
As the Trump administration has withdrawn federal support for legal representation of unaccompanied children — and at the same time streamlined the process of deporting them — the state of California and several of its cities and counties have ramped up funding for their own legal services programs for undocumented minors.
“Pregnant unaccompanied children have rights to medical care, safety, family unity and due process, but those rights mean little without a lawyer to defend them,” said Marion “Mickey” Donovan-Kaloust, director of legal services at Immigrant Defenders in Los Angeles. “California’s support systems can provide pregnant unaccompanied children with the stability, dignity and specialized care they need to be safe and thrive.”
In addition to concerns about their access to healthcare and legal services, advocates allege that the Trump administration is knowingly putting pregnant children at risk to advance an ideological goal: denying them access to abortions by placing them in Texas, where abortion is virtually banned.
Current federal regulations require the government to move detained minors who request abortions to states where it’s legal. In January, the Trump administration announced it plans to rescind that rule, though it hasn’t yet done so.
An HHS spokesperson said in February that claims the department is attempting to restrict unaccompanied children’s access to abortion are “completely inaccurate.”
Congressman Gil Cisneros, a Democrat from Southern California who also signed the inquiry letter to HHS, said, “In California, they would have more access to all reproductive healthcare, and then they could make decisions based on discussions with their healthcare professional and what’s best for them.”
Mark Betancourt is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.
This story was produced by The California Newsroom and The Texas Newsroom. The California Newsroom is a collaboration of public media outlets that includes NPR, CalMatters, KQED (San Francisco), LAist and KCRW (Los Angeles), KPBS (San Diego) and other stations across the state. The Texas Newsroom is a public radio journalism collaboration that includes NPR, KERA (North Texas), Houston Public Media, KUT (Austin), Texas Public Radio (San Antonio) and other stations across the state.
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