Timeline

Three years of court battles ended in September 2020, when the Trump-Pence administration dropped the fight and changed its policy. The current policy prohibits ORR staff from blocking young detainees from obtaining abortions and prevents staff from forcing detainees to disclose their pregnancies. Officials and health care providers must also ensure access to medical appointments related to pregnancy just as they would with other health conditions.

The ORR denied at least seven young immigrants' requests for abortion — even when the pregnancy resulted from rape. All of these women and girls were ultimately able to access abortion despite the government’s extreme efforts.

In an overreach of power, the ORR director received a weekly updated spreadsheet on the condition of every pregnant teen in its custody. Under Director Scott Lloyd, the ORR went so far as to consider forcing a teenage girl in custody to undergo an experimental and unproven treatment to "reverse" an abortion.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used to have limits on detaining pregnant immigrants that almost always required releasing them on bond or under supervision. However, the Trump-Pence administration expanded ICE’s power to detain pregnant immigrants. The administration’s policy to hold pregnant immigrants in custody during their immigration proceedings had devastating effects on the detained women, their pregnancies, and their families. The number of undocumented pregnant people who had miscarriages while in government detention nearly doubled in the administration’s first two years.

Former ORR Director Scott Lloyd helped create the policy that gave the person in his position final say in whether young immigrant women can access safe, legal abortion. He was the one who got to decide.

In one of many such cases, the ACLU sued the ORR in October 2017 for unconstitutionally blocking a young undocumented woman in its custody from access to abortion and violating the constitutional right to abortion. The policy has been fiercely defended by Secretary of HHS Alex Azar and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions — even though it’s clearly unconstitutional and therefore illegal.

According to documents released by MSNBC and American Bridge in March 2019, the government was not just tracking pregnant people. Reports indicate that the ORR director was also tracking the menstrual cycles of undocumented girls in its custody — ostensibly to find out if they became pregnant. Former ORR Director Scott Lloyd denied this under oath, but the revelations in the news spurred members of Congress to ask Lloyd to clarify.