Shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, and Texas completely outlawed abortion in communities along the Rio Grande Valley, the effect was swift. In this region, which is home to 1.4 million residents, most of them Latinx or immigrants, the area’s only abortion clinic in McAllen was forced to shut down.
“When we lost that, people lost care. That was the immediate first blow and it did send shock waves,” says Cathy Torres, organizing manager for the Frontera Fund, an abortion fund serving border communities in Texas from Brownsville to El Paso. The organization provides financial support toward abortions, flights, and hotels for people forced to leave the state for medical care. After the Dobbs decision, they also began funding other reproductive health services such as birth control and STI testing.
The Frontera Fund is a three-person team, and in addition to her management responsibilities, Torres also answers most of the calls to the organization. She responds to the myriad of questions in voicemails and text messages in English and Spanish. Some reach out to the fund with concerns about being criminally prosecuted should they get an abortion out of state. Others need help paying for travel or their appointments in neighboring states such as New Mexico, Colorado, or Kansas.
The McAllen clinic closure was especially devastating for undocumented immigrants, Torres says. Should they want to travel to another state, anyone living within 100 miles of the US-Mexico border must pass Customs and Border Protection checkpoints before leaving the area. Border agents can question drivers and their passengers, search vehicles, and detain people. Trained K-9 dogs often circle cars and the checkpoints are flooded with cameras and surveillance. For immigrants without documentation who need in-person abortion care, “folks are either facing the potential risk of deportation or they’re being forced into parenthood,” Torres says.
The fear among immigrants who call Frontera Fund’s support line is palpable, Torres says. “People who are undocumented are scared to go anywhere, to do anything, to go to the doctor,” she says. “While that has always been the case, you can imagine how heightened it is now.”
Immigrants have long faced obstacles in accessing reproductive health care. The list of challenges even before the Dobbs decision has included language barriers and, for many, the stigma of abortion within their own communities. Travel options are limited for those without valid IDs needing to go out of state for care.
In recent months, these barriers have only grown as the Trump administration targets immigrant communities with ICE raids, courthouse arrests, detention in overcrowded facilities, and deportation. I reached out to abortion funds, clinics, and advocacy groups across the country and they all said the same thing: they have noted a growing fear among immigrants to leave their homes even for a nearby medical appointment. For many, medication abortion delivered by mail and administered at home may be an option; but for immigrants who need in-person medical care, they must weigh the risk of traveling without status.
“We have navigated domestic terrorism for decades.”
Some providers are also strategizing on how to respond if ICE shows up at their doors—the latest challenge they must navigate amid a growing web of abortion restrictions in the last three years. Due to the ever–present anti-abortion violence and harassment, many clinics already have security measures that could protect staff and patients if ICE were to visit, says Amy Hagstrom Miller, one of the most prominent independent abortion providers in the country and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, which operates clinics in four states. “We have navigated domestic terrorism for decades,” she says.
Since the Dobbs ruling, about two dozen states have adopted abortion restrictions, and 13 have banned the procedure altogether. Many of those states, such as Florida and Texas, also have large immigrant populations. At least 1.9 million undocumented women live in a state with abortion restrictions, according to a 2024 report by the Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on advancing policies for low-income communities. “State abortion bans and restrictions disproportionately harm communities who already face significant barriers to accessing health care,” the report states, “including Black, Indigenous, Latina/x, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities.”
Suma Setty, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Law and Social Policy and one of the report’s authors, has watched the growing government hostility against immigrant communities since President Donald Trump returned to office. Setty worries that recent enforcement actions will further restrict immigrants’ access to reproductive health care. “The fact that we’re seeing arrests in courthouses for people who are complying with the law makes it very difficult for people to even just go out.”
At a national legal helpline operated by If/When/How, a reproductive rights organization, call takers have noted that immigrant callers express a greater sense of fear and confusion, says Limayli Huguet, one of the organization’s Spanish-speaking attorneys. The helpline operates 24 hours a day, and Huguet is among the staff of six attorneys responding to calls, voicemails, and online messages from people seeking reproductive health care. She has noticed that the helpline receives more calls when reports about immigration enforcement, like ICE raids, appear in the news.
Huguet has also heard immigrant callers say that they are scared of leaving their homes. A woman recently called, and explained she was pregnant and concerned about traveling to a nearby hospital for prenatal care. Huguet tries to help callers assess the possible legal consequences for those seeking care in a post-Roe world. “A lot of our work is just making sure that people feel empowered to make the decision that they want to make,” she says.
In Florida, a recent series of laws targeting immigrants have tightened their access to care, says Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro, executive director of the Florida Access Network, an abortion fund serving the entire state. In 2023, for instance, the state passed a law that requires hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status.
Since February, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration has encouraged local law enforcement agencies to collaborate with federal immigration authorities through so-called 287(g) agreements that grant police certain immigration powers. As I reported back in April, of all these agreements nationwide, about half were established with law enforcement agencies in Florida. The increased enforcement has forced many undocumented immigrants in the state to limit their movements, Piñeiro says. “Going to a grocery store is a risk, let alone being forced to drive multiple states away [for abortion access],” she says.
Florida’s six-week abortion ban does include some exceptions; pregnant victims of incest or rape who file a police report can access the procedure for up to 15 weeks of gestation. But under the current climate of cooperation with ICE, Piñeiro says she finds it difficult to believe many victims would seek out police.
“One of the big questions is, if ICE showed up to your clinic, what are you going to do?”
Some providers are also preparing for any potential interactions with ICE. The discussions are already happening in Illinois, says Diana Parker-Kafka, executive director of the abortion fund, Midwest Access Coalition. The fund helps many patients from Texas, and more than half of their team who answer calls speak Spanish or another language. “One of the big questions is, if ICE showed up to your clinic, what are you going to do? What is your security instructed to do? What do the laws in the state say that you can do?” she says. “There are a lot of conversations that are going to be new to funds, to clinics, to leaders. The law is literally changing before our eyes.”
At Whole Woman’s Health clinics, located in Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Virginia, presentations about immigration have been shown to staff, says Hagstrom Miller. Short of a warrant identifying the clinic by name and address, ICE doesn’t have a legal right to enter the premises, she says. Hagstrom Miller wants patients and staff to see her clinics as “a safe place.” She notes, “They can trust Whole Woman’s Health to really stand up for them.”
Reproductive health care isn’t the only medical service affected by anti-immigrant policies. Lupe Rodriguez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, points to the Trump administration’s decision to freeze Title X funding to family planning clinics across the country. These were places where immigrants obtained other medical services such as wellness exams and blood pressure screenings.
Trump also eliminated a Biden-era policy that protected certain public spaces like hospitals from ICE, further discouraging immigrants from seeking care, Rodriguez says. Many immigrants, especially those without documentation, must constantly weigh “the threat of being detained, questioned, separated from their families if people go out into the community to seek care or to seek services.”
Setty, from the Center for Law and Social Policy, has heard of recent situations where people have skipped medical treatments for chronic conditions. “Abortion access was already challenging in many states where there are high immigrant populations,” she says, “but if you’re adding the attacks on immigrants on top of all of that, it’s just narrowing this tightrope even more for folks who are trying to access any sort of care.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.