The Body as Borderland: The Abortion (Non)Rights of Unaccompanied Teens in Federal Immigration Custody in the Trump-Pence Era

Abstract

In 2017, Scott Lloyd, the newly appointed director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) declared that henceforth pregnant teens in federal immigration custody could not obtain an abortion without his express consent. This quickly proved to be an impossibility on account of Lloyd’s deeply held and religiously saturated antiabortion beliefs. In justifying his denial of consent to all who sought it, Lloyd insisted that ORR had a statutory obligation to provide refuge to the unborn as well as to protect unaccompanied minors in the care and custody of the agency from the trauma of abortion regret.This article focuses on the origins and implementation of Lloyd’s abortion-consent policy within the broader context of the Trump administration’s “pro-life” and anti-immigrant agendas, and its contestation in the much-publicized Garza v. Hargan class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. As argued, by mapping these twinned commitments onto the transgressive bodies of undocumented pregnant teens in federal immigration custody, the policy appropriated the seemingly private and intimate in order to both punish these young women by compelling motherhood as a sanction for their infractions and deter those who might otherwise be tempted to breach the Southern border as “abortion tourists.”