U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, and 47 other congressional Democrats sent a letter to Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. condemning the Trump administration’s housing of pregnant migrant minors in Texas — a state where abortion is banned.
In the letter, dated April 30, Castro and the others maintain that exclusively housing unaccompanied pregnant minors in Texas violates the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s policy, which requires placing them in states that provide access to the full range of reproductive healthcare options.
“These children have survived extraordinary hardship to arrive in the United States,” the letter states. “All are entitled to the full range of medical care, including reproductive health care, as required by ORR’s own regulations. Deliberately placing them in a medically inadequate facility in a state that bans abortion over the objections of the agency’s own health officials is a political decision, not based on the welfare of children.”
Castro and the others sent the letter after he conducted a fact-finding mission earlier this month at the Urban Strategies San Benito ORR shelter, the place where the pregnant minors are being held.
“There’s no OBGYN,” Castro told Texas Public Radio of his concerns following his visit. “There’s no doctor that specializes in teenage pregnancies.”
Castro also told TPR that some of the pregnant minors inside the facility had been sexually assaulted before arriving there.
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