The girl traveled for months, from Central America up through Mexico, and into the United States. Just seventeen, petite with tan skin and long, dark hair, she was poor and wanted to build a life that would make her proud. She hoped to learn English, study and work, and maybe—“Si Dios lo permite,” she told Vice News, “if God allows me”—become a doctor someday.
It was when she arrived at the shelter in Brownsville, a border town on the southernmost tip of Texas, with all the other teenagers and children—“unaccompanied minors,” as they were known—that she discovered she was pregnant. She was about eleven weeks along. Back home, she had watched her parents beat her unmarried older sister with firewood and cables until she miscarried. Abortion was banned there. But here, she had another option. She told the authorities that she wanted an abortion, and as soon as possible. “I don’t feel capable of being a mature woman or being strong or old enough to be able to take care of it,” she said.
It wasn’t a particularly unusual request. Throughout the Bush and Obama administrations, immigrants in the custody of the United States could generally procure abortions, so long as the government didn’t pay for them. But this girl wouldn’t have the same options as the unaccompanied migrant girls who had made the long trek to the border before she had. In the Trump administration, the request made the girl not just one of the tens of thousands of migrant children coming into the country that year, but a priority for the head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement—Scott Lloyd, the Catholic lawyer who was closely tracking the pregnancies of girls crossing the border. She wasn’t the only girl in this situation. Over the course of Trump’s administration, Lloyd’s agency kept a spreadsheet documenting hundreds of similar girls, with columns listing their ages, the type of sex—consensual or assault—the likely gestational age of the fetus, and where they were being held. Many were sixteen or seventeen years old, a few were fourteen. At least one was eleven.
The notes offered a window into what the journey had been like for the girls. “Kidnapped in Mexico x 18 months; raped/forced into sex trade–pregnancy as a result to unknown male,” read the notes for one sixteen year old, who was six months pregnant and being held in Texas. “With 49 year old male,” read the entry for a fourteen year old girl, who was seven months pregnant in California. “Assaulted in home country and along journey by unknown assailants,” read the entry for another fourteen year old girl, who was less than a month pregnant, in Illinois. The row for a seventeen year old in Illinois who was five months pregnant noted “Pregnancy with 40 yo husband” and “HIV positive due to Rape by stepfather.” In at least two cases, the notes listed their LMP—or last menstrual period—as a way of trying to date their pregnancy. Lloyd argued that the deeply personal data captured by the federal government was necessary to track the girls’ medical care and identify trends among the children coming into the United States.
Whether these girls requested an abortion was also listed in a column on the spreadsheet. Lloyd’s policy was that those requests had to be approved by him in writing. And, he said, under his watch the government would not spend taxpayer funds on abortions. “If they were asking us to take them for an abortion, I mean, that would be something that we would have to necessarily expend resources to do,” he said, explaining how a shelter staffer would have to travel with the girl. “And we weren’t willing to do that.” Lloyd was, however, willing to spend resources implementing a new policy that sent pregnant girls to a “life-affirming” pregnancy center, he said.
So the girl went. The staff prayed over her and forced her to look at a sonogram of her fetus, she said. But her decision was made, she said, and it was between her and her God—not them.
The battle between the girl and the Trump administration revealed how the antiabortion movement was turning dusty corners of the federal government into platforms for its crusade. It was a big goal built in small ways, through Excel spreadsheets, emailed orders, and new regulations crafted by armies of bureaucrats. It was expanded by lawyers, writing statutes in statehouses that they could push forward through the lower courts. And it was secured by the judges who were installed to seats on high courts.
That afternoon, the girl met Rochelle Garza, an attorney from the Rio Grande Valley in private practice who was frequently appointed by the court to represent girls seeking abortions. The rule in Texas was that minors needed approval from a judge to end a pregnancy, if they could not get consent from their parents.
But this time, when Garza got to the court with the girl and a lawyer from a nonprofit that offered legal aid to pregnant minors in Texas, something unusual happened. The federal field specialist for the resettlement agency was standing outside demanding to enter the confidential hearing in the judge’s chambers. Strict rules were supposed to keep these proceedings secret because they dealt with children. The Trump administration official shouldn’t have even known that they were in court that day. Inside the room, with the Trump official barred from entering, the judge cleared the way for the girl to get her abortion on September 29, after the counseling session mandated by Texas law. Private funds would pay for the procedure, and her lawyers would take her to her appointment. The only role of the shelter staff—and the federal government—would be to open the doors and permit the girl to leave for a few hours. Still, Garza had the sinking feeling that it might not be that easy.
She was right. The staff refused to allow the girl to be taken to her appointment. She would not get her abortion that day. Or for weeks that followed. Instead of the clinic, she was headed back to court. Garza knew that they needed help for a case that was quickly moving beyond Texas. To get the girl released from the shelter, they would need to sue Lloyd and the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
They connected with Brigitte Amiri, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. To her, the problem was bigger than just this girl. She had uncovered emails appearing to show that the agency, under Lloyd’s leadership, attempted to stop another abortion already in progress, sending another migrant girl to the hospital to try to save the fetus after she took the first pill in the two-dose medication abortion process. It was an “abortion reversal”—a procedure pushed by antiabortion doctors that had been deemed “dangerous” and “unethical” by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In other messages later revealed in a public records request by a liberal group, he mandated that staff tell a pregnant girl’s parents about her abortion decisions against her wishes, violating her right to privacy.
To Amiri, it all seemed shockingly “brazen.” During the Bush administration, the antiabortion forces were largely outside activists pushing their own agenda with some help from government officials. This, with Lloyd, was something new. The most radical activists were no longer outside pushing the administration. They were the administration. “There were always these entities, Catholic hospitals or charities, trying to say they didn’t have to follow the law because of their religious beliefs,” she said. “Now, the government had stepped into their shoes.”
Still, when the girl’s case came to Amiri, she thought it would be easy. The government could not ban abortion, a federal right under Roe that was protected by Casey. On October 16, Amiri filed an emergency petition in a federal court in Washington. Like the woman whose case established the federal right to an abortion, Jane Roe, this girl would also be nameless.
“I do not want to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against my will,” the girl said in her court declaration, before signing her alias in block letters: JANE DOE.
Every day mattered. The longer the girl waited, the more medically and logistically complicated her procedure would become. She had to be seen for counseling at least twenty-four hours before the procedure, in two separate appointments with the same doctor. If she reached seventeen weeks and six days, Amiri had told the court, the girl would have to travel several hundred miles north to a different facility; the mandatory counseling meant she would have to make the round trip twice. And because of the 2013 Texas law, the one that Wendy Davis filibustered but that passed anyway, abortion was now illegal after twenty weeks.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, Matthew Bowman, the former Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer, was advising Lloyd as deputy general counsel for the department. But now, to deal with the litigation, the administration put a fleet of eighteen lawyers on the case, including Scott Stewart, the newly appointed deputy assistant attorney general for the department’s civil division. The girl, he argued, could either return home—to a country where abortion was banned—or find a sponsor who would help her get the procedure. The judge asked whether Stewart believed that Roe was still the “law of the land.” Stewart didn’t dispute the legality of Roe but signaled that undocumented minors had “minimal” constitutional rights to an abortion in federal custody, unless it was for a medical emergency.
“Despite the fact that she is in this country illegally and is in a detained shelter, or whatever it is called, she still has constitutional rights,” the judge, Tanya Chutkan, said. “Do you agree with me there?”
Stewart refused to cede the point. “I’m not going to give you a concession on that, Your Honor,” he said.
Judge Chutkan laughed, an exasperated chuckle. “This is remarkable,” she said. She granted an order later that day, allowing the girl to leave the shelter on either October 20 or 21.
The government appealed Judge Chutkan’s order. As the case was pending, the shelter staff didn’t allow the girl to leave, to go to the clinic or anywhere else. Instead, they isolated her, wouldn’t permit her to do Zumba with the other kids or go on trips outside of the shelter. The staff followed her every move, “de día y de noche,” she told VICE News in an interview, caseworkers even tracking her into the bathroom. They asked what she would name the baby. She felt so alone.
People from this country that she was just beginning to know stood with her, Garza told her, writing and calling to show their support. “Eres muy fuerte. Tienes un carácter muy fuerte,” Garza said. “You are very strong. You have a very strong character.”
In all their conversations, Garza never told the girl that she might not get her abortion. Watching her struggle, Garza couldn’t bear to say the words. Instead, Garza, Amiri, and their teams prepared for the next legal battle. When the hearing was announced for October 20, the date that Judge Chutkan had said the girl could have her abortion, Amiri raced straight from her office in New York to Washington, grabbing shoes from under her desk and stopping at Union Station to buy a change of underwear. By then, the girl was more than fourteen weeks into her pregnancy.
In oral arguments before the three-judge federal appeals panel, Amiri argued that the girl simply wanted the guarantees enshrined in Roe. Weeks earlier, the state judge in Texas had granted her the power to make her own decision. Lloyd and his team were substituting their judgment for the girl’s own, effectively exercising veto power over her decision—and her constitutional right, she said.
“Since 1973, the Supreme Court has held that the government may not ban abortion,” Amiri told the judges. “We’re not asking for a sweeping constitutional ruling; we’re asking for [something] basic, the validation of what the Supreme Court has already said for forty-some odd years, and that is the government may not block abortion for anyone.”
The Trump administration pushed back. Their lawyers did not contest whether she had a right to an abortion, just that the government was not required to facilitate access to the procedure. She could, they said, return to her home country for the procedure. Their argument put the girl in an impossible position, given that she was not allowed to leave the shelter on her own, never mind the futility of making the treacherous, monthslong trek back to a place where abortion was illegal.
Amiri turned to one of the judges, a fit, middle-aged white man with side-swept brown hair graying at the temples. Based on his detailed questioning of the Trump administration lawyer, she could tell that he had done his research and read all the legal papers. His questions were tough but measured. He quizzed the lawyers on how far the right to an abortion established in Roe extended. “An adult woman who is pregnant in immigration detention unlawfully here, does she under current Supreme Court precedent have a right to obtain an abortion?” he asked. He wondered why the girl couldn’t find a sponsor to act as her guardian and take her to the appointment. “Did she have names of people and phone numbers and addresses with her when she arrived in the United States?” he asked.
Amiri explained why that had proven impossible. The government had been seeking a sponsor for weeks already and had been unable to find anyone who would qualify. The process—background checks, home visits, and the rest of the vetting—would simply take too long now and would likely put the girl outside of the window for getting a legal abortion, she explained. The restrictions passed by the Texas legislature over the years had made scheduling an abortion difficult. And that wasn’t even accounting for the “irreparable harm” to the girl’s mental and physical health from being forced to remain pregnant. The delay so far, Amiri argued, was an “undue burden”—the kind that had been deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Casey.
When the hearing was over, the stakes felt even bigger than the girl. “If we lose this case, I don’t know what Roe means,” Amiri reflected. “The Trump administration would do to all of us what they have done to Jane Doe.”
The ruling came by the time Amiri disembarked from her train home to New York. She stood on the sidewalk outside her daughter’s pre-K classroom and sobbed. The girl should wait eleven more days, the court ruled, as the state tried to find a sponsor. If one was not found by October 31, the litigation could start again. But Amiri knew that by Halloween, the girl would be over seventeen weeks pregnant and they’d have to start all over with the district court. That process could easily take more than three weeks, meaning the girl would miss the twenty-week Texas deadline. It was, thought Amiri, a dishonest political punt. A way for the two Republican-appointed judges on the panel to please conservatives while dodging the big constitutional question the case posed to Roe.
Amiri rushed to file an appeal, asking the court to rehear the case en banc—meaning the larger full court would review the decision by the three-judge panel. Two days later, the circuit court voted to reverse the ruling and allow the girl to end her pregnancy by a 6–3 margin.
The Trump administration effort had failed. The girl was granted her abortion.
Amiri flipped through the pages of the ruling to see what the three judges who dissented had said. The same judge who questioned her about the girl’s sponsor had written that he opposed the majority ruling. His words were not as aggressive as another judge’s, a woman who wrote bluntly that Jane Doe had no constitutional right to an abortion. He stopped short of that kind of direct hit at Roe, writing that giving the girl what Garza and Amiri saw as her constitutional right represented “a radical extension” of abortion law.
The final decision was “based on a constitutional principle as novel as it is wrong,” he argued, “a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in US government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.” It was an argument that threaded together a judicial question—what rights an undocumented girl could receive—with the political language of the antiabortion movement, “abortion on demand.”
The judge had given no indication of such views during oral arguments, when he asked civil questions. “It’s like he got angry, and then it came out,” said Amiri.
When the girl finally entered the clinic in the early morning, it was under cover of darkness. She wanted support, so Garza went into the room with her. Garza held her hand and rubbed her hair, and felt sad and tired and frustrated. In Washington, antiabortion activists were outraged. “We unequivocally reject abortion advocates’ narrative that justice has been done in this case,” Marjorie Dannenfelser said. “Instead the extreme agenda of the abortion lobby and the ACLU has claimed two victims and made a cruel mockery of the ‘American dream.’”
But Garza had watched her struggle and saw her suffer as she was unable to control her own destiny. In the end, the girl was required to stay pregnant for a month longer than she wanted. It was amazing how divorced legal proceedings and politics could be from people’s actual lives and decisions, how little the judicial system took into account human pain, Garza thought.
The episode showed the increasingly precarious state of abortion rights. The antiabortion movement had people like Lloyd positioned to originate policy. They had lawyers like Stewart and Bowman ready to defend it. They fell short in just one part of the system—the court, where they did not have a majority of judges. But they were working on that.
The story of Jane Doe was a sort of parable, a precursor to what America without abortion could look like if the antiabortion movement could put all the pieces into place. In many ways, the case was a trial run for a larger strategy, the antiabortion movement’s revision of Jane Roe years earlier.
The court’s ruling in the case didn’t stop Lloyd, who continued to deny abortions to other pregnant undocumented girls on his agency’s spreadsheet, including one who said she had been raped and threatened to harm herself. Even more unusually, the Justice Department soon turned its full force against Amiri, Garza, and even Garza’s brother, who was her law partner, asking the Supreme Court to sanction the lawyers for alleged “material misrepresentations and omissions” in the case. To some observers, the action looked like retaliation against advocates by the federal government. The appeal was “a flagrant effort to intimidate the ACLU, one of the Trump administration’s fiercest legal foes,” wrote one legal analyst. The high court declined the request and the ACLU’s case ballooned into a class action lawsuit on behalf of all the pregnant teens in custody. Eventually, three years after the litigation began, the government ended the policy banning the young migrants from getting abortions. Lloyd left the office in 2018, after the controversy over a Trump policy forcibly separating thousands of migrant children from their families consumed the country, for a new role at HHS focused on outreach to faith-based partners. Eventually, three years after the litigation began, the Trump administration acquiesced and issued a new policy in the fall of 2020, prohibiting obstruction or interference with access to abortion for unaccompanied minors who requested one.
After Jane Doe had her abortion, Garza, like Amiri, kept thinking about the judge who had written the dissent, arguing the girl shouldn’t be allowed to have it. He couldn’t see the trauma written on her face, thought Garza, but still he wanted to take away her rights. She did not know him, but she knew he had never seen the girl.
At the top of his dissent, the court had printed the judge’s name in capital letters. “KAVANAUGH.”