In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we're doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation.
Texas houses the country’s only family detention centers and has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S., but it is also home to powerful reproductive justice and migrant rights movements
The reproductive justice movement’s power in Texas is rooted in a truth we know too well: to fight for bodily autonomy is to fight for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the broader Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apparatus.
We are not new to this, but true to this.
Texas is the epicenter of ICE terror: the national leader in ICE arrests and deportations and the solitary home of family detention. DHS recently pursued plans to purchase a warehouse in Dallas to cage up to 9,500 more of our neighbors. Though the developer ultimately withdrew following public pressure, the attempt reveals the scale of detention infrastructure the state is actively seeking to expand. We live with the visceral reality of state violence that forcibly disappears and kills our communities, from Houston to Amarillo, from Austin to the Rio Grande Valley.
The possibility of a Texas without militarized borders and overcrowded cages of immigrant families is dismissed by people who have no idea the reality of Texans’ daily lives. In Houston, one out of every seven residents knows someone detained or deported by ICE, with this number doubling among residents who identify as Hispanic and those near or below the poverty line. Across the state and over 20 detention centers, Texas holds the highest daily population of detained individuals, followed by California and Louisiana.
And yet, in the face of this machinery, Texans continue to resist. In Dallas-Fort Worth, 40 multifaith clergy formed the Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response (CLEAR) to provide pastoral care, bear witness, and organize resistance as asylum-seekers are detained during routine ICE check-ins. In the Rio Grande Valley, volunteers leave water in the desert for families migrating to the U.S., even as legal consequences loom. And in San Antonio, a city 155 miles from the border that serves as a major crossroads for immigrant communities, organizations such as Sueños Sin Fronteras de Tejas continue to make reproductive justice a possibility for thousands of migrant women, girls, and other gender-marginalized people.
This is why we have profound solidarity with every community across the U.S. enduring occupation by federal agents, including in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents killed two local residents earlier this year. We recognize the fight against state violence because it has long been the fight of the reproductive justice movement. As just one recent example, reproductive justice organizations on the ground in Minnesota organized mutual aid efforts to meet the material needs of families targeted by ICE. These are not one-off acts of solidarity, but rather a necessary shift in work—one made when there is a deep understanding of what reproductive justice actually demands.
Mutual aid in the wake of ICE raids, accompaniment to and from school or work, and support for detained parents are not acts of charity separate from reproductive justice; they are the very practice of it.
Reproductive justice rests on three core principles: the right to bodily autonomy; the right to have or not have children; and the right to parent the children we do have in safe, sustainable communities. This third principle—the right to parent with dignity—is systematically denied by forced family separations, when DHS detains children as young as 2 years old and ICE agents brutalize pregnant people in the street and deport them directly from hospital beds. This is why mutual aid in the wake of ICE raids, accompaniment to and from school or work, and support for detained parents are not acts of charity separate from reproductive justice; they are the very practice of it.
For immigrant communities across Texas, DHS is a reproductive justice crisis: The agency decides who can have children and under what conditions; it severs parents from their children; and it forecloses any possibility of raising a family in safety. Theft of our bodily autonomy is the ultimate tool of an authoritarian regime, and Texas has been its proving ground.
Under a DHS directive, detained parents face an illusion of choice: identify an outside caretaker for your children, or bring them into detention with you. But parents are swept up by ICE agents and transported to Texas so quickly that this choice is never real. Families detained together are held in one of the two family detention centers in the U.S., both of which are in Texas: the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, a facility where a child died in 2018 and where there is currently a measles outbreak, or the Karnes County Residential Center southeast of San Antonio.
Texas is a central site of reproductive injustice, as it leads the nation in ICE arrests, houses the country’s only family detention centers, and has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S. The lethal conditions for pregnant people in our state are not confined to delivery rooms or the lack of postpartum care. Decades of research show that the psychological terror of ICE and the historical disinvestment from health care, housing, and environmental sustainability in favor of expanding the deportation machine kills pregnant people.
Now, the Trump administration is systematically sending pregnant unaccompanied minors—some as young as 13, many pregnant by rape—to a single shelter in San Benito, Texas. Advocates worry the administration is doing so for one explicit ideological purpose: to trap them in a state where abortion is totally banned. By detaining these children in Texas, the administration is forcing them to stay pregnant, overwhelmingly in conditions that allow for a potentially disabling or fatal medical emergency due to grossly inadequate health care. For those who manage to survive pregnancy and give birth, they will likely not be able to leave Texas, because the only facilities that exist to detain them and their children are also here.
This is not a failure of policy; it is reproductive injustice as white supremacist warfare, waged against the most vulnerable to enforce a brutal demographic and ideological order.
While another world is impossible, these are the conditions that the people who govern this state choose to subject us to. This is the machinery of reproductive injustice, perfected in Texas and exported nationwide.
This moment is about organized resistance: the fight for ownership over our bodies, our futures, and the fates of our families from all forms of state-sanctioned violence. This is also the core of reproductive justice. From our bodies to the border, our commitment remains to a world where autonomy is sacred.
Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
Ja’Loni is the Director of Movement Power at Avow, a reproductive justice organization building a Texas where every person is trusted, thriving, and free. They are a Queer, Muslim, Black-Latine writer, lawyer, and abortion doula based in Houston.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.