Field guidance notes that unaccompanied minors should have access to abortion care—11-15-22
Immigration news, in context
This is the 145th edition of BORDER/LINES, a weekly newsletter by Felipe De La Hoz and Gaby Del Valle designed to get you up to speed on the big developments in immigration policy. Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at BorderLines.News@protonmail.ch.
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This week’s edition:
In The Big Picture, we examine new guidance on abortion care for minors in government custody, and its implications.
In Under the Radar, we discuss the pushing out of CBP Chief Chris Magnus, who had been in the job for under a year.
In Next Destination, we look at the significant news that Cuba will begin accepting deportation flights from the U.S.
The Big Picture
The news: Immigration custody writ large is not known for its excellence in healthcare for those detained, and abortion care has historically not been different. In fact, while most types of care have been merely difficult to fully access, Trump administration officials attempted to ban abortions for unaccompanied minors in immigration custody completely (colorfully illustrated by former Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Scott LLoyd’s antics, which included tracking the periods of minors in agency custody).
Any child under 18 without immigration status or a parent or guardian available to care for them is considered an unaccompanied alien child (UACs), as per 6 U.S.C. § 279(g)(2), with the majority of such UAC entering the country as asylum seekers through the southern border. They’re then taken into the custody of ORR, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Migrant children are held in ORR shelters—which are operated by subcontracted nonprofit organizations—until the government can identify and reunite them with sponsors in the U.S., typically parents or other relatives. It’s not unheard of for teenage girls to arrive pregnant to these shelters, sometimes because they’ve been raped either in their country of origin or en route to the U.S. In some instances, migrant teenagers in ORR custody have sought to terminate their pregnancies—a practice the Trump administration tried to end in 2017.
After a lawsuit, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an en banc decision upholding an injunction allowing one minor seeking an abortion to receive care. That decision was later dismissed as moot by the Supreme Court after the minor had already had an abortion. Despite the lack of a firm legal precedent, the administration moved to begrudgingly allow abortions to proceed in tandem with state laws in locations where children were being held by service providers.
This new policy was complicated by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer, meaning there were states in which minors were held that no longer had access to legal abortion care at all. ORR, the agency which handles all unaccompanied minors in custody, had already issued field guidance specifically in response to Texas’ earlier near-prohibition of abortion, and has now updated that guidance specifically to note that minors should have access to abortion care if they need or want it, even if that means moving them across state lines.
Under the Radar
CBP chief resigns after being asked to step down
Chris Magnus, who has served as the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection since December 2021, submitted his resignation this week amid reports that Biden had asked him to step down, the LA Times reports. Magnus had initially said he wouldn’t comply with the president’s request, but later told the Times that he believes “this decision provides me with the best path for advancing my commitment to professional, innovative, and community-engaged policing.”
Magnus was previously the chief of police in Tucson, Arizona, where he developed a reputation for supporting “progressive” policies like community policing. His appointment to head CBP suggested an internal contradiction within the Biden administration: a desire to break from the more restrictionist policies implemented under Trump while simultaneously keeping some of them, such as Title 42, in place. In October, Politico reported that Magnus was facing internal pushback within the agency, and that longtime staffers believed he was too focused on reforming Border Patrol’s internal culture and wasn’t prioritizing the record-high apprehension numbers at the border. (A brief aside: there is an unprecedented number of people from South America arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, but this doesn’t fully account for the high numbers CBP publishes. Under Title 42, migrants can be expelled multiple times, meaning each expulsion counts as a single border encounter.) At the time of the Politico report, DHS said Magnus “plays a key role in” CBP’s border security mission.
Next Destination
Cuba agrees to accept deportation flights
For the first time since the pandemic began, Cuba has agreed to accept repatriation flights carrying people who tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, Reuters reports. Per Reuters, ICE currently has approximately a dozen Cuban nationals in custody who failed their initial asylum screenings at the border and are now awaiting deportation, but ICE will wait until there are enough people to fill a plane to begin the flights to Cuba.
The U.S. will not resume regular deportation flights to Cuba but will instead carry them out occasionally as per its agreement with Cuba, according to Reuters. U.S. officials reportedly hope that resuming deportations will deter Cubans from making the trip to the U.S. However, it does not appear that Cubans apprehended at the border will be expelled back to Cuba under Title 42, meaning anyone who intends on filing an asylum claim is unlikely to be deterred.