ICE Denies Rape Victims Access to Abortion

Kevin Sieff writes in the Texas Observer about the troubling confluence of government immigration detention policies: locking up women impregnated by sexual assault and then denying them access to abortion services.

A high percentage of women immigrating across the U.S./Mexico border are raped.  Once in ICE custody in the U.S., they are essentially forced by the government to carry the children to term.  At no point are the women treated as human beings facing human problems.  This particular policy makes the government complicit in grinding up the lives of low-income women fleeing desperate circumstances at home, as some of the stories in this article show.

Sieff writes about sexual-assault counselor Elia Alvarado's sessions with a woman from Honduras:

Maria, a single mother, had left her 8-year-old daughter at home, she told Alvarado, and paid a man to take her to the border. Her ultimate destination, she said, was the Northeast, where a friend had promised to find her work as a housekeeper. "I went to send money home for my daughter," she told Alvarado in a subsequent counseling session. "This was how I planned to support my family."

Maria and several other Hondurans were guided on a journey by car and train, she said. At night, they stayed in ramshackle homes, sleeping on crowded floors. One of those nights, just before she reached the border, she said that a man grabbed her near an abandoned shack where the immigrants were staying. He forced himself on her, leaving Maria defenseless, the only witness to the violent act. Afterward, Maria blamed herself. She wondered if this was what she deserved for leaving her daughter.

Days later, as the group waded quietly through the Rio Grande, Maria carried the secret with her. It was something she planned to tell no one. Not long after crossing the river, she heard the engine of a Border Patrol truck, saw the green uniforms coming at her. Within minutes, she was corralled into the backseat of a Border Patrol pickup.

Weeks after the rape, Maria took a pregnancy test at the detention center-a mandatory procedure for female detainees between ages 10 and 50. An official from the Division of Immigration Health Services took the test away and came back to tell Maria the news: She was pregnant.

In 2008, 10,653 women were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to agency spokeswoman Cori Bassett, 965 of those women - nearly 10 percent - were pregnant. Many of them, like Maria, were raped on their way to the United States-a journey known to be dangerous for any willing to take it, but especially so for women.

For two months, while Maria awaited her detention hearing, Alvarado says they met about once every two weeks to talk about the ordeal. Maria asked about her options for ending the pregnancy. "I can't do it," Alvarado remembers her saying. "The baby's face will just remind me of him-the man who did this."

But Maria ran into a practice limiting the reproductive rights of ICE detainees. For pregnant women in immigration detention facilities, it is virtually impossible to obtain an abortion. According to Bassett, in fact, "Preliminary records indicated that during fiscal year '08 and '09 to date, no detainee has had a pregnancy terminated while in ICE custody." Not a single one.

. . .

As sexual-assault coordinator at Harlingen's Family Crisis Center, [Alvarado] had agreed to let ICE contact her when abuse victims at Port Isabel, which holds up to 1,200 immigrants, requested counseling. Because ICE does not employ such counselors, the agency depends on people like Alvarado, even though they're not on its payroll. (The agency would neither confirm nor deny having such a relationship with Harlingen's Family Crisis Center.)

For five years beginning in 2003, Alvarado says she counseled about 50 detainees whose rapes had resulted in pregnancies. More than half, she says, asked about ways of ending their pregnancies. Alvarado couldn't help them. "That was just the policy," she says.

So Alvarado talked with Maria about responsibility; Maria still blamed herself for her situation. They talked about Maria's family in Honduras, how they would respond when she returned. Always, Alvarado says, Maria cried, but she never gave up hope of ending her pregnancy. Days after her court date, Maria-now about 10 weeks pregnant-was deported, sent on a plane back to Honduras, where abortion is illegal.

Alvarado says she heard from Maria one more time, when she called from Honduras. Her voice sounded shaky, Alvarado remembers. She was crying.

Maria told Alvarado she had found an unlicensed abortion provider and paid him to perform the procedure. When her family saw that she was bleeding, they accused her of ending the pregnancy prematurely. When Maria told them about the abortion, she said, they forced her to leave. At the time she spoke with Alvarado, she said she was living with a friend, trying to regain custody of her daughter.

. . .

On Oct. 4, 2007, Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law about a particularly disturbing outcome.

During the hearing, titled "Detention and Removal: Immigration Detainee Medical Care," Little told the subcommittee about an African-born asylum-seeker who learned she was pregnant while in custody. She referred to the case as an example of how "[o]fficers' personal beliefs can ... interfere with their ability to provide an effective and safe environment for female detainees.

"The pregnancy," Little testified, "was the result of a politically motivated gang rape in her home country which compelled her flight to the United States to seek asylum. When the [Broward Transitional Center] staff learned that the pregnancy was unwanted, they purposefully delayed the woman's release and pressured her to carry the baby to term. Only after FIAC took her case was she informed that she could get an abortion at her own expense while in custody. This woman was later released and miscarried."

These policies could be chalked up to the Bush administration's general disregard for the rights of women, immigrants, and prisoners.

But have the policies changed?  Do victims of rape in ICE custody get counseling about their options?  Is there a practical way for women in that situation to terminate their pregnancies?

These are reasonable questions to be asking Janet Napolitano's DHS.  And advocates have suggested initial steps to change these policies:

The best solution, they say, starts with changes in enforcement policies. If pregnant immigrants are released promptly, without having to endure long, often fruitless appeals, the problems plaguing their stints in detention could be prevented.

Middle-aged white male restrictionists will wail about anchor babies and the Reconquista.  They should be ignored, unless we are still living in George Bush's America.