Access Denied: Govt.'s Harsh Limits on the Reproductive Rights of Immigrant Women

By Kevin Sieff, Texas Observer. Posted March 4, 2009.

When sexual-assault counselor Elia Alvarado first met Maria in 2007, Maria was wearing a blue prison uniform, sitting in a doctor’s office at the Port Isabel Detention Center. She was in her early 30s, but looked haggard, Alvarado recalls, older than her age. Two months and more than 1,500 miles after leaving Honduras, she had been detained at the border and taken to the immigration holding facility north of Brownsville.

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.

“I told her, ‘If you weren’t in detention, these would be your options,’” Alvarado says. “But while she was detained, it just wasn’t a possibility.”

It was a line Alvarado had used many times before. As sexual-assault coordinator at Harlingen’s Family Crisis Center, she 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.

Alvarado remembers hanging up the phone, saying goodbye to Maria. It was the last time the two spoke.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, on stretches of desert and farmland trafficked by undocumented immigrants, women’s underwear is draped from the branches of trees. On a single tree outside Tucson, Arizona, an orange pair, a blue pair, and a white pair hang like grotesque ornaments among the desert’s thorny brush. Border activists and women’s advocacy groups call them “rape trees.” Each pair of underwear, they say, represents a victim of sexual abuse.

See more stories tagged with: women, immigration, rape, reproductive rights

Kevin Sieff is a reporter for the Brownsville Herald.

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