Pregnant Girls Who Were Detained by ICE and Trapped in Texas, Where Abortion is Banned, Are Apparently Missing

In February, it was reported that within a uniquely evil trench of Trump’s deportation campaign, more than a dozen pregnant girls—some as young as 13, at least half of whom got pregnant because they were raped, and several of whom had already given birth in custody—were being crammed, sometimes with their babies, into an ICE facility in San Benito, Texas. And according to a more recent report by the Guardian, no one knows where these girls—or their infants—are. 

“There used to be many, many more,” Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Oregon) told the outlet, a few months after visiting the Urban Strategies San Benito ORR (Office of Refugee Resettlement) facility in April, as a follow-up to reports of the kids’ detentions. “They had a lot of girls in custody. Where did they all go?”

While earlier reports about the facility suggested there were more than a dozen pregnant girls being held in San Benito, the numbers have suspiciously since fluctuated—from one attorney being told there were 11; to Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) being told in March that there were 17; to Dexter, at the time of her visit, being told there were seven. Dexter added that when she’d gone to the facility, she was blocked from speaking to them at all. “Apparently those girls were spoken to harshly by ORR staff, and they were scared to talk to me after that,” she said.

The directive to start placing pregnant girls in the Texas facility came about in July 2025, via an email sent by the ORR—a part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Still, several sources from the office expressed concern over this arrangement, and one, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, said the shelter was “one high-risk pregnancy away from catastrophe.” 

“What I saw in Texas was an immigration system that treats children, pregnant girls, and families as problems to manage instead of human beings deserving of dignity and care,” Dexter said in a statement after her visit, announcing also that she was sending a letter to the ORR. “These agencies are funded by our tax dollars and answer to the American people. I intend to get answers and transparency.”

“No one is missing,” an ORR spokesperson told Jezebel in a statement. “ORR has the transfer or release information for all pregnant minors at this facility.”

Speaking to the Guardian, former ORR official Jonathan White—who’s been against the administration’s family separation policies since Trump’s first term—said the office management system should be able to “definitively answer” questions about the girls’ whereabouts. He speculated that it’s likely the girls were deported to their home countries or another, third country—along with their infants, who would technically have been born as U.S. citizens. “I suspect that in effect in this one narrow case the president’s executive order on birthright citizenship is already being in some ways enforced,” he added, a grim detail. 

White also criticized the decision to lock the girls in Texas, saying the decision was “100% and exclusively about abortion.” (Since 2017, a long-term policy goal of Trump’s has been rolling back access to abortion for minors.) “I’ve been expecting this since Trump returned to office,” he said. “Now they casually roll out what they brutally fought to accomplish last time and didn’t.”