On the 45th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the ACLU decries ‘shocking’ attempts to prevent migrants in detention from seeking treatment

The Trump administration is engaging in the most flagrant violation yet seen of the constitutional right to an abortion by preventing undocumented women held in detention centers from seeking medical treatment, constitutional lawyers have warned.

On this week’s 45th anniversary of supreme court’s landmark Roe v Wade ruling, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have accused Trump-appointed officials of in effect holding pregnant women hostage in order to stop them reaching abortion clinics. Four cases in which women have been blocked have so far been confirmed, provoking a flurry of legal challenges, while the total number denied their constitutional rights could be much higher.

“I’ve never seen anything quite as blatant and brazen as this,” said the ACLU’s senior staff attorney Brigitte Amiri. “We are celebrating the 45th anniversary of Roe v Wade, which clearly states that the government cannot ban abortion, yet this is precisely what the Trump administration is doing to these women.”

Amiri added: “It’s shocking. The government is physically holding these women hostage for the purpose of preventing them having abortions.”

The new policy was introduced in March 2017 – two months after Trump’s inauguration – in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, ORR, a federal agencyresponsible for the custody of about 5,000 unaccompanied children who enter the US illegally. The undocumented minors are among the most vulnerable people in the country, many having fled abuse; some are found to be pregnant on arrival as a result of rape.

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The rule change was the brainchild of Trump’s appointee as director of the ORR, Scott Lloyd. His selection to lead such a sensitive outpost of the federal government raised eyebrows as Lloyd had virtually no experience working with refugees or children.

He did, however, have a long track record within the anti-abortion movement. Before joining the Trump administration he worked for Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal society that has for years funded attempts to criminalize abortion.

As BuzzFeed noted, in 2011 Lloyd wrote an article in which he argued that women should be forced to notify the biological father “of their decision to abort, and gain their consent”.

The rule change, set out in an email from Lloyd, instructed custodial centers to stop taking “any action that facilitates” access to an abortion. Women would be redirected to “counseling centers” where they would be given ultrasounds of their fetuses and advice on alternatives to terminating the pregnancy.

The Center for Investigative Reporting later revealed that the list of approved counseling centers was compiled by an anti-abortion group, Heartbeat, that strives to make abortion “unwanted today and unthinkable for future generations”.

‘The attempts at coercion are mind-boggling’

Court disclosures show that Lloyd personally flew from Washington to San Antonio, Texas, to apply pressure on a pregnant woman who was asking for an abortion; after his visit she dropped the request. He is also known to have talked on the phone with at least one other woman in ORR’s custody who was seeking an abortion.

Another woman was forced to go to the ER after she had taken an abortion pill to try to stop the termination mid-process. “The coercion is mind-boggling – Scott Lloyd is the government official who holds these women’s immigration status in his hands, and here he is talking to them about their pregnancy,” Amiri said.

The ACLU has taken the ORR and Lloyd to court on four separate occasions in which undocumented teens – known anonymously as Jane Doe, Jane Roe, Jane Poe and Jane Moe – were barred from seeking terminations.

In the first case, the shelter holding Jane Doe, aged 17, was forbidden by the new leadership of ORR from allowing her out of the facility to attend an abortion clinic.

Court documents show that the shelter was told it would lose its government grant if it let her leave the premises.

It is not known what happened in the most recent case of Jane Moe, who has been released into the care of a sponsor. In the first three cases, federal courts overruled the ORR and allowed the women to go ahead with ending their pregnancies.

Lloyd has now petitioned the US supreme court for a review of the decision to let Jane Doe have an abortion. He has also asked the country’s highest court to punish the ACLU lawyers involved in the case for alleged misconduct, on grounds that they assisted her in carrying out the termination quickly, despite the fact that she was acting entirely within her legal rights.

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The most startling aspect of Lloyd’s conduct has been a memo he wrote in the case of the third woman, Jane Poe, an teenage immigrant who was pregnant as a result of a rape in her native country and who had threatened to harm herself unless she were allowed to end the pregnancy.

In the memo, which was disclosed to the Washington district court that is hearing the ACLU’s request for a class action lawsuit against the ORR’s new anti-abortion policy, Lloyd sets out his stance in crystal-clear language.

Addressing the nature of the rape, he begins: “Certainly, it is understandable that a woman who is pregnant from the vile actions of a criminal would want to terminate her pregnancy. I do not, and am in no position to, judge anyone who has taken such an action.”

Nonetheless, he goes on to say: “I cannot authorize our program to participate in the abortion requested here, even in this most difficult case … Implicit here are the dubious notions that it is possible to cure violence with further violence, and that the destruction of an unborn child’s life can in some instances be acceptable as a means to an end.”

He concludes that the abortion is not in Jane Poe’s best interest. “We have to choose, and we ought to choose to protect life rather than to destroy it.”

In fact, under Roe v Wade not only does Scott Lloyd not have to choose, he is constitutionally prohibited from doing so. The supreme court ruling states clearly that it is the woman herself who gets to choose – a constitutional right that Jane Poe’s immigrant status does not impinge.

The Guardian invited the ORR to comment, but the agency did not immediately respond.

In his memo, the ORR director invests himself with powers over pregnant women that even American parents do not have over their own children. “Parents in this country do not have the power to veto their children’s abortion decision, even if the child is under 18. And nor does Scott Lloyd,” Amiri said.

She added: “What is going on here is Lloyd imposing his own personal anti-abortion ideology on these young women to deny them access to care, even if they have been raped, even if they are suicidal.”

In Amiri’s view, the goings on within the relatively obscure world of refugee resettlement should sound alarm bells across the country: “This is a canary in a coal mine. The Trump administration would like to do to all women what they are doing to these women – prevent them accessing abortion.”