Fearful of losing their jobs, homes, and families under the threat of a Trump administration crack down, more and more undocumented immigrants in the Southwest are canceling abortion appointments or waiting weeks longer to get the procedure.

BuzzFeed News spoke to staff at four nonprofit organizations across Texas and New Mexico who say they have seen an uptick in patients canceling, pushing back, or not making it to their appointments over the past few months as ongoing threats of mass raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and deportations continue to reverberate across local news outlets, communities, and Facebook pages.

“We have seen a wave of people not making it to their appointments and we have correlated it with all this anti-immigrant stuff in the media,” said Áine Brazil, who cofounded New Mexico’s Mariposa Fund, which supports undocumented immigrants seeking reproductive health care. “People coming up from El Paso, Fort Worth, and Southern Texas who are already hundreds and hundreds of miles away and terrified of check points and crossing borders.”

Getting an abortion is already a daunting, difficult process — from taking time off work to drive hundreds of miles, coordinating childcare, finding a place to stay, and, ultimately, scrambling together the funds to pay for all of those necessities plus the procedure. But it can become increasingly more expensive the longer you wait.

For undocumented patients, the experience is even more frightening and challenging when you have to cross state lines knowing ICE officers are being stationed on streets and highways.

Although the waves of ICE operations and arrests that Trump has promised have fallen flat, the fear and anxiety they have brought to immigrant communities have stymied an already vulnerable population's willingness to seek reproductive health care.



In the past few months, Brazil said her organization has recorded that 25% of their patients have expressed fear about raids and checkpoints.

“They will call and say, ‘I’m afraid,’ or, ‘What should I do?’ And it’s a really hard position to tell people to take a risk and know that they are, but people are desperate and they do what they have to do to make it happen,” she said. “But sometimes they don’t make it because the fear is too much.”

Fund Texas Choice, which serves about 30 people per month across Texas, said they had a “significant number” of patients last month who canceled their appointment or who disappeared and were no longer in contact, which is rare given the effort and coordination that goes into securing funding and transportation at one of the state’s remaining 18 abortion clinics.

