The issue first attracted wide attention in October 2017 when an undocumented teenager in Texas known as Jane Doe obtained an abortion over the government’s objection, after the appeals court in Washington allowed it. Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, participated in that case and dissented from the ruling. He said it would create “a new right for unlawful immigrant minors in U.S. government detention to obtain immediate abortion on demand.”

In arguing before the appeals court this past week that young undocumented immigrants had no such right, a lawyer for the Justice Department, August E. Flentje, said that any of them who wanted an abortion had the option of returning to their home countries — an assertion that drew skepticism from a panel of judges.

Judge Sri Srinivasan, who presided over the argument in the appeals court, said that abortion was not readily available in some of the countries to which immigrants might return. The government, he said, was telling young women who wanted an abortion that they could “leave and go somewhere where that right is not in existence.”

Brigitte Amiri, a lawyer for the young immigrants, said the administration — specifically, the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services — had imposed “a blanket ban on abortion for any minor in government custody.”

The Office of Refugee Resettlement is headed by Scott Lloyd, a staunch opponent of abortion who has personally tried to dissuade some young immigrants from having the procedure. The refugee office, he said, is supposed to be “a place of refuge” and must not participate in “the destruction of an unborn child’s life.”