Mothers and the disappeared

So much is happening every day, I’m always tempted to address the newest crisis. But it’s also often a good idea to pause to consider the deeper implications or context of prior events. Today I want to write about children in detention at a contractor-run facility in San Benito, Texas.

Reports this month suggest that all unaccompanied pregnant minors in the U.S. immigration detention system are being sent to San Benito. This is despite the fact that medical staff at the Office of Refugee Resettlement have flagged the shelter—which is a for-profit entity—as insufficient for the needs of the pregnant children.

Meanwhile, Texas state abortion law is draconian. It seems likely this is the very reason for sending pregnant detainees there—to keep them from getting abortions. So this week, I want to look at what we know about the current situation, and to consider Urban Strategy’s San Benito detention facility in light of some global detention history.

Dictatorship in Argentina

The current moment in Texas carries echoes of Argentina’s years under dictatorship. First, a little background: after a trio of generals seized power in 1976, anti-communist death squads began murdering civilians, leaving their corpses in ditches in and around Buenos Aires, the capital.

The detention system that rose under that dictatorship in Argentina reflected neighboring Chile’s recent move from large, traditional camp-style detention to smaller and less visible sites. Like Chile, Argentina’s leaders were sensitive to the global optics of their crimes.

The U.S. embassy had formally rebuked the generals’ human rights abuses soon after the junta took power, issuing a formal denunciation. But in a private meeting, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger discreetly told leadership to ignore the public statements.

Argentine officials had come to a meeting with him believing they would face threats, but instead received encouragement. “If there are things that have to be done,” Kissinger told the foreign minister, “you should do them quickly. We want you to succeed.”

One of the outcomes of trying not to lose American support was that detention stayed fairly atomized. The disappeared who were kidnapped from their homes or off the streets were spirited clandestinely to hundreds of detention sites. La Perla, a military installation outside Cordoba, was the among the most notorious—some two thousand detainees were sent there in all, with only 137 survivors.

Another site of shame and infamy was ESMA (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada) in the capital. Some 5,000 detainees were taken to ESMA during the dictatorship. Many were tortured in the basement as interrogators played music to cover their screams. Others were kept in the top level of the building and forced to work to create propaganda for the regime.

There were weekly death flights, before which detainees were told they would be vaccinated for a trip to a detention center in the southern regions of the country. But what they were given was actually a sedative. Once the planes were over open ocean, military personnel would throw their bodies from the plane.

On the third floor

One part of the Escuela Mecánica was different, however. On my visit there in 2016, I went up to third floor to find a small, nondescript room. It was the birthing room, where pregnant detainees were brought to deliver their babies. Afterward, their children were taken from them, in many cases vanishing forever. As many as five hundred babies were stolen this way, given to the families and allies of the junta to raise as their own.

The dictatorship had further restricted abortion once the generals came to power, instilling limits similar to those in Texas today. As a result, the optics of killing pregnant mothers were politically undesirable. So they waited until the mothers had given birth to murder them.

But the grandmothers of the surviving babies were not in detention. They organized and spoke out. At tremendous risk, they demonstrated on the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace every week, year after year, demanding answers. Long after the dictatorship fell, DNA tests became sophisticated enough to help reunite families. But it was a grim process with legal consequences. And many of the children had no idea they’d been raised by anyone other than their birth parents.

In some homes, parents (who were effectively kidnappers) were violently abusive. This was true in the case of Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit, who had been born to one of the disappeared mothers. When Pérez learned the real story of his birth as an adult, he eventually brought charges against the man he grew up with as his father—for the murder of his biological parents. The case led to his “father” being convicted.

Some 130 children have been reunited with their parents in Argentina. But there are those who don’t want to testify in court against the people who raised them—particularly against those they’d once believed were their mothers. The fathers could hardly claim ignorance, but their wives often swore they hadn’t known there was anything irregular in their adoptions. The whole monstrous system remains an open wound on society.

Trapped in Texas

Now we see the U.S. government, which is in thrall to anti-abortion activists, sending children to give birth in a state that will disregard the additional medical risks that pregnancy inflicts at that age. And the government is sending these children to a facility already determined to be incapable of managing those dangers.

According to a 2024 report from the World Health Organization, “Adolescent mothers (aged 10–19 years) face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections than women aged 20–24 years, and babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm birth and severe neonatal condition.”

In the past, the U.S. government would house pregnant, unaccompanied migrant children in Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters or foster homes in communities with medical services experienced in handling high-risk pregnancies. Dozens such settings exist. But the current administration is punishing both the pregnant children and the infants they will be forced to deliver, inflicting short and long-term physical and psychological trauma.

The California Newsroom and the Texas Newsroom collaborated to produce an excellent feature this month on these girls in Texas. Jonathan White—who has since left government but previously ran ORR’s unaccompanied children program during the first Trump administration—told reporters, “This is 100% and exclusively about abortion.”

White explained that the administration tried to restrict abortion access for unaccompanied minors in 2017, but failed. “Now they casually roll out what they brutally fought to accomplish last time and didn’t.”

With Roe v. Wade overturned, the stage was set for this kind of legal shell game with pregnant children. The administration is also working to undermine Biden-era rules protecting the reproductive rights of pregnant minors in detention. And as recently as 2024, ORR barred the shelter at San Benito from receiving pregnant girls for a time due to mismanagement of medical appointments and care plans.

Reports this month suggest that there haven’t yet been any major medical emergencies. And attorneys representing the children who are mothers say that postpartum, several girls have remained detained at the facility with their infants. An ORR staffer anonymously told reporters, “I feel like we’re just waiting for something terrible to happen.”

A brutal system

Mistreatment is endemic in the U.S. immigration detention system. Pregnant adults in immigrant detention face their own kinds of abuse. There have been extensive reports of pregnant adult women being shackled in pregnancy and forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded quarters. Pregnant women experiencing bleeding have been refused medical care.

The anti-abortion movement in the country is politically vicious and bent on controlling both women and children. This underlying them is mirrored in family separations, a way to punish migrants with deliberate, and sometimes permanent harm, for crossing the border, whether it is in search of a better life or to seek asylum. It’s no surprise that a government elected in part through its embrace of pro-life arguments and laws delivers direct harm to both women and children in so many different settings.

According to a December 2024 report from a collaboration between Human Rights Watch, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale University, 1,360 children hadn’t yet been reunited with their parents six years after the United States government forcibly separated them at the U.S. border to deter migration during the first Trump administration. And the Marshall Project has noted that the U.S. detention of minors in the first year of Trump’s second administration is six times higher per day than it was during Biden’s last sixteen months in office.

More recently, the Minneapolis Star Tribune has been reporting on minors being picked up alone in their neighborhoods in cities and towns, and treated as “unaccompanied minors”—as if they had crossed the border alone and had no family in the country. These children are sometimes hidden by being assigned new alien identification numbers, making them untraceable in the system, especially after they are sent to ORR shelters rather than ICE facilities.

The government wants to keep their relatives from finding them. To harm immigrants in the U.S., the administration is trying to rupture family connections as completely as possible.

With all the warehouses they’re now trying to acquire and the expeditionary military-style camps they’re trying to set up, the potential for harm will expand dramatically. Based on the arrest quotas they’ve established, they appear to hoping to more than double the number of deportations carried out in 2025.

There will be significant obstacles to those efforts. More and more communities are managing to block warehouse conversions.

But in the horrific detention situations that do wind up being created, imagine how many more parents will lose their children, how many more sexual assaults will occur in camps and other facilities, and how many more children will become parents, kidnapped into circumstances where the system is designed to unleash additional harm.

What you can do

What more vulnerable population is there than the pregnant immigrant child of an immigrant held in immigrant detention? While U.S. immigrant detention camps don’t carry out the death flight executions that took place in Argentina more than 40 years ago, the U.S. system, much vaster, is nonetheless built to inflict trauma. The consequences of how we allow our government to treat those it detains—particularly in these current operations, which are both public spectacle and private terror—can last for generations.

Last week, a group of eleven Democratic U.S. senators sent a letter demanding answers from the administration about its treatment of children in detention. The government has been trying to terminate the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which sets minimum standards for the humane treatment of children in immigration custody. Senators accused government agencies of being intent on detaining and removing children from the country without regard for constitutional or statutory protections.

You can demand your senators join these calls for accountability, and ask them to address the treatment of pregnant minors overall, as well as the funneling of pregnant minors to a substandard facility in South Texas. You can help the South Texas Pro-Bono Asylum Representation Project, an American Bar Association effort representing some of the detainees at San Benito, Texas. They need donations, as well as help from attorneys and volunteers alike to complete asylum applications, translate documents, organize files, and represent clients in hearings (among other tasks).

But you can also help close to home by reaching out to immigrant-supporting organizations in your community, to work with your city to make it harder for ICE to kidnap or detain people where you live, to make sure your neighbors have legal representation, and to push back on overreach from the current administration to end this nightmare.

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