By RAY QUIROGA
publisher@sbnewspaper.com
Portions of this story was produced by The Texas Newsroom and The California Newsroom and was previously reprinted in its entirety. The Texas Newsroom is a public radio journalism collaboration that includes NPR, KERA (North Texas), Houston Public Media, KUT (Austin), Texas Public Radio (San Antonio), and other stations across the state. The California Newsroom is a collaboration of public media outlets, including NPR, CalMatters, KQED (San Francisco), LAist, KCRW (Los Angeles), KPBS (San Diego), and other stations across California. Mose Buchele of The Texas Newsroom contributed reporting.
A small but passionate group of protesters braved the Rio Grande Valley summer heat and gathered on the corner of Heywood Street and Sam Houston Boulevard on Saturday to advocate for detainees at a San Benito detention facility, said to house pregnant women, some believed to be underage and high risk.
The demonstration was organized through a social media effort spearheaded by 29-year-old San Benito resident Julianna Cruz.
“The proper medical care they are not receiving (concerns us) as well as their compliance. They should not be housed in a state with strict reproductive laws like Texas, and those girls deserve better. That is why I say Texas laws don’t overrule human rights. Even though they are undocumented, they still deserve every type of medical treatment, especially since they are in high-risk pregnancies and are very young,” Cruz said.
In May of this year, Congressman Joaquin Castro of San Antonio and Vicente Gonzalez of the Rio Grande Valley visited Resaca City to inspect a controversial migrant detention facility in the heart of the city.
The otherwise unassuming facility, located in the 200 block of East Heywood St., sits quietly in a San Benito neighborhood, across from the San Benito Community Building and cultural centers, caddy-corner to the San Benito school district administration building.
It originally served as the First Baptist Church of San Benito and later as Calvary Chapel before being sold.
A yearlong investigation by The California Newsroom and The Texas Newsroom, public media, found that the Trump administration is sending pregnant unaccompanied minors apprehended by immigration enforcement to this single group shelter.
The decision was made despite urgent objections from the administration’s own health and child welfare officials, who say the facility and the region lack the specialized care the girls need.
That’s according to seven sources who work at the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the custody and care of children who cross the border without a parent or legal guardian or are separated from their families by immigration authorities.
Since late July 2025, more than a dozen pregnant minors have been placed at the Texas facility, some as young as 13.
Their pregnancies are considered high risk by definition, particularly for the youngest girls.
The move marks a sharp departure from longstanding federal practice, which placed pregnant, unaccompanied migrant children in ORR shelters or foster homes nationwide equipped to handle high-risk pregnancies.
Sources, along with more than a dozen former government officials, health care professionals, migrant advocates, and civil rights attorneys, said they worry the Trump administration is putting children at risk at the San Benito shelter to advance an ideological goal: denying them access to abortion by placing them in a state where it’s virtually banned.
“This is 100% and exclusively about abortion,” said Jonathan White, a longtime federal health official who ran ORR’s unaccompanied children program for part of President Donald Trump’s first term.
White, who recently retired from government service, said the administration tried and failed in 2017 to restrict abortion access for unaccompanied minors. “Now they casually roll out what they brutally fought to accomplish last time and didn’t.”
In May, Castro said his visit raised more questions than it answered.
“It’s the one facility where they keep pregnant girls, often teenagers, and other unaccompanied teenage minors. But in this shelter, they also have three babies, the babies of these girls. When I was at Dilley, for example, there were pregnant women there, but in San Benito, this is where they send pregnant girls,” Castro explained, reflecting on what makes the San Benito shelter unique, adding that the age range at the facility is 0-17.
He went on to say that the facility is also housing a five-year-old unaccompanied minor. “We pressed more and asked more questions, but this has been the most secretive, least transparent administration that we’ve dealt with, so they wouldn’t give us specific information about particular people,” he said.
The congressman also posed concerns about the length of time detainees are held at this and other facilities.
“The longest stay for any person there right now is 400 days. There is a girl in there right now who has been there for longer than a year,” Castro said.
Asked via email why the administration is sending pregnant children to San Benito, an HHS spokesperson who asked not to be named wrote that “ORR’s placement decisions are guided by child welfare best practices and are designed to ensure each child is housed in the safest, most developmentally appropriate setting, including for children who are pregnant or parenting.”
According to an internal email obtained during a six-month investigation by The California Newsroom and The Texas Newsroom, public media collaboratives that worked together to produce this story, ORR’s acting director, Angie Salazar, instructed agency staff to send “any pregnant children” to San Benito starting July 22, 2025.
The move comes despite objections from the government’s health and child welfare officials.
Several sources said a handful of pregnant girls were mistakenly placed in other shelters because immigration authorities didn’t know they were pregnant when they were transferred into ORR custody.
Since the July order, none of the pregnant girls at the San Benito facility have experienced major medical problems, according to Aimee Korolev, deputy director of ProBAR, which provides legal services to children there. She said several of the girls have given birth and are detained with their infants.
‘Blown away by the level of risk’
According to ORR officials, there are dozens of ORR shelters or foster homes nationwide designated to care for pregnant unaccompanied children, with 12 in Texas alone. None of the officials could recall a time when all the pregnant minors in the agency’s custody were concentrated in a single shelter.
Detaining them in San Benito, doctors and public health experts said, is a dangerous gambit.
“It’s not good to be a pregnant person in Texas, no matter who you are,” said Annie Leone, a nurse midwife who recently spent five years caring for pregnant and postpartum migrant women and girls at a large family shelter not far from San Benito. “So, to put pregnant migrant kids in Texas, and then in one of the worst health care regions of Texas, is not good at all.”
Specialized obstetric care in Texas is mostly available in its larger cities, hours away from San Benito. Several factors, including a high number of uninsured patients, have eroded health care availability across the state.
Furthermore, Texas’ near-ban on abortion has been especially devastating for obstetric care. The law allows an exception when the mother’s life is in danger or one of her bodily functions is at risk, but doctors have been confused about what that means.
Many doctors have left to practice elsewhere, and those who’ve stayed are often afraid to perform procedures they worry could lead to criminal charges. Although Texas passed a law clarifying the exceptions last year, experts have said it may not be enough to assuage doctors’ fears.
Several maternal health experts described a sobering list of risks for the girls at the San Benito shelter: If one of them develops an ectopic pregnancy (where the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus), miscarries, or has her water break too early and then develops an infection, the emergency care she needs could be delayed or denied by doctors wary of the abortion ban.
Getting the care that is available could take too long to save her life or the baby’s, they added.
Adolescents are also more likely to give birth prematurely, which can be life-threatening for both mother and baby. The youngest face complications during labor and delivery because their pelvises aren’t fully developed, said Dr. Anne-Marie Amies Oelschlager, an obstetrician in Washington State who specializes in adolescent pregnancy.
“These are young adolescents who are still going through puberty,” she said. “Their bodies are still changing.”
Pregnant girls who recently endured the often harrowing journey to the U.S. face even greater risk, obstetrics experts said. Many have been raped along the way and have sexually transmitted infections that can be dangerous during pregnancy, add to that limited access to prenatal care or proper nourishment, and then the trauma of detention.
“You couldn’t set up a worse scenario,” said Dr. Blair Cushing, who runs a women’s health clinic in McAllen. “I’m kind of blown away by the level of risk that they’re concentrating in this facility.”
A history of problems
According to USAspending.gov, the San Benito shelter is owned and operated by Urban Strategies, a for-profit company that has had a federal contract to care for unaccompanied children for more than a decade.
The main building, an old tan-brick former Baptist Church, occupies a city block in downtown San Benito. The church was converted into a migrant shelter in 2015 and was managed by two other contractors before Urban Strategies took it over in 2021.
On a fall day last year, there were no signs of activity at the facility, though children’s lawn toys and playground equipment were visible behind a wooden fence. A guard was stationed at one of the entrances.
Reached by email, Lisa Cummins, the founder and president of Urban Strategies, wrote that the company is “deeply committed to the care and well-being of the children we serve,” but directed questions about ORR-contracted shelters to the federal agency.
When asked about the San Benito facility, the ORR spokesperson stated, “Urban Strategies has a long-standing record of delivering high-quality care to pregnant unaccompanied minors, with consistently low staff turnover.”
But agency sources who spoke with the newsrooms said that as recently as 2024, shelter staff failed to schedule timely medical appointments for pregnant girls, failed to immediately share critical health information with the federal agency, and discharged them without arranging continued medical care.
Like other experts who spoke with the newsrooms, White, the former head of ORR’s unaccompanied children program, said he believes the San Benito directive and the anti-abortion rule change are intended to work together: Once pregnant children are placed at the San Benito shelter, the new regulations could prevent them from being moved out of Texas to obtain abortions — even if doing so would put them at risk.
In May, Castro acknowledged that the Trump administration is attempting to change the “rule,” and if successful, women at these facilities who were impregnated as a result of sexual assault would be forced to carry their pregnancies to term. “I hope people will speak up about it. It is cruel to these young girls if this rule is put in place,” he said.
San Benito Mayor Pedro “Pete” Galvan, who was elected in May but previously served as a commissioner, said the facility meets all current city standards and regulations and that the city commission can do little as long as it complies with current ordinances.
Willacy County resident Janie Alvarado, who took part in Saturday’s demonstration against the facility, said their effort aims to make San Benito residents aware that a facility of this nature exists in their backyard.
“Too many people here don’t know that a facility like this exists right in their backyard. They have no knowledge of it, and we want to bring it to their attention,” she said.
Cruz said she hopes public pressure results in greater government transparency and, at the least, the detainees will be relocated to a state with more reproductive rights.