A Democratic congresswoman who visited a federal immigration detention center in San Benito, Texas, encountered a troubling gap in transparency. Representative Maxine Dexter, an Oregon lawmaker and former critical care physician, found herself unable to account for dozens of pregnant unaccompanied minors who had been held at the facility, and she is raising urgent questions about what happened to their US citizen newborns.
When Dexter arrived at the facility in late April for a tour, staff blocked her from speaking to or even seeing any of the children, she said. Local immigration attorneys had arranged interviews with two girls, but those teenagers were reportedly spoken to harshly by Office of Refugee Resettlement staff on the morning of her visit and were too frightened to talk with her.
The census discrepancies were striking. An attorney receiving daily counts reported 11 children at the facility on the day of her visit. Officials told Dexter there were only seven. When Democratic Texas congressman Joaquin Castro visited a few weeks earlier, there were 17. "Where have all of these kids gone? Because there used to be many, many more," Dexter asked during her visit. Staff offered only vague responses: the departures were "case by case," with no explanation of whether the girls were placed in foster care, moved to other facilities, or returned to their home countries.
Jonathan White, a former top official overseeing children's programs in the Office of Refugee Resettlement under both the Obama and Trump administrations, said the ORR case management system can "definitively answer" where each child went. He suggested the most likely scenario: the girls were deported back to their countries of origin or to a third country. Their infants, born on US soil and therefore US citizens, would effectively be deported alongside them.
"I suspect that in effect in this one narrow case the president's executive order on birthright citizenship is already being in some ways enforced," White said. He noted that such departures almost never occurred under prior administrations because children had to formally request a stay in immigration court. When Dexter visited the Harlingen immigration court, more than half the children from ORR facilities had no legal representation.
The facility houses girls as young as 13, many carrying high-risk pregnancies. About half the pregnancies result from sexual assault. Dexter expressed serious concerns about whether adequate medical care is available in a state with restrictive abortion laws and a shortage of obstetricians partly due to those restrictions.
"These are high-risk pregnancies, by definition, simply by the age of the girls," Dexter said. "If they have an ectopic pregnancy, if they have a partial loss of pregnancy, will they get the healthcare they need to save their lives?"
In 2024, detentions at the San Benito facility were halted because of insufficient access to healthcare. When Dexter asked what had changed, officials said appointment wait times dropped from 15 days or more to five days. But attorneys and staff she spoke with painted a different picture. The facility lacked basic equipment: no glucometers, no Dopplers, no lactation specialists to help nursing teenagers who are sent back to class as early as two weeks after giving birth.
A spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services said pregnant girls have access to gynecologists and maternal-fetal medicine specialists trained in high-risk adolescent pregnancies. But Dexter's fact-finding revealed what she called potential intimidation of detainees willing to speak with her.
"The fact that there appears to have been some coercion or intimidation from talking with me just makes you wonder: 'What are they hiding? Why do they not want transparency and accountability for what's going on?'" Dexter said.
She also noted that Texas Governor Greg Abbott rescinded state-level oversight of such facilities, leaving the Office of Refugee Resettlement to police itself. "ORR is overseeing ORR, which is a recipe for disaster," Dexter said. She sent formal questions to refugee and health officials in May but has not received answers.
Author James Rodriguez: "The disappearance of these girls and the potential deportation of their US citizen children demands immediate congressional investigation and judicial review, not bureaucratic delays and stonewalling."
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