When immigration agents seize “unaccompanied alien children,” a term referring to undocumented kids who have no parent or legal guardian in the United States, those kids don’t usually go into ICE detention. Instead, ICE hands them over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a part of the Department of Health and Human Services that Congress tasked with those children’s custody and care.
In July 2025, ORR Acting Director Angie Salazar announced a new custodial policy: “any pregnant children” should be placed in a particular group home in San Benito, Texas, a small city near the Mexican border—and far from the obstetric care that those children, and their children, are likely to need.
The policy change alarmed several ORR officials, who told reporters at The California Newsroom and The Texas Newsroom that the Trump administration was “playing politics with children’s health.” The officials provided agency leadership with a list of facilities far better-equipped to handle the girls’ pregnancies. But higher-ups ignored their objections. Since Salazar issued her directive last year, the Trump administration has sent more than a dozen pregnant children to the ORR shelter in San Benito. Some of them were as young as 13. At least half of them were pregnant as a result of rape. All of them had high-risk pregnancies. And now, they and their babies are missing.
When Texas Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro visited the San Benito facility in early April 2026, he saw several teenagers who were pregnant or had recently given birth, and their newborn infants. But when Oregon Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Dexter, a physician, inspected the facility on April 24, she saw no children, and shelter staff refused to answer her questions about where the girls were.
Castro, Dexter, and dozens of other congressional Democrats have since sent letters to Salazar and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., seeking information about the whereabouts and health and safety of the girls and their children, and asking what proof of citizenship the young mothers have received for the children born in ORR custody. They have yet to receive answers to their questions.
Although the pregnant children who the Trump administration sent to San Benito are undocumented, the infants who they gave birth to are American citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” For well over a century, this broad language was practically universally understood to confer citizenship to all people born on American soil, except for children of foreign diplomats and members of sovereign Indian tribes.
On January 20, 2025, however, President Donald Trump reentered the White House, and issued an executive order purporting to supplant the Constitution’s definition of birthright citizenship with his own. Trump’s order aims to limit birthright citizenship to children with at least one parent who is a citizen or legal permanent resident, thus legalizing a caste system in which stigma is passed down from parent to child.
The Supreme Court has had about a year and a half to put an end to this white supremacist farce. But last summer, in Trump v. CASA, the Court spurned the opportunity to do so. After federal courts issued orders preventing Trump from implementing his birthright citizenship order nationwide, the Republican justices narrowed the relief to only those parties to the lawsuit, giving Trump a procedural backdoor way to violate the rights of any baby without a lawyer. Plaintiffs changed tactics, though, and soon won a new nationwide injunction blocking the citizenship order as part of a class action lawsuit. (The class? All babies affected by Trump’s order.)
Birthright citizenship returned to the Supreme Court this year on the merits, after multiple lower courts ruled that Trump’s birthright citizenship order was unlawful, and the Court chose to hear Trump’s appeal. Mercifully, the April oral argument in that case, Trump v. Barbara, went very poorly for the administration. But in the meantime, Trump may already be deporting newborn American citizens. Last week, Jonathan White, who led ORR’s unaccompanied minors program during Trump’s first term, told The Guardian that the San Benito detainees have probably been removed from the country. Speaking from his experience, White said he suspected that “the president’s executive order on birthright citizenship is already being in some ways enforced.”
The Supreme Court could have said that Trump’s order is unconstitutional over a year ago. Girls and their babies are missing because it didn’t.
