The first Trump administration’s crackdown on unaccompanied immigrant minors became the blueprint for today’s post-Dobbs attacks on abortion, contraception and bodily autonomy.
A message from Ms. editors, followed by a conversation between legal scholar Shoshanna Ehrlich and Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.
As the second Trump administration accelerates its assault on sexual and reproductive rights at home and abroad, the legal landscape has shifted in ways that are both familiar and newly perilous. With Roe v. Wade gone, long-standing guardrails have disappeared, opening the door to more aggressive attacks not only on abortion, but on contraception, bodily autonomy and the rights of those most vulnerable to state control.
In this wide-ranging conversation, Ehrlich and Amiri trace how the first Trump administration’s efforts to block abortion access for unaccompanied immigrant minors foreshadowed the post-Dobbs playbook now being deployed against teens, immigrants and people with the fewest resources.
Their conversation moves from past to present, connecting attacks on abortion to emerging threats to contraception, gender-affirming care and the right to travel—while also highlighting hard-won victories, from state constitutional amendments to over-the-counter birth control. It’s a sobering account of how rights are eroded … and a reminder that collective action can still bend the law toward justice.
This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Shoshanna Ehrlich: Let’s start with your current position and a bit of background as to how you came to this work.
Brigitte Amiri: I am one of the deputy directors at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project in the national office.
I have been here for almost 21 years, and have seen a lot of changes in our work, but our bread and butter is to protect access to abortion and contraception, and we’ve also expanded a bit into birth justice.
I came here from legal services, where I did foreclosure prevention for low-income homeowners, and before that I was at the Center for Reproductive Rights. And as you know, I graduated from Northeastern Law School where I was very lucky to have you as one of my professors.
Ehrlich: I was incredibly lucky to have had you as one of my students.
The second Trump administration has been trampling on sexual and reproductive rights globally and nationally—banning the provision of abortion care and counseling for veterans through the Veteran’s Administration, pardoning antiabortion activists, reinstating the global gag rule, and so on.
Looking back to Trump 1.0, were there the same level of attacks on abortion access?
Amiri: I think there was, and it also looked different, but we’re only one year into this Trump administration, and I feel like it’s going to get worse. In the first Trump administration we were prepared for certain attacks, and we were getting our ducks in a row for those attacks. But we were also surprised by some other attacks, and had to quickly jump into some of those fights.
But also, the big difference was that in the first administration we still had Roe. By losing that underlying constitutional right to abortion at the federal level, the door has been opened for the second Trump administration to both compound the attacks and move in new directions.
Ehrlich: What are examples of expected and unexpected from the first Trump term?
Amiri: We knew the Trump administration was going to come after Title X, the nation’s only family planning program to propose rules that undermining that critical safety net that provides no-cost or low-cost birth control, STI testing and treatment and cervical cancer screenings to people with the fewest resource. We were prepared to and did litigate these rules, and unfortunately lost that lawsuit. We saw the decimation of the family planning program after those rules went into effect in 2020.
The attack that we were unprepared for was preventing unaccompanied immigrant minors from accessing abortion when they were in government custody. It was so blatant and so brazen, in terms of the prevention of access to abortion, that it wasn’t necessarily something on our radar screen because of Roe. We knew that the government couldn’t ban abortion under the federal Constitution, so it was a surprise when the government decided to block unaccompanied immigrant minors from accessing abortion in government shelters.
… The teenagers … came by themselves without immigration documentation, discovered they were pregnant as part of their initial medical exam, asked for access to abortion or information about abortion, and were blocked by the Trump administration.
Brigitte Amiri
Ehrlich: That makes a lot of sense. Since although Roe had been steadily chipped away at, it nonetheless functioned as a pre-Dobbs guardrail against outright bans, so I am wondering whether this was also emblematic of Trump’s attack on undocumented immigrants?
Amiri: Yes. I think it was definitely the confluence of antiabortion forces and anti-immigration forces, and also, going after the most marginalized. It is also interesting to note that the attack from the first Trump administration on access to reproductive healthcare was for minors in government custody, and not adults in ICE custody, for example. That’s also an important thing to point out: They went after the most marginalized, in terms of this Venn diagram of reproductive rights and immigration and young people.
We caught wind in the fall of 2017 that the Trump administration was at first trying to coerce minors who were seeking abortion in government custody from accessing abortion, and if that coercion failed, they would just prevent them outright from leaving the government-funded shelter to access abortion.
Ehrlich: Can you just quickly explain who falls into the category of unaccompanied immigrant minors?
Amiri: Unaccompanied immigrant minors are minors who come by themselves from their home country often fleeing violence, and they have relatives in the United States often who they hope will be their sponsors, who they can live with. So many unaccompanied minors who come to the United States are reunited with family here and stay here or they seek asylum. If neither path is available, they face deportation.
The teenagers we are focused on here, came to the U.S. by themselves without immigration documentation, discovered they were pregnant as part of their initial medical exam, asked for access to abortion or information about abortion, and were blocked by the Trump administration.
Ehrlich: And when you say “blocked” from abortion access or information, what did that look like?
Amiri: When it comes to unaccompanied immigrant minors, the federal government contracts with private entities to run shelters. Those shelters must provide day-to-day care for minors, including access to medical care in accordance with statutes and regulations that oversee this population.
So, in these government contracted shelters, the government still has a fair amount of control. There’s a federal field specialist, for example, employed by the federal government who is involved in the inner workings of the shelter and there were reports going from the shelter to the head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the federal agency that oversees unaccompanied immigrant minors, and Scott Lloyd, the then-director of ORR, was intent on using his own personal opposition to abortion to prevent minors in government custody from accessing abortion.
Those attempts to block abortion access took different forms. We know, for example, if a minor requested an abortion in certain circumstances, he personally went to the shelter to try to convince them to not have an abortion. We also knew in one circumstance that a minor had started the two-pill medication abortion regimen, and when he found out she took the first set of pills, he ordered that she be taken to a hospital to see if they could reverse the abortion and prevent her from taking the second abortion.
…. Scott Lloyd, the then-director of ORR, was intent on using his own personal opposition to abortion to prevent minors in government custody from accessing abortion. … To try and interrupt the process of a desired chosen abortion is just outrageous.
Amiri
Ehrlich: And of course, we know abortion reversal is a myth.
Amiri: Right. And to try and interrupt the process of a desired chosen abortion is just outrageous. We also know that he required minors to go to antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers. He threatened to tell minors’ parents in their home country that they were seeking access to abortion as a form of punishment and dissuasion. And when these attempts failed and the minor continued to be insistent about her ability to access abortion, he just said, you are prohibited from leaving the shelter for any abortion-related care, including counseling and pre-abortion care. And so, it was just basically holding them hostage and preventing them from leaving for any abortion-related care.
Ehrlich: I know that the ACLU, with you in the lead, brought a challenge to what I guess was really the first post-Roe outright ban on abortion that actually was in play. Correct me if I’m wrong about that.
Amiri: It depends on how you define it. A number of states were trying to push the envelope at the same time. A number of states had bans on abortions at different points in pregnancy, like six weeks in pregnancy, 12 weeks in pregnancy, 20 weeks in pregnancy. So, we had a number of cases that were also flagrant violations of Roe pending around the same time. But this was a very stark prohibition by the government of access to abortion, full stop. And so, I naively thought it was going to be a very open and shut case.
I remember when we made contact with the first Jane Doe, and we knew we needed to file a motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO). The next day, to prevent the government from blocking her access to an abortion, I said, “This will be so straightforward, I’m going to go home, have dinner, put my kid to bed and then I will draft the TRO because it simply needs to say, ‘Government you can’t ban abortion, see Roe v. Wade.'”
Little did I know we were going to end up in a protracted legal battle for years.
Ehrlich: So, what happened?
Amiri: We eventually won, but it took a lot longer than I expected because the government kept throwing up arguments that we had to respond to both in the trial and the appeals court. For example, one of the arguments was that because unaccompanied minors were in federally funded shelters and the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funds from being used for abortion, allowing them to access abortion violated the amendment.
Importantly, however we were able to bring the case of Garza v. Hargan as a class action on behalf of unaccompanied minors who were or might become pregnant. We successfully got a preliminary injunction of behalf of the class preventing the government from prohibiting them from obtaining an abortion, so no one was denied the ability to obtain an abortion.
After Biden was elected, the Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying explicitly that ensuring unaccompanied immigrant minors have access to abortion is not a violation of the Hyde Amendment, but the Trump administration revoked it shortly after he was elected for his second term. So, a big theme in both Trump administrations is an attempt to expand what it means when federal law says that federal funds cannot be used for abortions except in limited cases.
Ehrlich: Would you say these efforts by state and federal governments to breach the legal prohibition on abortion bans during Trump I, while unsuccessful, set the stage for the Dobbs decision and the stepped attacks on abortion access by the current administration?
Amiri: Definitely. And Dobbs itself was the outcome of those state attempts to ban abortion at the earlier stages of pregnancy as a way of getting a test case to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. That was all part of the environment during first Trump administration too.
Ehrlich: One additional question about the Garza case particularly given the current vicious anti-immigrant climate, and the fact that we’re talking two days after the murder of Renee Good, does the case mark the confluence of hostility towards both abortion and undocumented immigrants?
Amiri: Yes. Some of the commentary by the other side during the Garza case was the allegation that some of these minors were coming to the United States for “abortion tourism,” that they were coming here intentionally to get abortions because they were illegal in their home states.
That is not the case, but that was part of the, “you shouldn’t have come here in the first place,” refrain from the administration. And interestingly—although I think the government made the claim in the beginning but then did not continue with it—these minors had no constitutional right to abortion because they were here without documentation and that only citizens of the United States would have rights under the Constitution vis-à-vis abortion. That was something others pushed, but the government itself did not.
Ehrlich: Before moving to what is happening now, perhaps you can just say a bit more about Dobbs because I think it’s important to remember, it didn’t come out of nowhere.
Amiri: From the time Roe was decided, the other side started to chip away at the abortion right in various ways. And since we’ve been talking about the Hyde Amendment, Henry Hyde when he introduced the amendment said something along the lines of, ‘I would like to ban abortion for everyone, but the only vehicle I have is to prohibit Medicaid from covering abortion, so that’s what I can do.’ And so, we know that a national ban has long been an intent of theirs. We saw the deliberate chipping away at the abortion right.
We saw the vehicles to try to not just impose restrictions and get them upheld and then copied in all the states, but the bans that we’re talking about too. We were screaming from the rooftops that they were coming after Roe and abortion was going to be banned, and we were not believed.
Ehrlich: By whom?
Amiri: By the public, by people even in my daily life. I would say my concern is that they’re going directly after Roe and they’re trying to overturn the right to abortion for the entire country. And people would say, that’s never going to happen—that was a refrain I heard all the time.
As with all rights, they’re tenuous and you have to continue to fight to enforce them. And the other side, literally from time Roe was decided, they’ve been planning for this moment and they’ve been strategizing. And so, it was in the works for a very long time.
Ehrlich: When you talked about the most marginalized being targeted in Garza as part of the strategic attack on Roe, is that kind of rights’ erosion in play now?
Amiri: Yeah. And you see this now as the template for gender-affirming care. The bans on gender-affirming care for minors is the first foray into that attempt to restrict bodily autonomy there, and we’re seeing it in contraception too. So, when we say they’re coming after the right to contraception next and they want to overturn Griswald v. Connecticut, we know that they have said that before with Roe. And what they are doing is at the state level in passing laws requiring parental consent for teens to access contraception. And so, it’s the same playbook of going after the most marginalized as a steppingstone to overturning and abolishing the right in general.
Ehrlich: That’s a scary picture. Would you also say that the laws criminalizing the provision of abortion support to minors, which the antis are calling “abortion trafficking,” is another steppingstone ?
Amiri: Yes. Right. In terms of going after the right to travel for abortion care, which is tied to a separate constitutional right—the right to travel. By trying to restrict minors from traveling out of state to get abortion care if abortion is illegal in their home state, it is another steppingstone of going after, in this case, the right to travel for abortion care overall.
Ehrlich: I want to weave together some of the incredibly important strands that you just set out, which is what you are saying is that the current attacks on gender-affirming care and contraceptives is a repeat of the same playbook that was used post Roe, which is to begin by limiting access for teens as the opening wedge to attacking the rights for everyone. Is that an accurate?
Amiri: Yes. 100 percent.
We lost the Skrmetti case when the Supreme Court upheld the ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The contraceptive piece of it has not yet been newly tested by the Supreme Court, and so we don’t know what it will say about its decision in the 1977 case of Carey v. Population Services holding that minors have a constitutional right to access contraception. But we see state legislatures pushing new, expansive laws requiring parental consent for medical care, including prescription contraception, where they previously could consent on their own. We also see standalone bills requiring parental consent for contraception in general. So, we are seeing the initial stages of these attacks on contraception.
Ehrlich: Do you think the ultimate targets are the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswald v. Connecticut, that constitutionalized the right to contraceptives for married couple and the subsequent 1972 decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird extending the right to unmarried individuals?
Amiri: Yes.
We know that there are people explicitly calling for the overturn of the right to contraception. Judge Kacsmaryk in his decision in Deanda v. Becerra wrote in a footnote that the court should revisit Griswald. So, it’s not a product of our imagination. It is an explicit call to action by some people on the other side.
Ehrlich: I have a hard enough time reading Kacsmaryk’s decisions without looking at the footnotes. Can you briefly explain what the Deanda case is about?
Amiri: This fits with the theme that we’re talking about here and why we’re concerned. Texas has a law requiring parental consent for medical care, including prescription contraception. But the family planning program at the federal level, Title X, has always guaranteed confidential services, including for minors. So, there has been a long-standing prohibition on parental consent or notification for minor’s accessing contraception or STI testing and treatment at a Title X funded health center.
The Deanda case was brought by a man on behalf of his minor daughters saying, I don’t want my daughters to go to a Title X clinic and get contraception without my knowledge or permission. He raised a federal parental rights argument, arguing the law interfered with his right to control the upbringing of his children, and also argued that the Texas law must be followed by federally funded Title X health centers.
The parental rights issue was not reached on appeal. However the appeals ruled that the Texas law requiring parental consent must be followed even by federally funded Title X health centers, which is backwards since the basic principle is that federal law preempts (takes precedence over) over state law when the two are in conflict.
It’s disingenuous. It was a result-oriented decision to require everyone providing prescription contraception to minors in Texas to first obtain parental consent. So, Texas became the first state where minors cannot go to a Title X funded family planning center and get confidential care, and that was just devastating.
But one second for a bright spot. The year after Deanda was decided, we got the amazing news from the FDA that the first over the counter pill would be approved without an age restriction. When that news came, my first thought minors in Texas will now be able to go into a drugstore or pharmacy and buy oral contraception, without any sort of obstacle other than the finances, which is always a consideration. But the over-the-counter pill is a tremendous success story. I bring that up to have a bright spot so I’m not all doom and gloom.
Ehrlich: Moving away from some of the doom and gloom, I want to talk about some of the litigation that the ACLU is involved in now with a focus on cases being brought in states that have approved ballot measures to enshrine the right to reproductive freedom in their constitutions.
Amiri: I’ll start with how exciting the constitutional amendments are, specifically in those states that, as you said, did not previously have explicit or implicit protections for reproductive rights. I think also that the power of these ballot initiatives is they show what we’ve always known to be true—that people support access to abortion and contraception in large numbers, including in states where you would think that people might not support it, like Missouri.
In large numbers we win these ballot initiatives. And kudos to all the organizations and the grassroots folks that got these amendments passed because that meant the litigators now have a tool to go into state court, under the state constitution, to try to strike down abortion bans and restrictions.
For example, Missouri lost abortion access completely post-Dobbs. After the constitutional amendment was passed in 2024, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU ran into court and got an injunction to block existing abortion restrictions and we were able to restore abortion access in Missouri for the first time post Dobbs. We are actually going to trial starting next week in Missouri to wipe the books clean of the various abortion restrictions and the abortion bans to ensure that people can access abortion without these obstacles.
Ehrlich: Just to clarify, weren’t these restrictive laws automatically off the books as unconstitutional?
Amiri: Most of the constitutional amendments are not self-executing, meaning they don’t automatically wipe laws off the books. The courts must evaluate the existing restrictions to determine which can pass muster under the state constitution. Although the language varies somewhat from state to state, I should add that all of the amendments require that any abortion restriction pass a very high level of court review.
Ehrlich: By way of example, which I believe comes from one of your cases, let’s take an existing state law which has a 24- or 48-hour waiting period following counseling based on a state-mandated script designed to have pregnant people rethink their decision. You would argue that post-amendment, the law is an unconstitutional burden on the right to abortion. However, the state might claim that it was not banning or restricting abortion, but just making sure a patient is making a fully informed decision, which is not inconsistent with the constitutional amendment. Is that how this would play out?
Amiri: That’s a perfect example. And so, we have to go to court and say, no, under the constitutional amendment that mandatory waiting period often requiring two trips to the clinic creates an impermissible restriction on abortion and cannot be justified by any of the state interests that the government proposes.
Ehrlich: Have opponents attempted to challenge the constitutional amendments themselves?
Amiri: Yes, there have been challenges. In Michigan, my home state, antiabortion groups brought a federal challenge arguing that the amendment violates a host of federal constitutional protections, including religious liberty, parental rights claims, that it harms women and the purported attempts to establish constitutional rights of embryos and fetuses. The trial court dismissed the case because the challengers lacked standing to sue, and it is now on appeal in the Sixth Circuit.
In Missouri, Republican lawmakers approved a new ballot initiative that seeks to repeal the new abortion-rights amendment in favor of a near total ban, which is slated to go the voters sometime in 2026.
Ehrlich: Is there anything else you want to add?
Amiri: Returning to where we started, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The Trump administration is busy destroying the lives of many people in various ways but has not yet fully turned its attention to coming after reproductive rights. So, we are preparing for anticipated attacks at the federal level.
In the meantime, we are very excited to expand access to abortion under the state constitutional amendments in states where we have litigation, like Missouri, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan. It’s really wonderful to be able to ensure that people can get the care that they need.
Ehrlich: When you talk about “it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” another concern that has surfaced in our conversation is: Who is it going to get worse for?
Amiri: It’s always the most marginalized, as we’ve been talking about. It’s the people who have the fewest resources, people who live in rural areas, young people, people without documentation, people with limited language skills. That is who will feel the brunt the hardest of these policies.
We also know that the Trump administration is working on a Title X rule that would also destroy again the Title X Family Planning program nationwide, which had been restored by Biden, and is the critical safety net for people without significant income.
We’re also obviously concerned about the elimination of the approval of medication abortion, which is something that the other side has explicitly said that they wanted, which would be devastating for everyone across the country.
Ehrlich: I assume the current effort to kick Planned Parenthood out of the Medicaid impacts the same historically marginalized communities we have been talking about? Critically, while it cannot use Medicaid funds to provide abortion care under the Hyde Amendment, the full range of sexual and reproductive healthcare is available.
Amiri: Exactly. It impacts access to contraception, STI testing and treatment, cervical cancer screening. So, it’s incredibly cruel.
Ehrlich: I want to reiterate a critically important point you made earlier, and then maybe we can end our conversation on a bright note? Although it’s hard to be complacent during Trump II, as you stressed, it’s important not to take rights as given, but to learn from the overturning of Roe that they are also gunning for Griswold and Obergefell (marriage equality) among other well-established constitutional precedents.
But to end on a brighter note, you mentioned the over-the-counter pill. Are there other bright spots that you can think of?
Amiri: I’ve been a reproductive rights advocate for a long time, even when I was a young person growing up in Michigan. And so, I think about how far my home state has come just in my lifetime. I can see the power of the people. I can see how policies can change. We went from having tremendous restrictions on access to abortion under very conservative state leadership to then voting on the reproductive freedom amendment leading to the repeal of almost all of the existing abortion restrictions. Although we have some cases we still need to bring, to be able to see that change in access to abortion in my home state in my lifetime is tremendously hopeful.
Ehrlich: I think that’s an incredibly powerful message because it’s really hard to feel hope right now. But and what you’re saying about Michigan and the other constitutional amendment states is that direct collective action makes change possible.
