After a visit to a remote Texas shelter, Rep. Maxine Dexter raises urgent concerns about secrecy, missing girls, and inadequate medical care for pregnant unaccompanied minors in federal custody.
Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), a physician, is no stranger to confronting immigration officials. She went head to head with ICE and CBP over the arrest and detention of her constituents twice, including traveling to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, to personally check on one family detained while taking their sick child to the doctor. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility wouldn’t let her inside, they released the family and she accompanied them home.
When Dexter returned to Texas last week to learn more about the conditions children face in immigration custody, particularly pregnant girls and new mothers, she was horrified by the lack of cooperation she encountered at the small shelter in San Benito that houses all pregnant girls in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
Since July 2025, all pregnant unaccompanied minors have been secluded in this remote facility, in a town so isolated that Dexter refers to it as a “healthcare desert in a state where abortion and reproductive rights are not supported.”
Dexter set out on April 24 to visit San Benito and talk to the girls living there. She wanted to assess for herself a place deemed ill-equipped to handle the potential medical complications faced by pregnant minors and young mothers by immigrant rights and healthcare advocates.
A day later she shared some of her first impressions of her visit with Ms.
What Are They Hiding?
… The staff clearly were not helping us speak with them. And that gives me extraordinary concerns that there’s something they’re hiding …
Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.)
Dexter headed to the shelter already troubled after visit to a children’s immigration court earlier in the day where she saw multiple kids appear without legal counsel. The isolation of kids asked to navigate an impossible system alone was weighing on her. It became even more galling upon her arrival at the shelter.
Without warning, shelter staff denied her permission to talk to any of the girls, despite her staff arranging the visit weeks in advance and working with the girls’ lawyers to secure all the necessary permissions, a complicated process that was still in motion in the days before the visit. According to Dexter, shelter staff first claimed that they hadn’t received adequate notice of the interviews but then said that this was immaterial, as the girls had withdrawn their consent to meet with Dexter and another physician traveling with her.
“We don’t know what transpired. The lawyers were very clear that [the girls] were willing and interested in talking with us and then by the time we got there they had revoked their permission to speak with us. There’s reason to believe that that was after conversations with the staff there, which regardless of what’s happening, the staff clearly were not helping us speak with them. And that gives me extraordinary concerns that there’s something they’re hiding if they don’t want us speaking to the actual residents of their facility.”
Where Are the Girls?
Have they been returned to other countries? Are they in foster care? Are they transferred? And they said they couldn’t share that information with us.
Rep. Dexter
In the end, Dexter and her group visited a ghost town. They did not see a single child on their tour of the shelter, which currently houses two pregnant girls, two young mothers and their babies and three other girls.
The absence of the girls was troubling enough, but Dexter questioned what had happened to all the other pregnant girls who reportedly had been in the shelter over the last few months—the month before 17 girls were reportedly at the shelter during a visit by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), and initial reports put the number of girls in the shelter as much higher.
“Just a few months ago, they had many more girls. I asked where, where have they gone? Have they been returned to other countries? Are they in foster care? Are they transferred? And they said they couldn’t share that information with us. So, you know, it’s clear they’re trying to limit the number of girls in these facilities now. But where the hell are they?”
No Medical Testing, No Lactation or Postpartum Support
Obtaining information about the medical treatment the girls receive proved equally difficult. Staff declined to answer many basic questions about the number of emergency calls and types of medical conditions, claiming that providing this information would violate the girls’ privacy.
Even when staff provided information, it further underscored the overall lack of transparency within the facility, according to Dexter.
There is no lactation support, limited postpartum assistance, and Dexter did not see any of the medical equipment on site that is routinely used to monitor high risk pregnancies.
“We have no reason to believe that they have the [medical] access that they’re supposed to. We know that there have been girls who have gestational diabetes who can’t get diabetic diets—and we did not see any glucometers there. They said they do no medical testing there. They had no Dopplers for checking for fetal heart tones, which is standard if somebody’s having cramping or pain when they’re over 20 weeks. You know, you’re supposed to check heartbeat. They don’t do that there.”
Health and Dignity at Risk
… If [the Office of Refugee Resettlement has] nothing to hide, then they should be forthcoming.
Rep. Dexter
The possibility that pregnant girls are not being properly monitored for complications that could affect the health of mother and child is profoundly disturbing, and Dexter intends to follow up her visit with more detailed questions about the kind of medical treatment the girls receive. She is also worried about their reproductive health and the government’s reasons for sequestering these girls in Texas, a state where pregnancy has become increasingly more dangerous since it implemented a six-week abortion ban in 2021.
“We have no knowledge of exactly how often these women are getting care, whether they have full access to informed consent on whether they want to carry their pregnancies and other things. So, I have deep concerns about why they are there, but we can’t, we have no knowledge to substantiate or contradict that, and if [ORR has] nothing to hide, then they should be forthcoming.”
A Broken System
Dexter ended her trip the next day by returning to Dilley. This time, ICE allowed her to tour the facility but did not permit a second physician to accompany her.
While touring Dilley, she was overwhelmed by the number of people desperate to tell her their stories.
“There were 100 people waiting to speak to us, some of them families with children, some of them independent, adult women.” Dexter and her staff collected information from all of them, with a promise that she would find their members of Congress and share their stories.
They talked to her about their arrests and their separation from their children, about delayed or poor medical care, and about their interrupted cases back home. But most of all they talked about the broken system.
She recalled they told her conditions were not the issue but instead, the biggest problem is “that we can’t get to the court. We don’t belong here. We can’t get justice.”
With so many problems, it’s hard to know how to fix the immigration system, but Dexter believes that transparency, oversight and accountability is a critical component of any solution. She plans to get answers to her questions and to press for changes in law and policy that protect pregnant girls and all detainees from a system that is not held accountable.
Ms. will continue to follow Rep. Dexter’s efforts to hold ORR accountable for its treatment of unaccompanied minors, especially the girls of San Benito.
