Texas

Texas through a feminist lens: stories of resistance, resilience and reproductive justice in the Lone Star State.

The Deportation of 5-Year-Old Liam Tadeo Signals a Darker Era for Immigration Policy

PUBLISHED 8/31/2026 by

Five-year-old Liam Tadeo and his dad, Victor Martinez Nieto, planned to spend the last day of summer before kindergarten playing soccer. Instead, on Sunday, Aug. 16, on the way to Liam’s game, ICE agents pulled them over, arrested them and sent both father and son to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas. 

Victor begged ICE to release Liam to his mom, but according to their attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, ICE ignored the request. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

It became clear that if Victor—who does not have legal status in the United States—chose to fight his detention or deportation, he risked losing Liam. DHS would likely treat Liam as an “unaccompanied minor” and send him to the Office of Refugee Resettlement for placement in a shelter or foster care, despite the presence of his mother and other family members ready and able to care for him. 

The family decided to accept the deportation order, despite the wrenching consequences of taking Liam from his family and his home. At least, this way, he will be with his dad in Mexico. 

ICE deported Liam and Victor on Aug. 28.

According to Lincoln-Goldfinch, Liam wasn’t able to say goodbye to his mother.

Such cruelty has become the norm in Trump’s immigration regime, but it is carried out quietly and with brutal efficiency. ICE arrested more than 46,000 people in July alone; for the first time, arrests of people without a criminal record surpassed the number of individuals arrested based (however tangentially) on a past criminal arrest or conviction.  

Change didn’t come in time for Liam and his family, but hundreds of thousands of children, regardless of their immigration status, can still be protected. Restoring a fair and just system demands political courage, public outrage, and major policy reform. But it begins by exposing the subtle, despicable tactics that turn children like Liam Tadeo into pawns of immigration policy.

I Want an Oura Ring. As a Reproductive Health Lawyer, I Know Better.

PUBLISHED 8/23/2026 by

I almost bought an Oura Ring at 3:12 in the morning. I was lying awake in my small D.C. apartment, my phone casting a blue glow across my face. I couldn’t sleep. Again. My mind was already racing through the work waiting for me in the morning: Federal Register alerts, Google alerts for abortion ban and pregnancy criminalization, another headline about a woman denied reproductive care.

So I did what people do when they can’t sleep: I shopped. I opened the Target app looking for something—anything—that might help me sleep, and soon an Oura Ring was sitting in my cart. Before checking out I opened TikTok to see whether it was actually worth it. Soon, I was watching a woman talk about her Oura Ring the way people talk about a revelation, a religious experience. One video became 10. Women talked about the ring as if it had given them access to a version of their bodies they had never been able to understand before. It noticed signs of illness before they felt sick. It helped explain their exhaustion. It tracked their cycles and identified patterns connected to fertility and pregnancy. Its promise was simple and seductive: the ring might know what was happening inside your body before you did.

It sounded incredible. I wanted the ring to tell me why I was so tired. I wanted it to warn me before I got sick. More than anything, I wanted to understand my own body. 

For generations, women have been told their pain is normal, their cycles are mysterious, and their instincts are unreliable. So when a device promises to listen to your body every minute of every day and translate its signals into something you can finally understand, it doesn’t feel like a luxury. It feels like power.

‘It’s Killing the Women You Represent’: Texas Widower’s Plea to Lawmakers to End Abortion Ban

PUBLISHED 8/21/2026 by

After his 35-year-old wife bled to death from a miscarriage in a Houston-area hospital, a Texas father is suing—and taking her story to Capitol Hill.

“Choosing to bring new life into the world shouldn’t be a death sentence,” insisted Michelle Maloney, the San Antonio attorney working to bring justice to Texas widower Hope Ngumezi and his two young sons.

Three years ago, in June 2023, Hope’s beloved wife Porsha was happily expecting the couple’s third child until she began to miscarry at 11 weeks pregnant. The healthy 35-year-old finance manager for a charter school went to the emergency room at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital, just 10 minutes from her home in suburban Houston.

Both she and Hope were certain that she would receive the safe and critical medical care that she needed as she passed fetal tissue and blood clots the size of grapefruits at the hospital. An ultrasound confirmed that she had partially miscarried and that her fetus no longer had a heartbeat. But the heavy bleeding didn’t stop.

Still, the hospital’s OB-GYN, who examined her just once, moved Porsha from the ER—where staff were equipped to respond to emergencies—to a regular floor, where she received less monitoring. Porsha arrived at the hospital at 3:37 p.m. By 2 a.m., she began gasping for air and within minutes, she had died of hemorrhage.

A dozen doctors who reviewed her medical records for ProPublica, which broke the story about her death, said that Porsha should have urgently received a very simple and standard procedure for a miscarriage—a D&C (dilation and curettage). The 10-15 minute D&C would have removed all remaining fetal tissue in her womb, which her uterus was trying to expel with heavy contractions and bleeding. The procedure would have stopped the bleeding.

“The poor thing bled to death for lack of a D&C. It’s atrocious,” Austin OB-GYN Nancy Binford told Courier Texas.

Hope Ngumezi Took His Wife Porsha to a Texas Hospital for a Miscarriage. She Left in a Body Bag.

PUBLISHED 8/18/2026 by

When Hope Negumezi took his pregnant wife, Porsha, to a Texas hospital for a miscarriage, he expected routine emergency care. Ten hours later, she bled to death.

Hope Ngumezi shares with journalist Bonnie Fuller how his pregnant wife, Porsha, bled to death while waiting in agony for hours for medical care. In this harrowing personal account, Hope recounts Porsha’s final hours—and the dangerous legal “gray area” that kept doctors from saving her life.

“Why did this nightmare happen?

“Our first meeting was at my 21st birthday party. … As soon as I saw her, it was like in the movies, when everything stops. There seemed to be an aura around her. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face to sober up and to figure out how I was going to talk to her.

“She was a great mother. She just loved her boys so much and they loved her, too. They were both mama’s boys and were always hanging around her, which I loved.”

Why Attacks on Immigrant Communities Are Reproductive Justice Issues

PUBLISHED 7/22/2026 by , and

“It’s hell.”

That’s how our colleague, Miri, described her months-long detention in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, last year, separated from her husband and four children. Food was inedible, medications were inaccessible and women were forced to share beds and blankets due to overcrowding. She witnessed guards sexually assault women and conduct invasive strip searches. Pregnant and breastfeeding people were neglected: One new mother suffered from mastitis, while another woman in labor was ignored for hours before being taken to a hospital. 

These horrors, perpetrated by immigration enforcement officers, are exactly what the federal government approved billions to fund this summer. 

Reproductive justice is often reduced to abortion rights. But the movement has always taken a broader view. Created by 12 Black women organizers, the reproductive justice framework is about the right to have—or to not have—children and the right to raise them in safe, healthy communities. Detentions, deportations and disruption of care are part of a broader effort to limit who can fully belong, safely build a family and have rights in the United States. 

So who deserves safety and belonging in the U.S.? 

‘I Don’t Want To Die’: Texas Patients Are Afraid to Get Pregnant

PUBLISHED 7/15/2026 by

The fear of losing their lives is precisely what many pregnant Texas residents say they’ve experienced after four young women died in the state when they were unable to access medically necessary abortions.

Three died while doctors delayed their care for hours as they miscarried. Another, Tierra Walker, was 20 weeks pregnant and suffered from soaring blood pressure that had required multiple hospitalizations, yet was given no option for what would have been a lifesaving abortion by any of the 90 doctors who examined her.

She died in bed of preeclampsia, a serious, persistent high blood pressure disorder, and was found by her son on his 14th birthday.

Two of the dead women were also already moms, while another, Nevaeh Crain, was just 18 and expecting her first baby when she died of an infection while miscarrying. Crain had been sent home by two hospitals in the hours before her death, and a third delayed care while they waited to confirm that her fetus had no heartbeat.

These deaths and near-deaths have created an atmosphere where “100% of my patients are afraid” of experiencing complications in their pregnancies, said Dallas OB-GYN Dr. Austin Dennard. “It’s an extra stress to every stage of pregnancy. These laws are stealing the joy out of pregnancy.”

“Women are afraid to get pregnant in Texas. There is a pervasive unease with pregnancy. Women in their 40s with high-risk pregnancies are very afraid. Those pregnancies are fraught with difficulties,” she said.

Poems Wherein the Bullet Speaks: A Review of Heidi Kasa’s ‘The Bullet Takes Forever’

PUBLISHED 7/11/2026 by

Consider the title of Heidi Kasa’s first book of poetry, published by Mouthfeel Press: The Bullet Takes Forever. In seven syllables, Kasa’s title conjures a wide swath of loss, both vertical and horizontal, the catastrophic consequences of gun violence, robbing us of time and life itself.

The way the title lands is a fine indicator of the way Kasa’s poems will strike the courageous reader, the reader willing to dwell for a time in this space dedicated to examining violence, often delivered upon the most vulnerable among us.

Reading these poems, I realized how little narrative Kasa actually needs to provide. We already know the story. We have lived it, watched it unfold again and again in schools and communities across this country. At a moment when the Trump administration is rolling back gun regulations, Kasa’s poems remind me that policy debates can never capture what violence leaves behind: grief, fear and lives forever altered. Her collection asks us not simply to read, but to remember.

“Back to School Shopping List

“1. backpack (big enough to hide behind)
“2. notebook (for reunification records)”
“7. spelling test (words: tourniquet, instructions, wound, direct, manual, pressure).”

A Single Abortion Clinic Closing Rarely Makes Headlines. What Happens When None Are Left?

PUBLISHED 7/8/2026 by

Picture a map of the United States. It’s 2022, and in southern states like Texas and Tennessee, there are clusters of black dots that represent independent clinic closures. These are abortion care black holes: communities where it’s no longer possible to get an abortion at a nearby clinic.

Fast forward to present. It’s 2026, four years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and black dots have multiplied in states across the country. It no longer matters if the state is red or blue, governed by conservatives or progressives. None are immune to the increasing weight of political pressure, financial strain and operational difficulty that are forcing independent clinics to close or stop providing abortion care.

Each of these black dots is a community suffering a healthcare crisis, and they are proliferating across the United States at a rapid rate.

Independent clinics are often the only places to get clinical abortion care, unbiased information and support for pregnancy options. They are where people go to feel safe and respected, whether they are getting an abortion, continuing a pregnancy or getting gender-affirming care. In small towns and rural spaces, these clinics are often the only safe place for many people, especially those who are LGBTQIA+. If clinics close, there is often nowhere else to go.

And once abortion clinics close, it’s not as simple as reopening when they can, if they can. Even if a specific restriction is lifted, severe financial constraints, continued political hostility, threats of violence and legal uncertainty still stand.

A Rape-Survivor-Turned-Prosecutor Is Teaching Women How to Heal

PUBLISHED 7/5/2026 by

One of us is a doctor, the other a lawyer. We’re also members of a club that no woman ever asks to join, but too many are forced into, often by men they loved and trusted.

JoDee Neil, a Texas attorney and former prosecutor, has spent her career seeking justice for survivors of sexual violence. Now, in her new book Outcry Witness, she tells her own story—one shaped by rape, trauma and the long, uneven path toward healing. As survivors ourselves, we recognized something familiar in each other: the understanding that comes without explanation, and the belief that when institutions fail us, women often become each other’s lifeline.

An “outcry witness” is the first person a survivor tells about their abuse, and that response can shape the course of healing. Neil argues that being believed is not a small act of compassion—it is the foundation on which survivors rebuild their lives.

In an era when powerful men continue to evade accountability, Outcry Witness offers something the legal system too often cannot: validation, community and hope.

Our conversation became more than an interview. It became a reminder that storytelling is itself an act of resistance—that women speaking honestly to one another can challenge shame, expose violence and create the conditions for healing.

“We are at the precipice of the dam breaking,” Neil told me. “We’ve never been able to communicate in real time with each other, to really put the pieces together. … I am so full of excitement to be a part of this movement for humanity.”

Her book is an invitation for survivors to do exactly that.

Texas May Eliminate a Critical Tool for Preventing Maternal Deaths

PUBLISHED 6/11/2026 by and

Texas is considering whether to continue one of its most important tools for preventing maternal deaths.

The state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC), which investigates pregnancy-related deaths and identifies ways to prevent them, is currently undergoing Sunset review—a routine process that determines whether state programs will continue operating. If lawmakers fail to reauthorize the committee, Texas will lose a critical source of information about why mothers are dying and what can be done to save lives.

The stakes are especially high for Black women. In Texas, Black women are nearly four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. Texas’ maternal mortality rate also exceeds the national average, and approximately 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are considered preventable.

As public health researchers who have studied women’s health and health disparities in Texas for decades, we know that meaningful progress depends on understanding what is driving these deaths and holding systems accountable for addressing them.

Maternal mortality review committees are one of the most effective tools states have for doing exactly that.