ICE Deployments Disrupting Abortion Care

The Trump administration’s historic expansion of immigration detention has had a devastating impact on abortion seekers. Advocates and providers report that fear of encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents has meant their clients have been canceling crucial health care appointments or not showing up, delaying getting care, or in some cases, finding themselves unable to obtain abortion care at all. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” provided $75 billion to ICE, “an unprecedented increase in funding to implement the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda with zero accountability,” according to the Center for American Progress, and led to mass deployments of agents in cities and communities around the country.

The increased presence of ICE and the fear of detention and deportation have had “an extremely chilling impact on access to care, including disruptions to routine care such as refills to birth control and creating barriers to urgent care,” said Lucas Kade, director of development at Just the Pill, which provides medication abortion by mail in Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, and Wyoming for state residents and people traveling to those states. “We are deeply concerned about the long-term impacts on our community. If someone isn’t able to access medication abortion in a timely fashion, then they’re looking at having a [surgical] procedure, and [possibly] having to travel. Their choices become more difficult the longer this goes on.”

In early December, Minneapolis was inundated with over 3,000 masked and armed federal agents whose numbers grew over the next few months, with deadly consequences. “It’s very difficult when there’s a deployment like this — a federal occupation of a city — and all of your basic needs, including your health care or access to an abortion, are thrown into question, and you have to decide ‘Where do I position this in my hierarchy? I’m about to be evicted, I can’t take my kid to school, I’m running out of food, and I need an abortion.’” said Emily Mohrbacher, co-director of client services at the Midwest Access Coalition, a practical support abortion fund that helps people travel to, from, and within the Midwest, including the Twin Cities, for abortion care. “Working a pretty standard case for us has become a lot more complex. A big concern [for our clients] is leaving their children and worrying what will happen if they are detained. It’s made us have to think about travel very differently. A lot of our clients don’t have access to vehicles of their own, so now getting on a bus or a train is a lot more complicated if there are ICE agents at transportation hubs looking to pick up people. We’ve had to get a lot more creative with our volunteers and with our transportation partners.” It has taken “a psychological and emotional toll” not only on their clients traveling for an abortion, but also on their staff and volunteers. “We’re doing abortion access work during the day, and then we’re out in our community after work. So it’s been pretty nonstop, around the clock.”

Our Justice, an abortion fund that provides direct financial and logistical support for Minnesota patients, has pivoted to doing rapid response work. Its staff of eight have distributed over $20,000 worth of diapers and menstrual products in January and February. “It’s always going to be us looking after each other,” said Shayla Walker, executive director of Our Justice. The organization has shifted some of its planned work, including Medicaid enrollment, because clients who are eligible but undocumented are reluctant to provide personal information to the government. “We continue to offer Medicaid referrals, however we’re not encouraging people with precarious immigration status to sign up for it, as doing so could create fear or risk for them,” said Walker. The Hyde Amendment prohibits the use of federal money for abortions except in cases of rape or incest, or life endangerment of the pregnant person, but 20 states allow state Medicaid funds to be used. The drop-off in Medicaid enrollees has meant “more work on our end to raise money to fund abortions that would have otherwise been paid for, because people are too scared to use Medicaid or enroll. If we’re going to respond to this moment, some of the goals that we had planned, or were in the works for 2026, might have to be pushed for later in the year. Our vision is always going to be steadfast on reproductive justice. We have to move with the community because we are not separate. We are the community.”

The Chicago Abortion Fund, the largest abortion fund in the country, has worked with callers who were reluctant to leave their homes to get abortion care because of the presence of ICE in their community and helped create safety plans for clients who needed to travel. This includes case managers staying on the phone with them or texting while they were on their way to a clinic. Many of their Illinois-based callers who are undocumented don’t feel comfortable applying for Medicaid, which means coming up with funds to cover all abortion appointment costs. “Our callers are in so many different intersecting identities that any impacts on marginalized communities impacts people’s abilities to access abortion care,” said Alicia Hurtado, director of advocacy and communications at the Chicago Abortion Fund.

Abortion funds don’t request or keep information about their clients’ immigration status, and currently there is no hard data on how the presence of ICE in cities and communities impacts abortion care. However, advocates point to patterns they’ve seen in many parts of the country during a heavy ICE presence, that indicate it’s changing the way people seek abortion care. “We’ve had an increase in the abortion pill by mail” requests in places with mass ICE deployments, said Sylvia Ghazarian, executive director of the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project (WRRAP), which works with reproductive health clinics and providers across the country to fund abortions and emergency contraception. Abortion seekers can obtain the pills for $150 through a telehealth visit. Medication abortion is less expensive than a surgical procedure and “avoids travel and checkpoints. It helps with privacy and avoids the concern about immigration status.”

Additionally, “an incredible number of people are not showing up for their appointments, not seeking [abortion care] when they need it, or seeking care at the last possible moment,” said Lupe Rodríguez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. “They aren’t coming earlier because of the fear. [The increased ICE presence] is having a destabilizing effect across the country.”

A mass ICE deployment in Charlotte, North Carolina, in November led to “a huge increase in cancellations and no-shows of patients,” said Amber Gavin, vice president of advocacy and operations at A Woman’s Choice Inc., which operates clinics in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. “We also had members of staff saying they were scared to come to work and leave their home.”

Travel have always been especially risky for undocumented people in the southern states that share a border with Mexico. In 2023 Texas passed Senate Bill 4 criminalizing people who are undocumented from entering the state from Mexico, allowing local police to make arrests based on immigration status, and empowering state judges to issue deportation orders. Although the law has been blocked in court, and was only in effect briefly in 2024, people living in border communities have long contended with “internal immigration checkpoints along major highways and intersections, so that was always a risk,” said Rodríguez. “People would take the risk and travel to other parts of the state to get care. Now that is something many folks can’t even fathom doing right now. There is absolute fear that they will be detained and separated from their families. Already there’s deserts of health care, particularly reproductive health care, and now folks can’t even travel to get this care because of what’s happening. It’s creating an impossible situation for many people.”

The Texas Equal Access Fund had to temporarily stop providing in-person distribution of infant care supplies due to concerns that the events were being targeted by ICE, and no longer safe for their clients. However, they have adjusted their procedures and plan to resume the program in March. “We’re no strangers in Texas to being targeted by the government, [but] the impact of this increased federal presence is creating a culture of terror,” said Ana Rodriguez, the campaigns director at the Texas Equal Access Fund, which provides financial and emotional support for abortion and reproductive health care to people in North and East Texas. “It adds one more hurdle for the most vulnerable communities that are already having the hardest time accessing abortion care. This is a reminder that all these issues are interconnected. You can’t support abortion access if you’re not also pushing back against ICE as a rogue agency.”

When the government uses heavy enforcement to target vulnerable communities, “it really goes against the tenets of reproductive justice,” said Zaena Zamora, executive director of the Frontera Fund, which provides financial and practical support to people in the Rio Grande Valley and Texas border communities. “Border communities like ours have been dealing with this type of enforcement for years. [People should] pay attention to on-the-ground organizations in communities impacted by ICE and listen to what they have to say. We always try to operate through an intersectional lens because we know abortion is not happening in a vacuum.”