WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Illegal immigrant children in federal custody must be allowed access to abortions, according to a recent directive from the Biden administration’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
The November 10 directive from the ORR, a subdivision of the Department of Health & Human Services’ Administration for Children & Families, declared that “ORR staff and care providers must not prevent UC [unaccompanied children] from accessing legal abortion-related services and that ORR staff and care providers must make all reasonable efforts to facilitate access to these services if requested by the UC.”
This includes transporting abortion-seeking minors housed in pro-life states to abortion-friendly ones, and “prioritiz[ing] placement of pregnant UC and UC who are victims of sexual-based crimes in states without abortion bans and with broad access to reproductive health care for minors.”
President Joe Biden has presided over a surge of illegals entering the United States and being released inside the country following the reversal of several Trump-era border policies, such as the previous administration’s third-country agreements with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to have them hold refugees while their applications for political asylum in America were reviewed.
On July 1, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration declared the United States’ southern border with Mexico under Biden the “deadliest land crossing in the world,” after the discovery of an abandoned semi-truck in San Antonio, Texas, containing dozens of illegal migrants – many already dead of extreme heat; others dying later in the hospital.
“More than 1,238 lives have been lost during migration in the Americas in 2021, among them at least 51 children,” the U.N. body announced, citing a new report from its Missing Migrants Project. “At least 728 of these deaths occurred on the United States-Mexico border crossing, making this the deadliest land crossing in the world, according to the data.”
“The number of deaths on the United States-Mexico border last year is significantly higher than in any year prior, even before COVID-19,” report author Edwin Viales said. “Yet, this number remains an undercount due to the diverse challenges for data collection.”
Despite such pressing issues with the situation, the Biden administration has prioritized abortion “access” for those in the country illegally. Also in July, Reuters reported that “Biden officials are exploring ways to provide abortion access for pregnant women and girls in U.S. immigration custody in states with bans,” and that for the previous nine months, the federal government had been “flying or driving minors from Texas shelters to other states for abortions.”