In March 2017, the Trump administration began a policy of denying abortion to undocumented minors in its custody. Immigrant girls fought the government in court for the right to terminate their pregnancies. This is their story.
This article is part six of a series. See parts one, two three, four and five for context.
Under the Trump administration, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency that takes custody of undocumented minors who enter the country without a parent or guardian, began a policy of denying abortions tp pregnant minors in ORR custody. ORR-funded shelters were forbidden from taking actions to “facilitate” abortion, including scheduling or transporting minors to appointments or allowing them to pursue judicial bypasses, without personal approval from the director of ORR.
Unfortunately, the man who would soon become the director, Scott Lloyd, was a staunch opponent of abortion, believing it to be “the destruction of human life.” In this article, I will detail Lloyd’s past history, his time at the agency, and what happened after he left it.
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Scott Lloyd’s anti-abortion crusade began many years ago when, as a young man, he got a woman pregnant.
Lloyd later described the experience in an essay he wrote in his first year of law school. He recalled his shock and fear at learning the woman was pregnant. He spent a sleepless week praying, reading the Bible and seeking advice from friends. He wanted to place the baby for adoption, but the woman told him she had already scheduled an abortion for the next day, resulting in an argument.
When asked about his plans for the following day, Lloyd said he was going fishing. Instead, he drove to pick the woman up for her appointment, still hoping he could change her mind. She asked him to pay for half the procedure.
“On the way there,” Lloyd wrote, “I gave her the money, mostly in ones, for two reasons: 1) if I didn’t, I would be the enemy and she would stop listening to me and 2) because if she went through with it, I didn’t want to leave thinking it wasn’t my fault. Both were stupid reasons. In the parking lot we argued one last time.”
The woman told Lloyd he could leave, but he chose to wait for her in the clinic lobby. For months afterward, Lloyd, shaken by the experience, drank so heavily he would find himself passed out on park benches and in elevators. Once, he was even sent to court on charges of disorderly intoxication. Lloyd sought counseling from a minister, who told him that no sin is unforgivable and suggested he read the Bible and think about God as penance.
It was this experience that made him decide that abortion is wrong under all circumstances, including rape or incest, or when the mother’s life is at risk. “I’ve realized that absolutely every single reason to support an abortion is a distortion of the truth,” Lloyd wrote. “Two steps beyond all of them is a proper investigation of the matter, and two steps back reveals the fear and selfishness behind them.”
“The truth about abortion,” he wrote, “is that my first child is dead, and no woman, man, Supreme Court, or government—NOBODY—has the right to tell me that she doesn’t belong here.”
Lloyd wrote that women who don’t want to be pregnant shouldn’t have sex:
“If a woman needs to defend so fiercely the ‘one thing they can call their own—their body,’ then they shouldn’t be so careless with it as to have sex when they are not ready to be pregnant.”
He argued that, by having sex, a woman gives up her right to privacy and “bodily integrity,” and that men should have more say in stopping abortions:
“By making the choice to have sex, a woman is making a conscious decision to engage in an act that has the natural result of creating a pregnancy. A pregnancy implicates the rights of two other people—the baby, and the father, whether our government wants to recognize that or not. A state would not be violating any rights by recognizing and codifying the natural consequence of a person’s action, protecting a fetus’s right to life, and protecting a father’s right to be a father.”
He asserted that women should be strong enough to handle unplanned pregnancy without abortion:
“Roe v. Wade points to the mental and financial troubles a pregnant woman faces. It doesn’t speak highly of women to assume that they can’t handle the pressures of being a mother, and that they need a procedure that is so directly opposed to femininity. Ask any of the female deans or professors at our school how much abortion was a factor in their success as a female professional. Ask them if having a child spelled mental and financial ruin. I sort of doubt that abortion was a key step on their path to success. Is abortion a choice we should endorse in an effort to make women a more successful segment of society?”
Lloyd even went so far as to compare abortion to the Holocaust:
“The Holocaust was the violent result of society assigning lesser value to a vulnerable segment of its population. Abortion is the same exact thing. One can argue that we need to protect women, or they should be allowed to do what they want for their bodies. What prevents you from saying that German society needed protection, and Germany was allowed to do what they wanted with their society?
The Jews who died in the Holocaust had a chance to laugh, play, sing, dance, learn, and love each other. The victims of abortion do not, simply because people have decided this is the way it should be, not through any proper discernment of their humanity. Neither type of murder is more or less tragic, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that they are not both tragedies, and they are not both murder.”
A classmate of Lloyd’s was so shocked by the essay that they saved a copy of it, which they kept for more than a decade before sharing it with the magazine Mother Jones in August 2018.
“This thing was sort of unbelievable,” the classmate recalled thinking back in 2004. “He’s become this sort of crusader toward overturning a woman’s right to choose—based on his experience with getting a girl pregnant.”
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Before becoming head of ORR, Lloyd had little experience working with refugees. What he did have plenty of experience with, however, was fighting for anti-abortion and conservative causes.
In 2004, for instance, he worked with the parents of Terri Schiavo, a woman in an irreversible vegetative state. Schiavo’s parents tried to stop her husband from removing her feeding tube, despite his assertions that she had told him she wouldn’t want to live like that.
Lloyd also worked for the Department of Health and Human Services under the Bush administration, where he helped to develop a “conscious rule” to shield doctors from having to provide medical services – such as abortion, contraception and treating LGBTQ people – that they disagree with.
Lloyd has written extensively against abortion and contraception.
He has argued that life begins at conception, that “[i]t is a matter of scientific fact that a human being dies in every abortion,” that “[e]very effort to reduce the demand for abortion is a worthy one, so long as it produces some results,” that abortion opponents must keep fighting “so long as the abortion rate is anything greater than zero,” that “medicine taught women to rely on chemicals rather than their wills to avoid pregnancy,” that “[c]contraceptives are the cause of abortion,” that “all funds for contraceptives, in all form, and at all levels of government, should be eliminated,” that types of contraception that prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus are essentially abortion and government funding of them means “our tax dollars are being used to help trick people into aborting their own children, when they would not do so if someone was not lying to them,” that the Supreme Court’s rulings on abortions have declared “that the physical realities of pregnancy for the woman will serve to imbue her most weightless rationales with the magic ability to trump a man’s right to procreation and his right to his children,” that state legislators should write laws saying that “women must notify the men of their decision to abort, and gain their consent” unless their reason for terminating has to do with physical realities of pregnancy” in order to challenge that notion before the Supreme Court, that banning dilation and evacuation abortions (which he calls “dismemberment abortions), the most common type of second-trimester abortions, are justified because these abortions have “a special gruesomeness and inhumanity” to them and doctors who perform them “experience nightmares and regret,” and that women who get government-funded contraception should have to “sign a pledge” that they won’t get an abortion if they become pregnant and if they do get one they’ll become ineligible for publicly funded birth control.
Lloyd has also argued against gay rights. In 2011, he complained that “the law is pagan territory… Look no further than no fault divorce, legalized abortion on demand, and gay marriage as confirmation.” That same year, he argued that granting same-sex couples equal rights did not meet his definition of “justice:”
“… justice is a state where people have received what is actually due to them. To confer the same status to gay and heterosexual relationships is to refuse to acknowledge the many benefits heterosexual relationships provide to society that homosexual relationships simply cannot provide.”
He asserted that heterosexual relationships are superior to homosexual ones because they can produce children and because “[i]f corporations, the armed forces and military academies, the government, the bar, and the bench, schoolhouses, and every corner of society benefits or would benefit from the presence of females alongside of males, why is the same not true for parents?… Anyone who has had a mother and father knows this, as does anyone who has experienced the absence of either.”
Lloyd argued that these “benefits” of heterosexual relationships justify gay marriage bans:
“Therefore, any person and any group of people (such as a state legislature), who value the existence of human life and diversity can and should feel comfortable assigning a different classification to exclusive heterosexual relationships over exclusive homosexual relationships. There is nothing unjust about it; it is simply an acknowledgment of the common and necessary distinction between kinds of relationships and the reality of how societies grow and flourish. More troubling is the denial of these fundamental realities in order to achieve the political goal of ‘gay marriage.’”
Lloyd also co-founded the anti-abortion law firm LegalWorks Apostolate, served on the board of a crisis pregnancy center (an anti-choice organization that tries to pressure women into keeping unwanted pregnancies, often by using misinformation), and served as an attorney in the public policy office of the Knights of Colombus, a Catholic fraternal organization, where he credited himself as the “architect” of late-term abortion bans in six states.
In fact, prior to becoming head of ORR, the only real experience Lloyd had working with refugees was a year he spent working with the Knights of Columbus on helping Christians fleeing persecution by ISIS.
Contrast that with Robert Carey, director of ORR under the Obama administration. Before heading the agency, Carey spent fifteen years as a vice president of the International Rescue Committee, which provides aid to refugees and displaced persons. He had also chaired the Refugee Council USA, a coalition of nonprofits dedicated to directing and supporting refugees.
Lloyd’s lack of experience raised suspicions that he was selected to head the agency because of his ideological beliefs rather than because he had any professional expertise in the area.
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As head of ORR, Scott Lloyd made it a policy to deny minors the right to abortion and try to pressure them into remaining pregnant by forcing them to visit crisis pregnancy centers, get medically unnecessary ultrasounds, and tell their parents and potential sponsors about their abortion decisions, among a number of other coercive tactics.
During his time with ORR, Lloyd denied an abortion to a minor who was pregnant from rape. He personally spoke to at least two minors seeking abortions. And he participated in discussions of trying to “reverse” a minor’s abortion.
Lloyd personally tracked minors’ pregnancies. He kept a spreadsheet with information about all pregnant minors in ORR custody. Girls as young as twelve years old had their deeply personal and private information detailed in this sheet. The information included how far along they were, whether the pregnancy was the result of sexual assault, if they had asked for an abortion and, in two cases, the date of their last menstrual cycle (or “mentsrual” cycle, as it is spelled on the sheet). It is likely Lloyd used this information to determine how long he needed to keep girls pregnant before they would no longer be legally allowed to terminate.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted on her show how deeply creepy it is that the government tracked minors pregnancies: “Maybe Margaret Atwood could sue for copyright infringement.”
Most disturbingly, the government continued to keep track of girls’ pregnancies even after a March 2018 court order forbid it from blocking minors’ abortions. This suggests that the government may have continued to block girls from getting abortions after the court order, though the ACLU did not hear of any such cases.
In a December 2017 deposition, Lloyd admitted he had never approved a minor’s abortion. He refused to describe a circumstance where he would approve an abortion.
Lloyd threatened to pull funding from shelters that refused to comply with his antiabortion policies.
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During the Trump administration’s child separation policy, ORR was responsible for caring for the children taken from their families. Lloyd was widely criticized for his role in the crisis. An internal review completed in November 2018 concluded he had mismanaged the refugee office. In February 2019, Jonathan White, a career staffer in the Health and Human Services Department who had briefly worked under Lloyd, told Congress that he had urged Lloyd to try to prevent family separations in early 2017, more than a year before the Trump administration formally announced the policy and that Lloyd had ignored his warnings about the health risks of separating migrant children.
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Lloyd’s treatment of abortion proved to be hypocritical, given the way ORR treated other medical interventions. Lloyd required all minors seeking abortions to get consent from their parents, regardless of what the laws of the state they were being held in said about parental consent for abortions (though he maintained the right to deny abortions even when the parents gave consent).
In contrast, when it came to other medical treatments, ORR acted without parental involvement to a dangerous extent. A lawsuit filed in April 2018 alleged minors in ORR-funded shelters were given psychotropic drugs without the consent of their parents or regard for their individual needs. In shelters like the Shiloh Treatment Center in Texas, children were given a range of powerful psychiatric drugs to manage their trauma after being detained and in some cases separated from their parents. The lawsuit alleged such drugs were being used as “chemical straight jackets” rather than to treat actual mental health needs.
“If you’re in Shiloh then it’s almost certain you are on these medications. So if any child were placed in Shiloh after being separated from a parent, then they’re almost certainly on psychotropics,” a lawyer for the plaintiffs told Reuters.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist here; it looks like they’re trying to control agitation and aggressive behavior with antipsychotic drugs,” Mark J. Mills, a forensic psychologist asked by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting to review medical records and statements filed in court, told Reveal. “You don’t need to administer these kinds of drugs unless someone is plucking out their eyeball or some such. The facility should not use these drugs to control behavior. That’s not what antipsychotics should be used for. That’s like the old Soviet Union used to do.”
Asked how such drugs would make children feel, Mills said: “They feel like shit. They feel like they have given up their own control. The long-term complications are weight gain and developing adult onset diabetes. These drugs are not benign.”
Children were allegedly told they would not be released or see their parents unless they took medication and that they only were receiving vitamins. Parents and the children themselves told attorneys the drugs rendered them unable to walk, afraid of people, and wanting to sleep constantly. One mother said her child repeatedly fell, hitting her head, and ended up in a wheelchair. A girl described being held down and forcibly given an injection against her will. A boy, who was nine when he first came to Shiloh, was prescribed ten different shots and pills, despite his mother’s repeated objections.
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Scott Lloyd actively made the process of reunifying children with their families more difficult. Three individuals with knowledge told POLITICO Lloyd dissuaded staff efforts to track separated families. Lloyd also signed off on an April 2018 policy to collect fingerprints from people who took custody of unaccompanied minors and share that information with immigration enforcement. Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told POLITICO the policy could have “an enormous chilling effect” on attempts by parents or guardians to reunite with unaccompanied minors.
“If they’re afraid to come forward, then that’s going to increase the likelihood that these children remain in care for very long periods of time or indefinitely,” Greenberg said.
As the crisis mounted, Lloyd’s boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, learned Lloyd’s office had yet to review hundreds of case files to understand the scope of the family separation, despite being instructed to do so. This caused Azar to begin reviewing case files personally.
Lloyd’s struggle to reunify families personally aggravated Azar, five individuals with knowledge told POLITICO.
Democrats and advocacy groups repeatedly called on Lloyd to be fired. However, two officials told POLITICO that at times this strengthened his position, making it more difficult to fire him. Forcing Lloyd out “would have been seen as giving in” to political pressure, one official said.
HHS political leadership was also careful not to publicly criticize Lloyd, since he had influential supporters in the anti-abortion movement and the White House.
Eventually, though, Lloyd was effectively removed from leading the refugee office in the midst of the crisis. Though he retained his title of director, he no longer oversaw the day-to-day operation of the agency.
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In November 2018, Lloyd was formally transferred out of ORR. He became a senior advisor in HHS’s Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives, where he helped to choose which religious groups got support for health program grants. This is troubling, given his extreme religious beliefs and history with crisis pregnancy centers.
A month after the transfer, Lloyd published a semi-autobiographical novel about a college student who helps his “friend with benefits” get an abortion and then comes to regret it. POLITICO noted government employees typically are discouraged from writing books about subjects that overlap with their official responsibilities and that HHS lawyers have been involved in the matter.
Around the same time, Lloyd’s band, Day of Salvation, released its first single. It appears Lloyd was more concerned with his book and band, and with keeping girls from getting abortions, than he was with reuniting separated families.
“During one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time, Scott Lloyd found time to track menstrual cycles and track changes in his personal manuscript, but he couldn’t be bothered to track children in his custody,” Mary Alice Carter, Executive Director of Equity Forward, said in a statement.
“It’s outrageous that Lloyd took the time to write, edit and publish a book — all while failing to do his taxpayer-funded job. What is Secretary Azar thinking continuing to employ Scott Lloyd at HHS? It’s long past time for him to do the right thing and fire Scott Lloyd.”
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In June 2019, Lloyd finally left the Trump administration entirely. Sadly, it appears he never faced any real punishment for his mistreatment of abortion-seeking minors in his custody.
