I am outraged and disgusted by the Trump-Pence appointee for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Scott Lloyd, who has made it his personal mission to do everything in his power to force young, pregnant immigrant women to continue their pregnancies against their will.
Director of ORR Scott Lloyd oversees the Unaccompanied Alien Children program (UAC), which is responsible for the care of unaccompanied young people. The Federal government is legally required to provide these young people with basic necessities, including access to housing, food, and both emergency and routine medical care. In most cases the shelter where a young immigrant woman is placed exercises complete control over her life. This means ORR should be doing everything it can to make sure these young women can access comprehensive health care, but instead, Lloyd is doing everything he can to block them from getting abortion care. Since becoming Director, Scott Lloyd has shown that he will stop at nothing to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion. He has:
Coerced and shamed young women who have made a decision to have an abortion and has even forced them to visit fake, anti-abortion clinics also known as crisis pregnancy centers;
Personally reviewed and denied every request for abortion access from young women in federal custody;
Personally flew to Texas to try to talk at least one young immigrant out of her decision;
Trump-Pence appointee Scott Lloyd’s actions are unconstitutional, utterly disrespectful, and just gross. His interference with young immigrant’s access to abortion is illegal and unethical. And he must be stopped.
Fortunately, courts have stepped in to help some of the individual women Scott Lloyd has attempted to shame and coerce, like Jane Doe, whom Lloyd blocked for more than a month from getting the abortion she needed. And since Jane Doe’s case, several other immigrant women have been forced to go to court for their right to abortion. Unfortunately, we also know that ORR has been successful in forcing some young women to carry their pregnancy to term.
With Scott Lloyd in office there will undoubtedly be more Janes out there, and we have to say NO MORE!
We are so over Scott-Lloyd and his anti-abortion crusade. We DEMAND justice for Jane, and we DEMAND Scott Lloyd be removed from the office he is unwilling to uphold. ORR should be immediately stopped from blocking access to reproductive health care services and information, including abortion, for the thousands of young people in ORR custody.