Trump officials won't let teen who wanted abortion meet with lawyers

A panel of judges ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to let a pregnant, undocumented teenager tell a judge whether she wants an abortion. The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, hopes to put an end to a legal battle over the teen, who originally told lawyers that she wanted an abortion but later allegedly changed her mind.

The Trump administration has been in and out of court since October over its efforts to block undocumented teens in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement from getting abortions. Four teens have so far joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the agency, which oversees all unaccompanied minors who enter the United States without authorization, claiming that its head, Scott Lloyd, refused to approve their requests for abortions. All four were eventually allowed to get the procedure.

But this teen, dubbed Jane Doe in court papers, isn’t a part of that lawsuit. For Doe, the question isn’t whether she should be able to access an abortion but whether she wants one at all.

In January, shortly after the Texas shelter holding her discovered Doe was six weeks pregnant, Doe told a “a person interviewing her about her needs” that she was thinking of getting an abortion, according to the 5th Circuit ruling. She also met with a pair of lawyers who offered to help her obtain a judicial bypass, or permission from a judge to get an abortion without telling her parents. The lawyers, Rochelle and Myles Garza, set up a hearing for a judicial bypass for Feb. 8.

Read: How the Trump administration tries to stop undocumented teens from getting abortions

Doe never showed up to that hearing. ORR later told the Garzas that Doe no longer wanted an abortion, and gave them two handwritten notes by Doe that showed she had indeed ”changed [her] decision to have an abortion,” according to the ruling.

But the government refused to allow the Garzas, who by this point had been appointed to officially serve as Doe’s lawyers, to actually meet with Doe, the ruling shows. In March emails, ORR Director Lloyd instructed staff to keep a minor in an ORR-operated shelter from meeting with an attorney about the possibility of getting an abortion or a judicial bypass. In a December deposition obtained by VICE News, however, Lloyd said he’d only meant to keep minors from having “unnecessary” meetings with lawyers.

In the Thursday opinion, the 5th Circuit judges say they’re not interested in trying to sort out what exactly happened. Instead, they wrote, all that matters is confirming that Doe doesn’t want an abortion — which can only happen if she meets with a district judge.

“If the court finds that Jane Doe does not wish to abort her pregnancy, the matter is concluded, and the district court should dismiss the case,” the judges wrote. If Doe does want an abortion, then the Garzas could either continue to help her get a judicial bypass or the district judge could assign Doe another lawyer.

Strikingly, the majority opinion also took the time to condemn a special dissent penned by another judge on the circuit, Edith Jones. While Jones agreed with the majority that Doe should be made to appear before a judge to clarify what she wants for her pregnancy, she believes that the Garzas must be taken off Doe’s case.

“The Garzas never sought to pursue Doe’s interests in conjunction with ORR, but have acted inherently in opposition to the agency’s comprehensive federal duty toward her,” Jones wrote, implying that the Garzas are part of a “continued sidestepping of ORR’s custodial role by advocacy groups seeking to extend abortion rights.”

The judges writing in the majority, however, accused Jones of creating “needless judicial spin.”

“We pause to address a narrative that the special concurrence and dissent threads, one in which knavish, ‘agenda-driven’ lawyers circumvent an irreproachable agency to prey upon an unaccompanied pregnant minor. The crucial fact — whether Jane Doe wishes to pursue an abortion — cannot be answered by needless judicial spin,” the judges in the majority wrote, later adding, “There are no battles or wars here, only straight-forward [sic] fact issues.”

This isn’t the first time the Garzas, who practice as part of the law firm Garza & Garza Law, PLLC, have found themselves caught up in the national battle over whether undocumented minors in federal custody have a right to access abortion. Rochelle Garza helped represent the first teen to accuse the Trump administration of stopping her from getting an abortion, and the ongoing ACLU lawsuit involving the four teens — Garza v. Hargan — still bears her name. Rochelle Garza didn’t immediately reply to a VICE News request for comment.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families declined to comment on pending litigation, as did a Department of Justice spokesperson.

Antonia Hylton contributed reporting.

Cover image: In this Oct. 20, 2017, photo, activists with Planned Parenthood demonstrate in support of a pregnant 17-year-old being held in a Texas facility for unaccompanied immigrant children to obtain an abortion, outside of the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite File)