Migration, rape and cartels: a crisis at the border

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Six weeks after a young asylum-seeker from El Salvador crossed into the U.S. from Mexico, she realized she was carrying a rape-related pregnancy.

The woman — who like the other women interviewed for this article aren’t being identified for security reasons — said she was sexually assaulted by the Mexican cartel that was holding her hostage in the dangerous border town of Reynosa, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, just a few miles from the U.S. border.

Once in Texas and unable to obtain an abortion, she found herself stuck between America’s immigration system and the state’s abortion ban.

She’s not alone. She is one of an alarming number of migrants who are entering the U.S. with unwanted pregnancies. She’s also a victim of a disturbing pattern of violence that’s emerging on the Mexican side of the border, where cartels are systematically kidnapping and collecting ransom from migrants on their way north. Those who can’t pay with money are made to pay with their bodies.

Without knowing English and overwhelmed by the complex legal landscape surrounding reproductive rights, the Salvadoran migrant resorted to online forums to find information about how to access abortion pills. She soon learned she needed a combined dose of mifepristone and misoprostol, the Food and Drug Administration-approved regimen for medical termination of pregnancy, which has been banned in 14 Republican-led states, including Texas, since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

From October to December 2023, Doctors Without Borders, one of the few organizations on the ground in the region, recorded a 70% increase in consultations for sexual violence in the Mexican border towns of Reynosa and Matamoros compared to the previous three months. In the first two months of 2024, it has already recorded nearly 70 cases of sexual violence against migrants in the same area.

The Guatemalan asylum-seeker is one of them.

She said she was forced to leave Guatemala with her husband and two young daughters last year after they received death threats from the same gang that killed nearly half of her family. Their journey north was met with unimaginable violence after the Gulf Cartel, one of Mexico’s deadliest organized crime groups, intercepted the bus she and her family were traveling on from the Mexican city of Monterrey to Reynosa. The bus was full of migrants headed to the border.