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Scott Lloyd, the Trump administration’s pick as director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, raised the prospect last March of administering the hormone progesterone to a 17-year-old girl from El Salvador who had entered the US illegally and was being held in custody in San Antonio, Texas. The procedure is unrecognized by the medical profession as a means of reversing abortion and has side-effects attached to it.

Lloyd’s plan to apply the controversial hormone method, first reported by Vice News, was revealed in court documents disclosed in an ACLU lawsuit that seeks to stop the Trump administration from blocking access to abortions by female immigrants in the ORR’s care. Since Lloyd took over the agency last year, it has been accused by civil rights groups of effectively holding girls hostage in an attempt to negate their constitutional right to terminate their pregnancies. 

In an exhibit appended to the lawsuit, a memo from the acting director of the ORR Kenneth Tota dated 4 March 2017 noted that the previous day the teenager had taken a pill designed to produce a medication abortion. In normal usage, a second pill is then taken 24 or 48 hours later.

But in the memo Tota ordered the ORR to escort the girl “to the emergency room of a local hospital in order to determine the health status of [teenager] and her unborn child. If steps can be taken to preserve the life of the [teenager] and her unborn child, those steps should be taken.”

A partial transcript of Lloyd’s deposition to the ACLU seen by the Guardian shows that he was asked directly whether he had had conversations about reversing the girl’s medication abortion. “I may have,” he replied.

He was then asked whether the ORR would seek to try to reverse an abortion of a child who had entered the US on her own and who was in federal custody. “I don’t know, I mean except to save the life of the baby,” he said.

Court documents show that in the end the ORR did allow the girl to go ahead and take the second medication abortion pill, thus terminating the pregnancy. But before this happened the ORR had made inquiries about the efficacy of administering progesterone as a means of stopping the abortion mid-flow, according to emails seen by Vice News.

Brigitte Amiri, the ACLU lead counsel on the lawsuit, said: “The Trump administration’s cruel and unconstitutional treatment of young immigrant women knows no bounds. The administration forced a minor to go to an emergency room for an ultrasound in the middle of a medication abortion, and contemplated trying to ‘reverse’ the abortion through an unproven method, against the young woman’s will.”

Under Lloyd’s leadership the ORR has tried to prevent at least four pregnant teenagers from accessing abortions. In each case the ACLU has launched legal challenges to ensure that the individuals were afforded their constitutional rights set out in Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 supreme court ruling that legalized abortion.

In the latest lawsuit, the ACLU is pressing for a class action that would prohibit Lloyd and the ORR from blocking access to abortion clinics in all future cases.

[Ed Pilkington is the chief reporter for Guardian US. He is a former national and foreign editor of the paper, and author of Beyond the Mother Country. Reach him on Twitter @edpilkington. Click here for his public key.]