Listed below are the morning’s high tales on Monday, February 16, 2026
- The Trump administration is making adjustments to the way it treats unaccompanied migrant youngsters who’re pregnant, and that’s elevating alarm bells inside the federal government. Since final July, the administration has been concentrating pregnant children in a single shelter in South Texas, even when they’re apprehended in California or different states. This comes over objections from the federal government’s personal well being and little one welfare officers. They are saying neither the ability nor the area can present the specialised care the ladies want.
- Firefighters throughout the state are working with scientists on the College of California to reduce their danger to most cancers.
The Trump administration is sending all pregnant unaccompanied minors apprehended by immigration enforcement to a single group shelter in South Texas. The choice was remodeled pressing objections from the federal government’s personal well being and little one welfare officers, who say each the ability and the area lack the specialised care the ladies want.
That’s in keeping with seven sources who work on the Workplace of Refugee Resettlement throughout the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Companies, which handles the custody and care of kids who cross the border and not using a mother or father or authorized guardian, or are separated from household by immigration authorities. All the sources declined to be named for worry of retaliation.
Since late July, greater than a dozen pregnant minors have been positioned on the Texas facility, which is situated within the small border metropolis of San Benito. Some had been as younger as 13, and not less than half of these taken in to date turned pregnant because of rape, sources mentioned. Their pregnancies are thought-about excessive danger by definition, notably for the youngest ladies. “This group of youngsters is clearly acknowledged as our most weak,” one of many sources mentioned. Rank-and-file workers, the supply mentioned, are “shedding sleep over it, questioning if children are going to be positioned in applications the place they’re not going to have entry to the care they want.”
The transfer marks a pointy departure from longstanding federal apply, which positioned pregnant, unaccompanied migrant youngsters in ORR shelters or foster properties across the nation which are geared up to deal with high-risk pregnancies. ORR sources, together with greater than a dozen former authorities officers, well being care professionals, migrant advocates and civil rights attorneys, mentioned they fear the Trump administration is placing youngsters in peril on the San Benito shelter to advance an ideological aim: denying them entry to abortion by putting them in a state the place it’s just about banned.
