By Ja’Loni Amor Owens, Prism

The reproductive justice movement’s power in Texas is rooted in a truth we know too well: to fight for bodily autonomy is to fight for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the broader Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apparatus.

We are not new to this, but true to this.

Texas is the epicenter of ICE terror: the national leader in ICE arrests and deportations and the solitary home of family detention. DHS recently pursued plans to purchase a warehouse in Dallas to cage up to 9,500 more of our neighbors. Though the developer ultimately withdrew following public pressure, the attempt reveals the scale of detention infrastructure the state is actively seeking to expand. We live with the visceral reality of state violence that forcibly disappears and kills our communities, from Houston to Amarillo, from Austin to the Rio Grande Valley.

The possibility of a Texas without militarized borders and overcrowded cages of immigrant families is dismissed by people who have no idea the reality of Texans’ daily lives. In Houston, one out of every seven residents knows someone detained or deported by ICE, with this number doubling among residents who identify as Hispanic and those near or below the poverty line. Across the state and over 20 detention centers, Texas holds the highest daily population of detained individuals, followed by California and Louisiana.

And yet, in the face of this machinery, Texans continue to resist. In Dallas-Fort Worth, 40 multifaith clergy formed the Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response (CLEAR) to provide pastoral care, bear witness, and organize resistance as asylum-seekers are detained during routine ICE check-ins. In the Rio Grande Valley, volunteers leave water in the desert for families migrating to the U.S., even as legal consequences loom. And in San Antonio, a city 155 miles from the border that serves as a major crossroads for immigrant communities, organizations such as Sueños Sin Fronteras de Tejas continue to make reproductive justice a possibility for thousands of migrant women, girls, and other gender-marginalized people.

This is why we have profound solidarity with every community across the U.S. enduring occupation by federal agents, including in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents killed two local residents earlier this year. We recognize the fight against state violence because it has long been the fight of the reproductive justice movement. As just one recent example, reproductive justice organizations on the ground in Minnesota organized mutual aid efforts to meet the material needs of families targeted by ICE. These are not one-off acts of solidarity, but rather a necessary shift in work—one made when there is a deep understanding of what reproductive justice actually demands.

Reproductive justice rests on three core principles: the right to bodily autonomy; the right to have or not have children; and the right to parent the children we do have in safe, sustainable communities. This third principle—the right to parent with dignity—is systematically denied by forced family separations, when DHS detains children as young as 2 years old and ICE agents brutalize pregnant people in the street and deport them directly from hospital beds. This is why mutual aid in the wake of ICE raids, accompaniment to and from school or work, and support for detained parents are not acts of charity separate from reproductive justice; they are the very practice of it.

For immigrant communities across Texas, DHS is a reproductive justice crisis: The agency decides who can have children and under what conditions; it severs parents from their children; and it forecloses any possibility of raising a family in safety. Theft of our bodily autonomy is the ultimate tool of an authoritarian regime, and Texas has been its proving ground.