Advocates for Youth condemns in the strongest possible terms the State Department’s new regulation concerning the denial of visas to people who are pregnant or simply appear to be pregnant. It is the purest violation of basic human rights for people to have their bodies scrutinized by officials, their motives for visiting impugned, and their personal testimony that they are not pregnant ignored. The regulation is also racial profiling that clearly targets young immigrant women from the Global South, especially Latinas and Asians. One woman has already been forced to take a pregnancy test by airline staff at the airport before she was permitted to travel to the Mariana Islands (a U.S. territory).

“I am rendered speechless by the depths to which this Administration will sink,” said Debra Hauser, President, Advocates for Youth.  “We need to call these new requirements out for what they are: sexual violation with racist intent.”