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ken paxton
Attacks on Shield Laws Ramp Up as NY Doctor Fined $100,000 for Providing Abortion in Texas
The Louisiana attorney general also tried to extradite the physician for sending medication abortion pills to a patient in the state.
Feb 14, 2025
Republican-controlled states' testing of abortion rights "shield laws" that have been passed in eight states in recent years ramped up on Thursday as a judge in Texas ordered a New York doctor to pay more than $100,000 in fines and fees for prescribing medication abortion pills to a 20-year-old woman in the Dallas area last year.
On the same day, the physician, Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT), was subject to a demand for extradition to Louisiana after a state grand jury last month indicted her for mailing misoprostol and mifepristone, pills that are used in a majority of abortions in the U.S., to the state.
The charges in Louisiana are the first criminal charges filed against an abortion provider in a state with a shield law, which bar officials and agencies from cooperating with lawsuits and prosecutions against healthcare professionals who send abortion pills to patients in states that ban abortion care. The laws have been passed as advocates in states where abortion care remains legal fight to ensure Americans across the country can still obtain care after the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did not file criminal charges against Carpenter, but accused her in a lawsuit of violating the state's near-total abortion ban by providing the medication to a resident through the mail.
In the country's first ruling on a case involving a shield law, State District Judge Bryan Gantt ordered Carpenter to pay $100,000 in fines and $13,000 in attorneys' and other fees. He also ruled that Carpenter, who did not attend Thursday's court proceedings, "is permanently enjoined from prescribing abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents."
Violating the ruling could result in a jail sentence for Carpenter.
Despite the ruling, ACT executive director Julie Kay toldThe Associated Press on Thursday that "patients can access medication abortion from licensed providers no matter where they live."
"ACT has and continues to stand behind New York and other shield laws across the country that enable the distribution of safe and effective telemedicine abortion care."
In December, ACT said medication abortion pills, which have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 2000 and have "been proven safe and effective globally for decades," are "an essential part of women's healthcare."
The Texas case is expected to eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where the right-wing majority could rule against legal protections for abortion providers who provide telemedicine for out-of-state patients—even as Republicans including President Donald Trump claim they believe abortion law should be left up to the states.
In Louisiana, Carpenter was indicted for allegedly violating the state's near-total abortion ban by sending pills for a girl who reportedly then experienced a medical emergency. The patient's mother has also been charged. If convicted, Carpenter could face up to 15 years in prison.
Republican state Attorney General Jeff Landry demanded her extradition to Louisiana, but New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said Thursday that she "will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana. Not now, not ever."
ACT said Thursday that "ongoing attempts by anti-abortion state officials to restrict access to abortion care are inconsistent with New York state law."
"ACT has and continues to stand behind New York and other shield laws across the country that enable the distribution of safe and effective telemedicine abortion care," said the group.
The Texas case also reflects a dynamic that could lead to new prosecutions against abortion providers: those resulting from legal challenges filed by men whose partners receive abortion care.
In the case of the 20-year-old Texas resident, the patient was taken to a hospital in July by a man identified in legal filings as the "biological father of her unborn child."
After the man "started to suspect" the patient had used abortion pills and found the medications that had been prescribed by Carpenter and ACT, he "filed a complaint with the Texas attorney general's office."
The New York Timesreported that with Texas Right to Life, several men plan to file wrongful death lawsuits in the coming weeks against doctors and others who assisted their female partners in obtaining abortion care.
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'Don't Be Fooled': Laken Riley Act Not About Crime by Migrants—It's a Right-Wing Power Grab
"This bill is political grandstanding at its worst," said one lawmaker.
Jan 10, 2025
With the U.S. Senate poised to vote on the Laken Riley Act on Friday, immigrant rights advocates are warning that—despite claims from proponents that the bill is aimed at protecting American communities from violent crime—supporters of the legislation are actually advancing a dangerous "Trojan horse" and securing a power grab for xenophobic right-wing authorities.
The bill is named after Laken Riley, a Georgia woman who was killed last February while she was jogging. Jose Antonio Ibarra, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, was convicted of her murder in November, and the case was a focal point of President-elect Donald Trump's campaign last year.
But as Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of immigrant rights group America's Voice, said Thursday, the bill "is filled with unrelated and sweeping measures that won't improve public safety."
Central provisions in the legislation, which passed in the House on Tuesday with the support of 37 Democrats along with the entire Republican caucus, would require immigration officers to detain undocumented immigrants who are accused of theft, including shoplifting—an apparent response to the fact that Ibarra was cited for shoplifting in Georgia but was not detained before he killed Riley.
Critics have expressed outrage over the provision, with Cárdenas saying it would trample "important due process principles—greenlighting detention and deportation for those accused, rather than convicted of low-level crimes."
"It's no surprise Republicans are continuing to exploit a horrific act of violence and portray immigrants as dangerous threats to America, despite the reality that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born," said Cárdenas. "And it also should be no surprise to any close observers of right-wing politics that the bill being pushed this week doesn't seek to improve public safety or even focus on public safety threats."
At Arizona Republic, editor Elvia Díaz advised readers, "Don't be fooled by soundbites."
"Republicans and now Democrats, too, want you to believe the Laken Riley Act is about deporting shoplifters," she wrote. "It's a power grab by states to dismantle federal authority over immigration enforcement."
In a column at MSNBC on Wednesday, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote that Republicans pushing the bill are asking the question: "Who runs the U.S. immigration system?"
The answer, backed up by numerous courts, has been the federal government, but the bill would give broad new authorities to state officials, such as attorneys general, to file legal challenges in order to have specific immigrants detained and to force the State Department to block visas from countries that won't accept immigrants who are deported.
"Giving states a veto power over thousands of decisions made every day by federal law enforcement officers and leaders will complicate immigration issues in every community and threaten to set off international incidents which could hurt U.S. interests around the globe," wrote Reichlin-Melnick.
The visa provision could impact countries such as China and India, which have "historically not cooperated fully with the United States on deportations," and where more than 1.8 million immigrant and short-term visas were issued to nationals in 2023.
"Because the United States is so intertwined with these countries, administrations of both parties have been unwilling to threaten blanket visa bans as a punishment for not accepting deportees," wrote Reichlin-Melnick. "Yet should the Laken Riley Act become law, that decision may no longer be in the hands of our nation's top diplomats and law enforcement officers; it could be in the hands of a single federal district court judge in Texas or Louisiana."
He continued:
What could this look like in practice? Imagine a person from China living in Texas on an H-1B visa who commits an offense that leads to a deportation order. If China does not accept the deportation, [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton could go to court seeking to force the federal government to ban all visas from China (or maybe just all H-1B visas) without having to worry about taking the blame for the economic or diplomatic fallout to the United States.
"What happened to Laken Riley was a terrible tragedy, and the perpetrator has been sentenced to life in prison for his heinous acts," wrote Reichlin-Melnick on Wednesday. "But just as Willie Horton's bad acts decades ago were not a justification for supercharging a system of mass incarceration, the heinous acts of Jose Ibarra should not be an excuse to flip our system of constitutional governance on its head and empower individual states and federal judges to run immigration law."
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who opposed the bill this week, said he has heard from "a lot of people who say they support this bill, but who don't seem to know what it really does."
"For example, if this bill is signed into law, a 12-year-old kid brought here by a parent could be LOCKED IN ICE DETENTION if they are accused—not even convicted, simple accused—of stealing a candy bar," McGovern said in a post on X, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement..
Kylie Cheung of Jezebel pointed out that while Republicans have held the Laken Riley Act up as essential legislation to protect women from violence, "these lawmakers don't care about women's safety or high rates of femicide perpetrated by people with citizenship—they've cut all actual resources for victims. They just want to gut basic civil liberties."
Immigration attorney Ben Winograd of the Immigrant & Refugee Appellate Center offered a hypothetical scenario under the bill: "Imagine a man who is a U.S. citizen marries a woman who entered the country illegally. He abuses her constantly, and after learning that she intends to leave him, he calls the police and (falsely) claims that she stole some of his property."
"If the police arrest the woman, she would be subject to mandatory detention while in removal proceedings—even if the police determined that the accusation was bogus," said Winograd. "The Laken Riley Act would allow any person with a grudge against an undocumented immigrant to make them subject to indefinite mandatory detention simply by leveling a false accusation of theft."
All the Senate Republicans are sponsoring the bill, which was cleared for a vote on Thursday, with Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) joining them. In order to overcome a filibuster the GOP needs just six more Democrats to support the legislation.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), one of nine senators who opposed advancing the bill on Thursday, said he is in favor of "bipartisan action to fix our broken immigration system."
"I stand ready to work across the aisle to get it done," he said. "Let's start from a foundation grounded in our Constitution."
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Texas Lawsuit Against New York Doctor Tests Abortion Provider Shield Laws
"It is important to remember that Dr. Carpenter did nothing wrong," said one legal expert. "Texas is trying to apply its laws extraterritorially."
Dec 13, 2024
"Time for shield laws to hold strong," said one reproductive rights expert on Friday as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against an abortion provider in New York.
Paxton is suing Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT), for providing mifepristone and misoprostol to a 20-year-old resident of Collin County, Texas earlier this year.
ACT was established after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, with the intent of helping providers in "shielded states"—those with laws that provide legal protection to doctors who send abortion pills to patients in states that ban abortion, as Carpenter did.
New York passed a law in 2023 stipulating that state courts and officials will not cooperate if a state with an abortion ban like Texas' tries to prosecute a doctor who provides abortion care via telemedicine in that state, as long as the provider complies with New York law.
Legal experts have been divided over whether shield laws or state-level abortion bans should prevail in a case like the one filed by Paxton.
"What will it mean to say for the GOP to say abortion should be left to the states now?"
"It is important to remember that Dr. Carpenter did nothing wrong," said Greer Donley, a legal expert and University of Pittsburgh law professor who specializes in reproductive rights. "She followed her home state's laws."
The Food and Drug Administration also allows telehealth abortion care, "finding it safe and effective," Donley added. "Texas is trying to apply its laws extraterritorially."
In the Texas case, the patient was prescribed the pills at nine weeks pregnant. Mifepristone and misoprostol are approved for use through the 10th week of pregnancy and are more than 95% effective.
The patient experienced heavy bleeding after taking the pills and asked the man who had impregnated her to take her to the hospital. The lawsuit suggests that the man notified the authorities:
The biological father of the unborn child was told that the mother of the unborn child was experiencing a hemorrhage or severe bleeding as she "had been" nine weeks pregnant before losing the child. The biological father of the unborn child, upon learning this information, concluded that the biological mother of the unborn child had intentionally withheld information from him regarding her pregnancy, and he further suspected that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child. The biological father, upon returning to the residence in Collin County, discovered the two above-referenced medications from Carpenter.
In the lawsuit, Paxton is asking a Collin County court to block Carpenter from violating Texas law and order her to pay $100,000 for each violation of Texas' near-total abortion ban.
Carpenter and ACT did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.
Caroline Kitchener, who has covered abortion rights for The Washington Post, noted that lawsuits challenging abortion provider shield laws were "widely expected after the 2024 election."
President-elect Donald Trump has said abortion rights should be left up to the states, but advocates have warned that the Republican Party, with control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, is likely to push a national abortion ban.
"The truce over interstate abortion fights is over," said legal scholar Mary Ziegler, an expert on the history of abortion in the U.S. "Texas has sued a New York doctor for mailing pills into the state; New York has a shield law that allows physicians to sue anyone who sues them in this way. What will it mean for the GOP to say abortion should be left to the states now?"
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