Roughly three-quarters of the population of Hialeah, 11 miles northwest of downtown Miami, is foreign-born. Mom-and-pop shops line the commercial streets and fruit vendors dot many street corners.
Some of the patients Tuesday were immigrants from Cuba, where abortion is legal and widely accessible. Others, like a 36-year-old nurse who immigrated from Haiti, were originally from countries where abortion is largely banned.
“I didn’t even know a law had been passed,” said the nurse, a mother of two who visited the clinic with her husband and declined to give her name to protect her medical privacy. “If I had not made it in time, I would have no choice but to have the baby.”
On Wednesday, that possibility loomed larger as a slow trickle of patients arrived at the clinic, not knowing if they had made it in time.
Women across Florida are encountering the new ban, but abortion rights advocates say immigrants in the state and in this county — which has the nation’s highest share of foreign-born residents according to census data — will feel the impact more acutely. They may face language barriers, for instance, or have jobs without paid time off. And for those who lack legal documentation, the hurdles are magnified.
“Undocumented immigrants are already walking a tightrope,” said Suma Setty, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Law and Social Policy, which has advocated for immigrants’ abortion rights.
“It’s basically narrowing the tightrope even further,” she said of Florida’s six-week ban. “And there’s no safety net.”
E.H., a 28-year-old Cuban immigrant who lives in Jacksonville with her husband and two children, traveled about six hours to Hialeah because she knew the clinic. On Wednesday, she said she was unaware of the abortion ban until she spoke with NBC News.
She explained why she was seeking an abortion. “It’s not fair to be obliged to bring children into the world if you cannot care for them properly,” she said.
Her ultrasound confirmed she was right around six weeks pregnant and she was confident she’d still qualify for the procedure. If she’d come in a week later, she’d have been forced to travel out of state.
Before Wednesday, the state banned most abortions after 15 weeks under a law enacted in 2022. Because the new cutoff comes before many women may realize they’re pregnant, those seeking abortion care may be faced with traveling hundreds of miles across state lines to clinics in North Carolina and Virginia.
