The highly unusual case of the midwife arrested for violating Texas’s abortion law

Maria Rojas, a midwife of the Houston area, was arrested in March for allegedly violating the almost total abortion of Texas. She was held for 10 days in the same The prison where Sandra Bland died after a routine traffic stop in 2015. Rojas was able to publish the exorbitant bail of $ 1.4 million with help, but her phone was seized and her license was stripped, and with her her ability to obtain income. She was ordered by the court to use a tracking device.

“In Texas, life is sacred. I will always do everything in my possession to protect the unborn,” the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, a leading defender in Anti-Aborto who recently announced his offer for a seat in the United States Senate, He proudly boasted About the arrest.

But three months later, Rojas has not been formally accused of a crime, which puts it in an unbearable limbo where he cannot make money, but forced to pay a expensive legal defense with little public evidence against her.

It is a standard practice that a criminal complaint is filed shortly after someone is arrested. But in an unusual movement, Rojas was retained in an arrest warrant. Without a formal accusation or any criminal discovery of the state, Rojas cannot begin to prepare his defense.

“Mrs. Rojas remains without accusation for any crime. Meanwhile, she remains under extremely restrictive link conditions, and is prohibited from doing the legal work as a midwife she was doing before these deceived accusations against her were made,” said News themezone of Nicole Hochglaube, a defense lawyer of Rojas.

It is “really unusual” to be arrested but not accused, he told News themezone C. Melissa Owen, first vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“It was very unusual 10 days after being arrested, and is now exceptionally unusual,” said Owen, who is also the co -president of Nacdl’s task force on the surveillance and overcrowding of pregnancy.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office did not respond to News themezone’s request for comments. The lawyers representing Pxton’s office did not respond to a request for comments.

This has not only been a difficult time for Rojas and his family, but also for the reds of the low -income community mainly Spanish -speaking that once served, said Hochglaube. The midwife owned and operated several health clinics in the Houston area, all of which have been temporarily closed by a court order in a civil case presented by the Pxton office.

“We hope to clarify it from these accusations, but remain in a harmful retention pattern waiting for any detail about these statements in the state of Texas,” said Hochglaube.

Without an accusation, Rojas stays in a kind of land of anyone where due process has been suspended. “There is no possibility of due process for her in this current state,” Owen said. “Rights only become significant through due process. Nothing can be done on an arrest unless you can challenge it.”

“There is no possibility of due process for her in this current state.”

– C. Melissa Owen, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

The sworn statement of arrest of 30 pages presented by the Pxton Office is currently the only evidence of the State that describes the alleged crimes of Rojas. Research on Red Clinics began with an anonymous complaint to Texas Health and Human Services in January. The Office of the Attorney General investigated and arrested Rojas and another worker for charges of practicing medicine without a license. Weeks later, they were arrested again by charges of carrying out an illegal abortion.

The state researchers surveyed the clinics for just over a month earlier this year after the anonymous complaint claimed that two women received illegal abortions from Rojas in September 2023 and January 2025. One of the two women later confirmed to the researchers that he received an abortion of Rojas, according to the arrest warrant. A third woman told researchers that Rojas presented himself as a gynecologist and that he may have provided a drug abortion to the woman after Rojas said she could not carry the term pregnancy.

The Affidavit of Arrest declared that the investigators confiscated a bottle of misoprostol and $ 2,900 in cash of the Rojas car. The main researcher wrote that he knew: “Based on training and experience, that misoprostol is a commonly used abortifact to induce medical abortions.”

Last month, Rojas could tell his history side in an appeal report in civil demand. His lawyers painted a very different image, accusing Paxton’s conjecture office and a politically motivated investigation that shows nothing.

“The attorney general boasts that he has caught an” abortionist from the Houston area “and has closed the” clinics that provide illegal abortions. “But there is an inconvenience: it is not true,” wrote the lawyers of Rojas in the report. “In the hurry of the Attorney General of the General Office to find and prosecute someone For violating the total prohibition of state abortion, he conducted a poor quality investigation and jumped to wild conclusions. “

Witness statements in the arrest order “do not show that an abortion was provided or tried to know,” Red’s lawyers wrote in civil appeal. They argue that the main witness of the researchers, the third woman who alleges that Rojas could have provided an abortion of medicines, received a Misoprostol tablet, which is a quarter of the necessary dose for an abortion of complete medications. Rojas probably believed that the woman was experiencing a spontaneous abortion and gave misoprostol, the standard protocol for spontaneous abortion care.

The principal researcher, who is a medical fraud researcher, confiscated a small number of misoprostol pills of the Rojas car, but did not notice that misoprostol is commonly used for other medical problems, especially during childbirth and childbirth of a baby. The affidavit establishes several times that Rojas had $ 2,900 in cash and the clinics accepted cash payment. The researcher said that “transactions from equal to equal and digital is frequently used in medical operations without a license to avoid financial scrutiny and regulatory supervision”, but did not notice that people who do not have insurance or have immigration concerns are more likely to use cash.

Bloomberg through Getty Images

Marc Hearron, the main lawyer of the Civil Case of Rojas and a lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said he is stunned by what is happening to Rojas.

“If the State can do this poor quality investigation, obtain an arrest warrant and throw it into jail, simply saying the word ‘abortion’, without even having evidence to support it: any medical care provider is at risk in the state of Texas,” he told News themezone.

Owen, from Nacdl, speculated that there are probably two main reasons for the state’s delay in the accusation of Rojas. The first is that the evidence that the Paxton office has gathered would not survive the probable cause test. The second is that they have a probable cause, but there is something suspicious about the evidence they have gathered or how they obtained it.

The lack of formal criminal charges is not the only exceptional thing in this case. It is also unusual for Paxton’s office to be directly responsible for investigating Rojas. The Office of the Attorney General in Texas does not have the power to process someone for criminal charges; The office must be invited by a local district prosecutor. Rojas was arrested in Waller County, where they are Whittmore, the local district prosecutor, is a former Paxton’s employee.

Rafa Kidvai, a lawyer from the Repro Legal Fund, said Paxton’s participation in the case, a general lack of evidence against Rojas and the amount of bond as reasons why they believe that this is a political prosecution.

The cases of abortion criminalization often establish higher bail amounts, Kidvai said, because abortion is a politically loaded problem. For example, women who abort in a toilet and fetal remains in discharge have been loaded with abuse of a corpse. But even within that context, the amount of Rojas’s bond for allegedly making an illegal abortion, a serious second -grade crime in Texas, was “excessively high,” Kidvai said.

The average amount of the bond for a serious second -degree crime in Waller County is around $ 36,000, according to 2024 Public records. Rojas’s bond was set at $ 1.4 million.

“This type of cruelty by procedure that happens is exactly what we should talk about,” Kidvai said. “If you lose all your financial support or your income, how to fight the case?

Kidvai has worked in many cases of criminalization of pregnancy and abortion, including several in Texas. When someone is accused of this type of crimes, often due to the loss of pregnancy, their community turns against them. They press employment, run the risk of losing custody of their children and sometimes there are immigration consequences.

Rojas spent 10 days in jail before paying a bail of $ 1.4 million. He was able to pay the bonus with the help of bail funds, organizations that provide financial assistance so that people can be released from jail before trial.

The amount of the bail of $ 1.4 million points out “that they want to punish someone and never give this person the opportunity to defend themselves,” Owen said.

“In the absence of that bail fund, she would be complying with a sentence and had no chance to prove if there is or not a crime here. “