When Amarillo resident Courtney Brown came across a social media post last July that announced anti-abortion activists would be bringing their “sanctuary cities for the unborn” campaign before her hometown council, she immediately reached out to her friends to start crafting a battle plan.
At the time, Brown, a 34-year-old owner of a local coffee shop, wasn’t an abortion rights activist, but she still knew she had to act—for her community and for those traveling through it for abortion care. The ordinance, which Amarilloans are set to vote on this November after the council declined to pass it earlier this summer, would allow almost any person to file a civil lawsuit against people who “aid or abet” abortion and reap $10,000 in damages, similar to the state’s bounty hunter-style Senate Bill 8. The broad ordinance could apply to anyone who provides funding to someone who passes through the city to receive out-of-state abortion care or who drives an abortion-seeking patient to their appointment on the city’s roads.
The threat is particularly harmful in a state with one of the country’s strictest abortion bans, which has forced some 35,000 pregnant patients to travel to New Mexico, Colorado, and other states where the procedure remains legal.
“When the ordinance came to Amarillo, we felt like we didn’t have a choice other than to fight it,” Brown told the Texas Observer. “It was our responsibility to protect our community, our friends, our family. We realized no one is going to come save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.”
“We know this travel ban is unconstitutional, but it almost doesn’t matter.”
Dubbed an “abortion trafficking” ban by anti-abortion extremists—as one of the policy’s progenitors put it, “The unborn child is always taken against their will”—the zealous measure encourages Texans to turn on each other in the name of “pro-life” values. At least 14 Texas localities, including Abilene and San Angelo, have passed some variation of the ordinance since 2021, but to anti-abortion advocates, Amarillo—a city of 200,000 in the mostly rural Panhandle that sits just an hour’s drive from New Mexico—is seen as a “trophy.”
After a “crash course” last summer on the details of the ordinance and the state of reproductive rights in Texas, Brown was “horrified,” and she said her resolve grew tenfold. She and five friends—including a nurse, a lawyer, and an artist—banded together to fight the extreme proposal by creating the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance. The all-volunteer coalition is dedicated to educating and informing the city’s residents about the ordinance’s potential impact. They reached out to local business, religious, and community leaders, and hosted forums at churches and other events around town. And of course, they spent hours making their case to city council members.
“Talking about abortion in conservative Amarillo can lead to some pretty aggressive responses, so we started with some hesitancy,” said Brown. “But as we talked to more and more people, we became confident and comfortable to talk to anyone who would listen.”
The group felt like their hard work paid off. The Amarillo City Council first considered passing the abortion travel ban last October. The Alliance was persistent in persuading council members that the measure was not only an infringement on bodily autonomy and medical privacy but a federal constitutional violation of interstate travel and free speech rights. After months of heated debate, the council overwhelmingly rejected the measure this June.
“We made council members fully understand the major implications of what they were voting on,” said Brown. “If we can make leaders in a conservative town like Amarillo see reason and logic, it can happen anywhere.”
When dismissing the proposal, Amarillo Mayor Cole Stanley said the city lacked the authority to put the policy in place. “Constitutionally, as a conservative, we always want to protect these civil rights and right of travel and right of speech. Freedom to move is greatly important. And we should never be in favor of anything that would ever limit that,” said Stanley at an earlier press conference.
But the fight wasn’t over. Anti-abortion activists, dissatisfied with the rebuke from council, collected 6,300 verified signatures to petition for approval to add the ordinance to the November 5 ballot, placing the fate of reproductive healthcare access in the hands of voters. The Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance now faces its biggest challenge yet: Convincing as many of their neighbors as possible that the ordinance will harm their community.
Amarillo is the biggest Texas locality, so far, to consider the policy as a ballot measure—making this perhaps the most significant chance for ordinary Texas residents to vote on abortion rights since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. Statewide, voters may never get the chance to protect abortion rights as they have in Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio and might in at least 10 other states this November. This is because Texas is among the two dozen states that do not allow citizen-initiated statewide ballot measures, something only the GOP-controlled Legislature could change.
Launched in 2019 by Mark Lee Dickson, a Longview anti-abortion activist with Right To Life of East Texas, and attorney Jonathan Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general and the architect of SB 8, the “sanctuary for the unborn” movement now claims success in about 80 political subdivisions across seven states. The movement first pushed ordinances to outlaw abortion care altogether, a symbolic move in the days before Roe fell in 2022. City of Lubbock voters approved such a ban in 2021, two years before Lubbock County passed a travel ban applying to unincorporated areas around the city. Then, following Roe’s demise and Texas’ broad outlawing of abortion, Dickson and co. turned their attention to travel bans to inhibit Texans from accessing healthcare elsewhere.
It’s a straight shot along I-40 from Amarillo to Albuquerque, New Mexico, the state most abortion-seeking Texans travel to for care. More than 14,000 Texas patients made the trek to New Mexico for the procedure in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Six localities near the New Mexico border have so far passed travel bans; Amarillo is one of the remaining pieces of the puzzle. And the Panhandle city is also on the way for many patients seeking care in Colorado.
“Amarillo may very well be the greatest challenge yet,” Dickson told the Observer in an email. “The city has become the abortion trafficking hub of Texas.”
The travel ban ordinances cite an archaic federal law known as the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old anti-vice measure that bars the mailing of all abortion-related materials, including pills. While the Biden administration has issued guidance stressing that the largely dormant Comstock Act only applies if the sender intends for abortion-related materials “to be used unlawfully,” that hasn’t deterred anti-abortion activists from championing the law as an avenue to ultimately implement a nationwide abortion ban, either through the courts or a future Republican president.
“We call upon every United States Attorney in the state of Texas, both present and future, to investigate and prosecute abortion providers and abortion-pill distribution networks” under Comstock, the Amarillo ordinance reads.
While the ordinance doesn’t explicitly punish pregnant patients seeking abortion—only those who assist them—Mitchell has shown interest in targeting individual women he claims traveled out-of-state to terminate their pregnancies, and he’s fought to access private patient information from abortion funds. Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Recently, Amarillo has become something of a hotbed in the national fight for reproductive health access. Religious right-wing Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the only judge who presides over civil cases in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, helped elevate a lawsuit—filed by anti-abortion activists seeking to repeal approval of the abortion drug mifepristone—up to the U.S. Supreme Court. (The court ultimately ruled the plaintiffs lacked standing.) Kacsmaryk has also ruled that allowing minors to receive birth control without parental consent at federally funded clinics violates parental rights.
“Thanks to Kacsmaryk, Amarillo turned into ground zero for these far-reaching reproductive rights issues,” said Brown. “And now with this travel ban, we continue to be a kind of testing area for terrible anti-abortion policies.”
To legal experts, abortion travel bans are constitutionally dubious as they appear to interfere with the right to interstate travel and commerce. States are usually limited in their extraterritorial jurisdiction power; for example, states that have not legalized marijuana or gambling do not punish their residents for partaking in those acts in states where they are legal.
“Generally, we don’t allow states to reach outside of their borders and regulate activity in another state,” said Liz Sepper, a University of Texas at Austin professor who specializes in healthcare law. “It’s even more suspect for a city to try and enforce its moral code outside its boundaries well beyond what the state has even done.”
However, there is a “complex gray area” that could be open to a loophole, said Sepper. For instance, in his concurring opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that overturned Roe, Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that patients could not be prosecuted for out-of-state abortions under the constitutional right to interstate travel, yet he failed to address the civil enforcement strategy found in the travel bans. Additionally, that private enforcement framework helps shield the bans from federal lawsuits seeking to block them, as is also the case with SB 8.
When confronted with the possible unconstitutionality of the ordinance, Dickson and his anti-abortion cohort often cite the federal Mann Act, a 1910 law—accused of being used as a tool of racially motivated persecution in the mid-20th century—that was originally intended to criminalize the transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”
“These prohibitions on abortion trafficking no more infringe the constitutional right to travel than prohibitions on sex trafficking infringe the constitutional right to travel,” said Dickson.
Regardless, the ordinance would likely create a chilling effect on those traveling out of state for care—and advocates say that’s by design. SB 8’s similar vigilante-style enforcement created the risk of potential litigation against anyone supporting care, which immediately halted abortion in Texas, causing damage even before legal pushback. “Like with SB 8, the point is to create fear,” said Sepper.
The chilling effect has already deterred patients. Amy Hagstrom Miller, who ran a network of abortion clinics in Texas before relocating her Whole Woman’s Health centers to New Mexico and other states after Roe was overturned, said she has already seen the impact on her patients. When news broke that Lubbock County would be considering an abortion travel ban, every patient from Dallas canceled their appointments at the Albuquerque clinic.
“They were terrified. They had this image that these guys were going to stop them on the highway and maybe put them in jail. And the ordinance hadn’t even passed yet,” said Hagstrom Miller. “We know this travel ban is unconstitutional, but it almost doesn’t matter. As soon as people hear about it, they’re scared.”
Andrea Gallegos—who helps manage two clinics in New Mexico after she relocated from Texas last year with her father, longtime abortion provider Dr. Alan Braid—echoed the observation. The clinics, whose Texas-based patients make up 85 percent of their clientele, have experienced higher than average no-show rates because people are afraid to drive through Lubbock and Amarillo.
“We get questions from patients wondering if it’s still safe for them to come here,” said Gallegos. “There is a real sense of fear that they will get in trouble just for doing that. Even before the travel ban, patients in banned states like Texas felt deep anxiety, now it’s just gotten so much worse. And that’s the point of these bans. They’re designed as a fear tactic.”
Brown continues to tell fellow Amarilloans that the ordinance is meant to instill this fear and divide the community. Her group is heartened by emails from ardently “pro-life” citizens saying that after meeting with the coalition they’ve come around to understanding that an abortion travel ban is not the solution.
As the ballot measure vote approaches, Brown’s grassroots group plans to ramp up efforts by phone banking, canvassing, and assisting with voter registration. They’ve built a new website to educate residents on the ordinance and have two billboards up in town. They’ll continue to host forums and persuade as many residents as possible. But, at the end of the day, the vote is in the public’s hands.
“We’re ready to go boots on the ground, door to door, and have those tough conservations,” said Brown. “It may be overly optimistic but we are hopeful, because we’ve seen how people in this community really want to protect each other and do what’s right at the end of the day. It gives me hope for November. Either way, we are ready for the fight.”
