A midwife and an associate have been arrested and charged with illegally performing abortions in greater Houston, according to court records and the Texas attorney general, apparently the first criminal arrests of abortion providers since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Ken Paxton, the attorney general in Texas, said in a statement that the midwife, Maria Margarita Rojas, operated clinics in several towns around Houston, including two in Harris County, the state’s most populous county, and one in Waller County, a more rural and conservative jurisdiction where the charges were brought.

The statement said that she had been “charged with the illegal performance of an abortion,” which has been a second-degree felony since the state’s near-total abortion ban took effect in 2022. She was also charged with practicing medicine without a license.

Court records released late Monday indicated that a person who worked with Rojas, Jose Ley, 29, was also arrested and charged with the same offenses. The records showed Rojas and Ley were being held on $500,000 bond in Waller County, west of Houston, where the charges were brought.

Lawyers for Rojas and Ley could not immediately be reached. But a friend said that Rojas had been arrested this month while driving to one of her clinics.

“She was on her way to the clinic and got pulled over by the police at gunpoint and handcuffed,” said the friend, a fellow midwife, Holly Shearman, who said she had spoken with Rojas by phone last week. “She said they wouldn’t tell her what was happening. She said they took her to Austin.”

Shearman recalled that Rojas had told her that others from the clinic, possibly someone who worked at the front desk, had also been arrested.

The bans on abortions around the country have largely relied on the threat of prosecution, with few instances in which criminal cases have actually been filed. Abortion providers in Texas and other states with abortion bans ceased operations after the decision. Women seeking abortions have instead traveled to states where the procedure remains legal or have received abortion medication through the mail.

“This is, as far as I know, the first allegation that someone in a ban state is providing an abortion in direct violation of abortion laws,” said Marc Hearron of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

In a handful of cases, charges have been brought against people who provided abortion pills to relatives, either with their knowledge or without.

The state of Louisiana indicted a New York doctor on criminal charges this year for mailing abortion medications to a Louisiana woman in violation of the state’s ban. New York has resisted requests to extradite the doctor under the state’s shield law, which protects providers from prosecution in states with abortion bans.

Texas brought a civil case against the same doctor, Margaret Carpenter, for sending pills to Texas residents. She did not defend herself in that case, and a judge last month ordered her to pay more than $100,000.

But the arrest of the midwife in the Houston area went further.

“In Texas, life is sacred,” Paxton said in a statement. “I will always do everything in my power to protect the unborn, defend our state’s pro-life laws and work to ensure that unlicensed individuals endangering the lives of women by performing illegal abortions are fully prosecuted.”

According to the website for one of her clinics, Rojas, 49, was born in Peru, has been a certified midwife in Texas since 2018 and has “attended more than 700 births in community based and hospital settings.”

Court records indicate that Rojas is a U.S. citizen but that Ley, who was also arrested, was a citizen of Cuba.

Shearman said that Rojas had been an obstetrician in Peru before moving the United States.