U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, is under fire once again for its treatment of detainees. This time the agency is being accused of performing hysterectomies on immigrant women without their informed consent.
Social justice nonprofit Project South and some of its allies complained in a letter dated Sept. 14 of numerous human rights abuses to detainees in the Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia.
Addressed to some of Georgia’s congressional brass, the letter was written on behalf of the detainees and Dawn Wooten, a licensed practical nurse employed at Irwin who blew the whistle about the alleged atrocious practices at the site.
“This complaint and Ms. Wooten’s accompanying Declaration (which is incorporated by reference) document recent accounts of jarring medical neglect at ICDC including refusal to test detained immigrants for COVID-19 who have been exposed to the virus and are symptomatic, shredding of medical requests submitted by detained immigrants, and fabricating medical records,” the letter read. “In addition, this complaint raises red flags regarding the rate at which hysterectomies are performed on immigrant women under ICE custody at ICDC.”
The complaint further states that many of the immigrant women were “confused” and “didn’t fully understand why they had to get a hysterectomy.” The doctor at the center of the complaints has been identified as gynecologist Mahendra Amin, who is not certified by the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, according to a recent report by The Daily Beast.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody,” Wooten said, according to the letter. “We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out … That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly … is he collecting these things or something … Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.”
Wooten also alleged Amin had taken the wrong ovary out of one woman, which led to her having to have a full hysterectomy.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody. He’s even taken out the wrong ovary on a young lady [detained immigrant woman]. She was supposed to get her left ovary removed because it had a cyst on the left ovary; he took out the right one,” Wooten said. “She was upset. She had to go back to take out the left and she wound up with a total hysterectomy. She still wanted children – so she has to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids … she said she was not all the way out under anesthesia and heard him [doctor] tell the nurse that he took the wrong ovary.”
Another detainee, Pauline Binam, says she woke up to find one of her fallopian tubes had been removed, Slate reported. Binam, who is of Cameroonian heritage, said she would have never consented to an operation she knew would leave her sterile.
Advocates for Binum believe ICE tried to hurry her deportation after her story began receiving a wide array of coverage. She was pulled off a plane Wednesday, Sept. 16, after congressional intervention. It was set to take her back to Cameroon, where she hasn’t been since she was 2 years old.
“It felt like ICE was trying to rush through her deportation. I can’t say that for certain, but all of this is extremely troubling,” U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal told NPR. “This feels particularly egregious because it is obviously invasive, reproductive surgery. And so for every woman in particular across America, this sends chills up our spine.”
Since news of the alleged hysterectomies broke, attorney for at least 17 detained women have said their clients were forced to have hysterectomies, according to NPR. Advocates are concerned it was an attempt at genocide or sterilization of the women that could be racially motivated. Both ICE and LaSalle Corrections, Irwin’s parent company, have refuted the allegations.
“To be clear, medical care decisions concerning detainees are made by medical personnel, not by law enforcement personnel,” Medical Director of ICE Health Service Corps Dr. Ada Rivera said at a news conference in Atlanta Tuesday, Sept. 15. “Detainees are afforded informed consent, and a medical procedure like a hysterectomy would never be performed against a detainee’s will.”
LaSalle said it “strongly refutes these allegations and any implications of misconduct” in a statement.
Project South Legal and Advocacy Director Azadeh Shahshahani said she is happy the women’s issues are finally getting some attention after continued outcry.
“Given that we’re in the midst of the pandemic, we thought that folks would be very focused on the level of care or lack of care being provided to people in detention,” Shahshahani said. “I guess we had not expected such a level of attention to [the hysterectomies]—which is really important. I mean, I’m glad that folks are finally paying attention to what is happening.”
There is immense evidence of medical malpractice against Black, brown and indigenous women throughout American history. Famed civil rights leader and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party co-founder Fannie Lou Hamer, whose “I’’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention riveted the nation and helped lead to a breakthrough in voting rights for Blacks, was one of the most prominent victims of the infamous “Mississippi appendectomy” practice of sterilizing Mississippi women without their consent after they sought treatment for conditions unrelated to reproductive health.
Eugenics laws allowing for such sterilizations were once common across the United States, with the practice utilized with such regularity that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, looking on at the American example in admiration, wrote: “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
Such a history is why the idea that a government agency could be intentionally sterilizing immigrant women is raising alarm.
“We’re talking about black and brown immigrant women who are in a very vulnerable situation and have no control over what’s happening to their bodies,” Shahshahani said. “So definitely this issue is receiving well-deserved attention. … I have to say, there are human rights violations happening at the facility that have been happening for years. This is not a stand-alone issue.”
