Immigrant Women Reportedly Sterilized in Federal Detention Facilities
Background: In September 2020, a group of human rights and immigrant rights organizations issued “Lack of Medical Care, Unsafe Work Practices, and Absence of Adequate Protection Against COVID-19 for Detained Immigrants and Employees Alike at the Irwin County Detention Center.” This report publicly exposed dangerous conditions within the for-profit Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC), a Georgia facility where immigrants were detained. It drew heavily from information provided by Dawn Wooten, a nurse who worked at the center and came forward to protest the conditions. The authors – Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network – accused the ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention center of medical neglect, such as the refusal to test symptomatic detainees for COVID-19, the practice of destroying medical requests, and fabricating medical records. The section of the report excerpted here focused on women detainees’ accounts that they were unnecessarily and, often, unknowingly, sterilized when receiving care from the physician affiliated with the Center. The authors demanded that ICE hand over further evidence of nonconsensual medical procedures, including sterilization; when ICE refused, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington), the National Immigration Project, and Project South sued the agency (CREW et al v. ICE).
[Ms. Wooten] further said: “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they're experimenting with our bodies.”
Ms. Wooten also expressed concern regarding the high numbers of detained immigrant women at ICDC receiving hysterectomies. She stated that while some women have heavy menstruation or other severe issues that would require hysterectomy, “everybody's uterus cannot be that bad.” Ms. Wooten explained:
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. 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.
Ms. Wooten also stated that detained women expressed to her that they didn't fully understand why they had to get a hysterectomy. She said: “I've had several inmates tell me that they've been to see the doctor and they've had hysterectomies and they don't know why they went or why they're going.” And if the immigrants do understand what they're getting done, “some of them a lot of times won't even go, they say they'll wait to get back to their country to go to the doctor.”
The rate at which the hysterectomies have occurred have been a red flag for Ms. Wooten and other nurses at ICDC. Ms. Wooten explained:
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.
Intertwined with the issue of the reported high rates of hysterectomies is the issue of proper informed consent. Regarding the hysterectomies, Ms. Wooten explained: “These immigrant women, I don't think they really, totally, all the way understand this is what's going to happen depending on who explains it to them.”
Source: Maya Manian, “Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself,” ACLU News, September 29, 2020. https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/immigration-detention-and-coerced-sterilization-history-tragically-repeats-itself.