The Google Street view of The Irwin County Detention Center in Southern Georgia.
On September 14, a report compiled by several advocacy groups alleged that ICE was performing unauthorized hysterectomies on migrant women in Georgia. A hysterectomy is a procedure in which a person’s uterus is removed and is most often done to relieve heavy periods or pelvic pain. Once someone’s uterus is removed, they are no longer able to conceive children or have periods.
The history of forced hysterectomies is a long and ugly one. Most infamously, Hitler advocated for hysterectomies on Jews and the Roma so that they would not have children, although the U.S. has its own legacy of forced hysterectomies on Black, Latinx and Indigenous people. The recent allegations against ICE invited comparisons between immigration facilities in the South and Nazi concentration camps.
A bulk of the allegations about the forced procedures come from a single report by Project South, a social justice organization that focused on the Irwin County Detention Center (which the report refers to as the ICDC) in Southern Georgia. The report includes accounts of several formerly detained migrants and a whistleblower nurse, Dawn Wooten.
The report included testimonies of several other human rights violations in the ICE detention facility. Below are major points from the report:
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Little was being done to protect detainees from Covid-19 (page 7)
“Detained immigrants have reported not being able to be socially distant, not having proper PPE, and being afraid of dying in the facility…Immigrants detained at ICDC told Project South that they are afraid for their lives inside the facility.”
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The ICDC did not quarantine new people who arrived at its facility (page 9)
“When immigrants advocate for themselves and refuse to share a room with a new transfer due to concerns about COVID-19, they are punished. One immigrant told Project South that men had been complaining and advocating to not let new transfers come into their pod, but when they do so, they are thrown in solitary confinement.”
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Medical workers were fabricating medical records and did not give people their medication, including one person who had HIV (page 15)
“According to Ms. Wooten [the whistleblower nurse], it was common practice for the sick call nurse to shred medical request forms from detained immigrants who were requesting to go to the medical unit. She also stated that the sick call nurse sometimes fabricated records such as vital signs without ever seeing the individual requesting medical help.”
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Nonconsensual Hysterectomies seemed widespread (page 18)
“Several immigrant women have reported to Project South their concerns about how many women have received a hysterectomy while detained at ICDC. One woman told Project South in 2019 that Irwin sends many women to see a particular gynecologist outside the facility but that some women did not trust him… 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.”
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THe ICDC withheld information about which detainees tested positive for Covid-19 (page 23)
“Not only does ICDC not share information about who has COVID-19; detained immigrants and employees reported instances where ICDC purposefully failed to disclose the truth about individuals who tested positive for COVID-19. Ms. Wooten has stated that the HSA and other upper lever nurses have withheld information about detained individuals testing positive for COVID-19.”
