According to a nurse that works there, immigrants in a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Georgia are subjected to horrific conditions and treatment, including “jarring medical neglect” and a high rate of hysterectomies among women.
What We Know:
- A whistleblower complaint was filed by several legal advocacy groups on behalf of Nurse Dawn Wooten, when she came forward with information on the center. Wooten has been a practicing nurse for more than 10 years, spending three of those as an employee of Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, which is run by private corporation LaSalle Corrections. The complaint, filed on her behalf on September 14th, accused the center of negligence, including poor safety precautions surrounding COVID-19 and generally hazardous and unsanitary conditions.
- According to the complaint, any immigrant who spoke out about their conditions were regularly put into solitary confinement. Wooten shared that when she attempted to speak out against these conditions, she was demoted and reprimanded. An Intercept article confirmed that Wooten’s account was “bolstered by interviews with another current member of Irwin’s medical staff, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, and four people currently or recently detained there”.
- In the complaint, Wooten reported an alarmingly high rate of hysterectomies, a surgery in which part or all of the uterus is removed, being performed on Spanish-speaking immigrants, many of whom did not appear to understand why they had undergone the procedure. Wooten said that an off-site doctor allegedly performed this procedure on women who complained about heavy menstrual cycles, but it appeared that many of the women did not know what had happened. The complaint alleges that often times, the nurses got consent from patients by “simply googling Spanish”.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody,” Wooten said. “That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. Everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
- The complaint also alleges health and safety violations in connection to the procedure. The complaint said that one woman was not properly anesthetized during a procedure and overheard the doctor say he had mistakenly removed the wrong ovary, rendering her unable to have children. The complaint also listed another woman who went into surgery to have a cyst drained but ultimately got a hysterectomy instead.
“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,” one detainee said, according to the complaint.
- One of the human rights groups that filed the complaint on the behalf of Wooten, Project South, had previously filed a report against the Irwin detention center in 2017, alleging poor treatment of detainees, including unsanitary conditions, inedible food, and refusing medical care to detainees. “This place is not equipped for humans,” one detained immigrant at Irwin told Project South at the time.
- Conditions at the detention center have also worsened during the coronavirus pandemic. The complaint says the center refused to test detained immigrants for COVID-19 in a timely manner, underreported COVID-19 cases, and mixed those who had been exposed to COVID-19 with those who had not, knowingly placing staff and detainees at risk of contracting the virus. “There is no social distancing possible in a detention center,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, a human rights attorney at Project South. “We are calling for people to be freed immediately, and we have been calling for this facility to be shut down for a long time.”
- Shahshahani said they groups plan on taking this whistleblower complaint beyond the detention center itself. The groups plan to file all the documents to Congress as well as to the United Nations, as Shahshahani said the United Nations defines“imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” as an act of genocide, a crime under international law.
- ICE responded to the now public complaint, saying that the Irwin County Detention Center has been inspected multiple times and has been found to be in compliance with Performance-Based National Detention Standards. ICE added that “in general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve.”
LaSalle Corrections and Irwin county detention center all refused to comment at this time. You can read Wooten’s shocking in-depth interview and complaint here.
