A staggering abuse of human rights
Involuntary hysterectomies…why does that sound so familiar…
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats demanded an investigation on Tuesday into claims by a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Georgia that detainees there have been denied basic medical care and possibly subjected to hysterectomies without their informed consent.
Dawn Wooten, a registered nurse who worked full-time at the Irwin County Detention Center until July, outlined her allegations in a complaint filed on Monday to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General by a coalition of advocacy groups.
“If true, the appalling conditions described in the whistleblower complaint – including allegations of mass hysterectomies being performed on vulnerable immigrant women – are a staggering abuse of human rights,” Pelosi said in a statement. “The DHS Inspector General must immediately investigate the allegations detailed in this complaint.”
Now why would ICE be doing mass hysterectomies? Trying their hand at eugenics are they?
In her complaint, Wooten said that she and other nurses had noticed female detainees getting hysterectomies at an improbable rate, and worried that the women didn’t understand what procedure they were receiving, as most medical staff members don’t speak Spanish.
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LaSalle Corrections, the Louisiana-based company that runs Irwin, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The firm faced similar complaints about coronavirus safety at another facility it runs in Louisiana in July, which a company official denied in later congressional testimony.
It’s ludicrous and revolting that we use for-profit companies to imprison (and control and perhaps sterilize refugees and immigrants).
Wooten says there was widespread disregard for protecting staff members and inmates [from COVID] at the Georgia facility. The nurse worked at Irwin for three years over the course of separate stints, she told the Intercept, but was demoted in July to an on-call position with few hours — retaliation, she claims, for demanding stricter adherence to medical rules.
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The 27-page complaint filed Monday details a laundry list of alleged failures at the facility: detainees being ignored or denied tests despite having coronavirus symptoms; others who have tested positive being placed back in the general population; and officials fudging statics on the number of infections.
Staff members, Wooten said, were pressured to “work symptomatic and work positive as long as we had a mask on.” Although ICE purchased two $14,000 rapid-test machines, she said, no nurses were ever trained to use them.
Detainees interviewed for the report said that social distancing was impossible and that everyone was given just one mask and no replacement.
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Although ICE has reported just 42 cases and no deaths from covid-19 at Irwin, Wooten alleged that those numbers are not accurate because officials have not been “reporting all these cases that are positive.”
In general, Wooten outlined a failed medical system at the facility. Nurses there routinely destroyed the paper requests detainees have to fill out to ask for medical help and made up vital signs for reports after not seeing patients, she alleged.
Well look at it from their point of view: they have to make a profit.
I was wondering when you were going to get to this. Assuming it’s true, isn’t it wholly disgusting? One cannot help but be reminded of the Nazis & their doctors.
It really does smack of someone worried about the ‘whites are being outbred’ trope so common to the right.
Trumpistas trying to prevent “anchor babies?”
It is beyond belief.
Those poor women! I’m horrified.
I suppose they’re making financial calculations; hysterectomies mean no need to supply menstrual hygiene products, no pregnancy-and-birth related care, no ‘anchor babies’. Much cheaper. Disgusting.
Coming from those who put children in cages, I find I am not surprised. I wish I were surprised. Appalled, yes. Surprised? No.
Tim Harris,
Unfortunately, you don’t need to look outside the country for precedents. The US was conducting forced sterilization as early as 1907.
Yuuuuuup… We taught the Nazis everything they needed to know; they just distilled our awfulness into the essence they required.
Can’t this be charged as felony assault?
If Biden wins and the Dems hold the House and Senate, we need to make an exception to the norm of not charging the previous President and aggressively investigate and prosecute the whole rotten bunch from Trump down. If the fascist militias and white supremacists revolt, put them down with all necessary force.
I’d say send Trump to the Hague as well, but we don’t recognize their authority. American exceptionaism dontcha know.
Sadly the Dems need to win the Senate as opposed to holding it. If they had it now we’d be in much less of a dumpster fire than we are.
Right, win (or flip). Should have rolled off my keyboard with just one synaptic burst, especially considering I’ve been phone banking for Dems here for over a month. Gotta flip both houses here in Michigan too, but seems like a long shot until we have our first non-gerrymandered districts in 2022.
What a Maroon #7. Yes, I know about the history of eugenics in the US, and, as Isabel Wilkerson’s book makes clear, the Nazis drew on American ideas about race, etc, as Blood Knight says. It is all so desperately sad, isn’t it? There’s a terrible account in the late Croatian writer Dasa Drndic’s novel ‘Trieste’ about the obsession with ‘breeding’ under the Nazis. I recommend the book, which is part novel, part documentary – she is a wonderful writer at her best.