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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. And on the show today, we're going to talk about allegations that hysterectomies have been forced on women being detained by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, perhaps better known as ICE. It's a tough story, and parts of this episode will be tough to hear, so please consider this a warning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nicole Norea is Vox's immigration reporter. She's been covering this story since it broke earlier this week. So on Monday, September 14th, a nurse employed at the Irwin County Detention Center in Osceola, Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Department of Homeland Security.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are following breaking news today. It's about an alarming new whistleblower complaint that alleges... And the bulk of that complaint accused the detention center, which is operated by a private prison contractor, LaSalle Corrections, it accused them of a litany of health and safety violations. How the Irwin County Detention Center in rural South Georgia does not follow CDC guidelines regarding COVID-19, that it's not keeping employees and staff safe, there's a lack of personal protective equipment, lack of hygiene.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But buried in the complaint on page 18 was a pretty explosive claim that female detainees had been subjected to an alarmingly high number of hysterectomies while in custody. The detainees were allegedly sent to a gynecologist outside of the facility who performed the hysterectomies, often without them fully understanding why they were getting the procedure done.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's even taken out the wrong ovary on one 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One woman was told that she had a thick womb or having bleeding, and even though she had never experienced those things before or been told by a doctor that she had a thick womb, so the allegations that they were making were quite troubling. One lady walked up to me here this last time around between October of 19 until July the 2nd. And she said, what is he? Is he the uterus collector? Does he collect uteruses?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I asked her, what does she mean? And she says, everybody that I talked to has had a hysterectomy. And you just don't know what to say. So does this whistleblower complaint state who this gynecologist is? The complaint itself doesn't identify the doctor, but PRISM, which is a social justice-focused news organization, reported that the procedures were allegedly performed by Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist associated with nearby medical centers and Irwin County Hospital in Georgia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In 2015, he and several other doctors reached a more than $500,000 civil settlement with Georgia prosecutors to resolve allegations that they submitted fraudulent claims to Medicaid and Medicare. So this guy does have a history of fraud, but the doctor's lawyer, Scott Grubman, is vigorously denying the allegations and said that basically once more information comes out, he expects that Amon will be cleared of all charges and that up until now he's dedicated his adult life to treating a high-risk and underserved population in Georgia.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Huh. Has he himself made a statement or has he just been speaking through his lawyer? Do you know? He did make a statement to The Intercept and said that he had only performed one or two hysterectomies in the last couple of years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay. Do we know how many women are alleging that this doctor gave them hysterectomies? So from what we know from members of Congress, it appears that there are 17 or 18 people who had been subjected to unnecessary gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies. That we know from the Office of Representative Premila Jayapal, who's the vice chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And she was briefed by three attorneys representing detainees at the facility I think that if this was happening to these individuals that have attorneys and we just finding out about it it is possible that this is even larger than just the 17 or 18 that we know of But BuzzFeed reported that ICE has informed lawmakers that the detention center had only referred two detainees for hysterectomies to outside health care providers since 2018.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That might seem consistent with the complaint on its face and what we've heard from Pramila Jayapal's office, but it could still be possible that the detainees could have received hysterectomies without being specifically referred for the procedure. Do we know whether these women gave consent for hysterectomies or not? So the complaint itself is a bit ambiguous on that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It appears that they may have faced some language barriers that would have made it difficult for them to communicate with medical staff about their condition. But the reports that have come out since with attorneys coming forward about their clients who are detainees at the center suggest that they never were consulted for receiving these procedures and that they would have said no to them had they been consulted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And these women who are saying they have gotten these hysterectomies against their will, have they spoken out? Are they speaking publicly? So I've spoken with a couple of attorneys representing detainees at the facility. One woman, Pauline Binham, was scheduled to be deported on Wednesday morning, but members of Congress stepped in and she was literally pulled off the plane that ICE had booked at the last moment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She is now being returned to Texas. And we intend to make sure that we get to hear from Pauline as part of our investigation and we're also calling on ICE immediately to stop deporting any other women that might be a part of this investigation that we need to talk to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've seen her medical records and in August 2019, she went to a doctor to get a minor procedure done to treat her irregular menstrual bleeding and the procedure was such that the doctor would scrape off the inner lining of the uterus. She went under anesthesia for that, and when she woke up, she was informed that they also took out one of her fallopian tubes and could expect to have difficulty conceiving in the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But she was adamant that she never consented to it. And the doctor that we mentioned earlier, who reportedly administered many of these non-consensual gynecological procedures, was actually listed as the ordering doctor for the procedure on her medical file. Okay. Has ICE said anything about that? Has ICE spoken about the idea that women may have been given hysterectomies against their will?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we haven't actually heard a lot from ICE, but both ICE and the detention center are urging people to be skeptical of the complaint, which is based on secondhand accounts with one detainee hearing things from other detainees. But while I think there's still a lot to unpack and investigate here with regard to what went on at the detention center, we now do have direct accounts from the attorneys of the women affected.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's going to be a lot more difficult for the agency and the detention center to discredit them and argue that this is just hearsay. And the private contractor that operates the detention center is denying the allegations entirely and saying that it's a way for the whistleblower and the organizations that helped file the complaint to push, quote unquote, long-held political objectives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Who's going to do the investigating? So lawmakers are trying to currently verify the allegations. The Committee on Homeland Security said that they would examine the allegations as part of a broader ongoing investigation of ICE detention conditions. And the Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday that they're conducting their own investigation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they've also asked the inspector general to separately review the allegations. What are the biggest questions that still need answering here? So as I said, a lot of details are still emerging here and reporting still going on. But it's not clear right now to what extent ICE and the medical staff involved sought the detainee's consent to perform the procedures and whether those procedures were medically necessary.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We also don't know how many of these procedures were performed and why the doctor performed them. One of the detainee's attorneys said that this may not necessarily be a quote-unquote systemic sterilization from ICE, but rather the kind of thing that was allowed to flourish in the course of poor oversight and terrible and humane conditions in these ICE detention facilities.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Nicole, as you said, the whistleblower complaint featured this sort of shocking detail about hysterectomies on page 18. What was the rest of this complaint about? So the bulk of the complaint was actually about conditions at the detention facility and how the facility was falling short of ICE's guidelines on COVID-19 prevention.
--:-- Nicole Norea: The sanitation, especially during COVID, the sanitation was horrible. We didn't have anything to sanitize with. We didn't have the proper PPE. So they didn't have the proper PPE. They didn't have anything to sanitize with while they were down in the dorms as well. And when you ask, you will be reprimanded.
--:-- Nicole Norea: She said that the detention facility was underreporting COVID-19 cases. When we first had the first case of COVID there in the facility, it was COVID is not here in the facility. Then we had another case and it was like COVID was not here in the facility. We had several more cases and it was like COVID was not here in the facility.
--:-- Nicole Norea: You know, there was not a proper separation of those detainees whenever they come in. You know, there's a 14-day incubation period. You know, they weren't separated. Knowingly placing staff and detainees at risk and that it neglected medical complaints and also refused to test symptomatic detainees.
--:-- Nicole Norea: Huh. So we know the United States hasn't done a great job of protecting incarcerated people, incarcerated Americans even, from COVID-19. What do we know about how COVID has been handled in these detention centers where we're holding immigrants?
--:-- Nicole Norea: Immigrants across the U.S. have been fighting for their release from ICE detention, much like other incarcerated people, for months now. They're alleging insufficient measures to protect them from coronavirus. Six detainees have died from COVID-19 and almost 5,800 have contracted the virus since February.
--:-- Nicole Norea: Migrants are literally begging for their lives, saying they are being used to clean infected areas of the facility, including one migrant who said he was asked to clean feces of another inmate without masks or gloves. We've also seen reports of insufficient PPE being distributed.
--:-- Nicole Norea: A couple of disposable masks have been given in April and a couple of cloth masks they've been given in May. And now they're saying that they're going to be in a way of insufficiently frequent cleaning of public spaces, failures to enforce social distancing, and failures to isolate new arrivals to detention centers and people who appear symptomatic.
--:-- Nicole Norea: And what else do we know about this Irwin detention center in Georgia? So the complaint alleges that they shredded medical requests that were submitted by detained immigrants and also fabricated medical records, as well as allowed employees to work while they were symptomatic and awaiting their COVID test results.
--:-- Nicole Norea: And once they did get those test results back, they hid that information from employees and the detainees about who had tested positive for COVID. And when immigrants decided to speak up against these practices, they were punished with solitary confinement.
--:-- Nicole Norea: And your impression is that this detention center in Georgia is a particularly egregious example of conditions across these centers? Yeah, definitely. I mean, the health and sanitation practices and the lack of transparency with regard to COVID cases and medical records is really troubling.
--:-- Nicole Norea: And this isn't the first time that this detention center has come under fire for failing to abide by ICE guidelines. The same 2017 report Project South said the lack of adequate access to medical care is alarming. The standard wait time for immigrants at Irwin wanting to visit the medical staff is between two days and two weeks.
--:-- Nicole Norea: A report released by Project South, which is the organization that brought this complaint in 2017, found that the center wasn't feeding detainees enough and served them spoiled food. It also paid them less than a dollar a day to do voluntary work. And other organizations have also raised concerns about this particular detention center and their health and safety practices practices
--:-- Nicole Norea: But other reporting on other detention centers especially since the pandemic began suggests that conditions are bad elsewhere as well Yeah, it's definitely part of a broader pattern of abuses that occur in immigration detention, and particularly so in facilities that are operated by private prison contractors and have less oversight from ICE as a whole.
--:-- Nicole Norea: Human Rights Watch has found that even before the pandemic, access to medical care was really a problem in most detention centers. And since 2017, 39 adults have died in ICE custody or immediately after being released from a host of conditions, mostly relating to inadequate medical care.
--:-- Nicole Norea: And what do we know about women specifically and the conditions women face in these detention centers? So we've long known that there are dangers for women's health and human rights in detention centers. Data from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General show that thousands of migrants have claimed they were sexually abused while in ICE custody.
--:-- Nicole Norea: There have been thousands of complaints about sexual abuse in detention centers. Some of those include women, obviously, but it also includes men. And there also used to be a policy against detaining pregnant migrant women. The Trump administration's ended a policy exempting pregnant women from being jailed by immigrant and customs enforcement ICE.
--:-- Nicole Norea: And in the time since the number of pregnant women who are in detention has jumped about 80 percent, a report by the Government Accountability Office found that pregnant women were denied the required medical care and that detention facilities couldn't actually even provide that care.
--:-- Nicole Norea: And there have also been reports of women miscarrying in detention facilities. And part of the issue here is that the Trump administration isn't crazy about birthright citizenship, right? immigrants coming to this country, having their children here, and then those children are automatically de facto United States citizens.
--:-- Nicole Norea: Yeah, I mean, the Trump administration has been suggesting that it would try to dismantle birthright citizenship for a long time now. We're looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land, you walk over the border, have a baby. Congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen. We're looking at it very, very seriously.
--:-- Nicole Norea: President Trump has said that it might be a goal of his down the line. It's frankly ridiculous. Do I what? And the Trump administration has been trying to restrict women, pregnant women, from traveling to the U.S. to prevent them from giving birth on U.S. soil and, as you said, becoming U.S. citizens.
--:-- Nicole Norea: So this could definitely be part of that crackdown. That being said, we should be clear here that the Trump administration hasn't publicly stated that giving women hysterectomies against their will is part of any broader immigration policy, right? No, and they've been quite careful to say that if this is something that's going on, it seems to be isolated to a single detention center.
--:-- Nicole Norea: At this point, there's not evidence that there's a broader ICE policy directive at stake here. And they have said that if this is going on at this detention center, they would take immediate measures to correct it. But of course, for the women who have already had hysterectomies, there's not much they can do on that front.
--:-- Nicole Norea: Is there a chance here that the amount of attention this story has received could improve conditions at ICE detention centers more broadly? That it might, I don't know, cause the people who run these detention centers to think twice before violating the human rights of the people who are being detained?
--:-- Nicole Norea: I mean, I think if history shows anything, unfortunately, probably not. We saw a whistleblower complaint come forward in 2019, alleging that ICE was using solitary confinement on a wide-scale basis in a way that was not consistent with human rights. But ICE has continued to use solitary confinement, and even during the pandemic, they've used it to isolate people in detention if they're exhibiting symptoms or if there are new arrivals to detention centers.
--:-- Nicole Norea: So that whistleblower complaint doesn't make me encouraged that this time will be any better. But at least the federal government seems to say that if this is happening, it's wrong. Thank you. Thank you.
