A whistleblower complaint filed Monday alleges an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center is responsible for an exorbitant number of hysterectomies being performed on migrant women, apparently without consent and for unclear reasons.
Systematic forced sterilization is a crime against humanity according to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
The whistleblower complaint, filed on behalf of a nurse at Irwin County, Georgia, ICE Detention Center (ICDC), also charges “jarring medical neglect,” Law & Crime reports, “including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus.”
One detainee 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.”
The whistleblower said there is one gynecologist in particular who is performing the hysterectomies at an alarming rate.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody,” said Dawn Wooten, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
“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.”
One detainee “was originally told by the doctor that she had an ovarian cyst and was going to have a small twenty-minute procedure done drilling three small holes in her stomach to drain the cyst,” the whistleblower complaint alleges.
“The officer who was transporting her to the hospital told her that she was receiving a hysterectomy to have her womb removed. When the hospital refused to operate on her because her COVID-19 test came back positive for antibodies, she was transferred back to ICDC where the ICDC nurse said that the procedure she was going to have done entailed dilating her vagina and scraping tissue off. “
“Another nurse then told her the procedure was to mitigate her heavy menstrual bleeding, which the woman had never experienced. When she explained that, the nurse responded by getting angry and agitated and began yelling at her.'”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a Dept. of Homeland Security agency.
Image of DHS Sec. Chad Wolf and President Donald Trump by US Dept. of Homeland Security via Flickr