A whistleblower complaint filed yesterday from Dawn Wooten, who worked as a nurse at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s privately run Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, reveals that the facility “underreported Covid-19 cases, knowingly placed staff and detainees at risk of contracting the virus, neglected medical complaints, and refused to test symptomatic detainees, among other dangerous practices,” report José Olivares and John Washington for The Intercept.

As if that isn’t disturbing enough, the complaint also alleges that an inordinate number of women were subject to hysterectomies in what was described by some as an “experimental concentration camp,” Jerry Lambe reports for Law & Crime. The complaint includes the story of one woman who was not properly anesthetized during the procedure and heard the doctor tell the nurse he had removed the wrong ovary, “resulting in her losing all reproductive ability.”

“Many of the detained women have told [Wooten] that they didn’t understand why they were being forced to have the procedure, explaining that some of the nurses obtained their consent ‘by simply googling Spanish.’”

Yesterday’s initial reporting lead to stories from The Guardian, CBS News, The Daily Beast, and United Press International, among others. Let’s see what details emerge today.

Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. We’ll be paying special attention over the next few weeks to how immigration is impacting the election, particularly in swing states. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].

200K CITIZEN CHILDREN – In a 2-to-1 ruling yesterday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an injunction halting the deportations of migrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan who have Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for humanitarian reasons, Maura Dolan reports for the Los Angeles Times. The ruling “affects 300,000 non-citizens and 200,000 of their children who are U.S. citizens. Many of the immigrants have lived in the U.S. for decades.” While the administration looks to deport them, TPS recipients are standing with Americans each day performing essential work. See our statement here. 

NEW BEGINNINGS – Cleveland will hold 75 naturalization ceremonies this Friday as part of Global Cleveland’s Welcoming Week, an event that takes place across U.S. cities to celebrate new citizens. Megan Gallagher and Lindsay Buckingham at WKYC Northeast Ohio recognize the occasion with a profile of Ohioan Damber Subba, a police officer in Akron, who recalls his how 2014 naturalization ceremony gave him “the greatest feeling.” Subba’s family fled persecution in Bhutan when he was a child and settled in the U.S. in 2008 after spending years in refugee camps. “I am proud to be an American,” he says.

LATINO VOTE COMPETITION – As the Biden and Trump campaigns sharpen their focus, the Latino vote has come into clear relief for both sides. Team USA Today reports on the challenges facing former Vice President Joe Biden, who is “underperforming with Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade, the largest county in the state, as well as with Latino voters across Florida.” Meanwhile, President Trump visited Arizona for the fifth time yesterday — a state where “Latinos are projected to make up almost one-fourth of Arizona’s voters this year, one of the highest shares of Latino voters in the country, according to the Pew Research Center,” Rachel Leingang writes for the Arizona Republic. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Alison Steinbach add in further reporting that the president “sought to make the case … that his administration can bring back the economy to its full potential after coronavirus-related shutdowns, keep families safe and protect religious liberties.” Trump supporter Marie Lopez said she thinks many Hispanic families are finding “they’re more Republican than they think they are.” Bonus read: Politico’s Sabrina Rodriguez and Marc Caputo report on the deluge of QAnon disinformation targeting Latinos in Florida.

‘WE CHOSE LIFE’ – Migrant farmworkers who typically spend part of the year working in Washington state on temporary H-2A visas are choosing to head home early or not come at all, citing poor management of the pandemic in the industry, Lilly Fowler reports in Crosscut. At Gebbers Farm, one of the largest apple and cherry producers in the region, workers say they were not properly tested or treated with adequate medical care: “They didn’t deal with it. They never managed it properly,” said William, a farmworker from Jamaica. Juan Carlos, a farmworker from Mexico, said he and others realized it “was a choice between work and life, so we chose life.”

EXCLUDED – Immigrants and advocates in New Jersey are calling for assistance for undocumented immigrants in the state’s COVID-19 economic relief response, reports Sophie Nieto-Munoz for NJ.com. A new report from Make the Road New Jersey, “6 Months Later: Still Essential, Still Excluded,” estimates that “more than 722,000 residents who are not documented were left out of pandemic relief due to citizenship status.” Said Paula, an undocumented immigrant in New Jersey who has been unable to find work during the pandemic: “It’s part of human rights and everyone’s rights, to have basic human rights like housing and food … I feel excluded and discriminated against, because I work and comply with my taxes.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali