The Department of Homeland Security is investigating reports from earlier this week about unwanted gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, performed on immigrant women at the privately run Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, Caitlin Dickerson at The New York Times reports.
“Dr. Ada Rivera, the medical director of the ICE Health Services Corps, which oversees health care in the agency’s detention system, said that the reports would be fully and independently investigated, but that the agency ‘vehemently disputes the implication that detainees are used for experimental medical procedures.’” While Rivera said that two women detained at the facility had been referred for hysterectomies since 2018, ICE “did not respond to questions about how many of the referrals were acted on, nor how many tubal ligations or other potentially sterilizing procedures had been conducted in the past several years.”
Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria write for Popular Information about the private company that runs the Irwin facility: “Operating primarily in the South, LaSalle Corrections’ facilities have a documented history of abusing and mistreating detained immigrants. Its relentless pursuit of profit over all else, coupled with lack of oversight, means that neglect is the norm.”
Meanwhile, The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer took to Twitter with a partial list of the DHS “scandals [that] are unfolding at once, in real time.”

All to say, the current leadership of our nation’s immigration system is breaking our government and our people.
Welcome to Thursday’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].
CHURCH GROUNDS – ICE has reportedly violated the law and its own policy by arresting Indonesian immigrant Binsar Siahaan under false pretenses on the grounds of Glenmont United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he and his wife Eko Sukemi live and work as the church’s caretakers. The Washington Post’s Meagan Flynn reports that last week ICE agents showed up at the family’s house and said Siahaan had to come with them to make sure his GPS monitor was working. “But once he was outside, Sukemi said, ICE officers handcuffed him … He was detained in Baltimore and then transferred to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, [Georgia], to await deportation.” Siahaan, a father of two with no criminal record, will have his case decided by a federal judge on October 2.

‘PENALTY’ – Retired Marine Ernesto Rocha writes in an op-ed for The Houston Chronicle about being excluded from CARES Act economic relief during the pandemic because his wife is not a U.S. citizen. “I can’t get my head around a policy that places a financial penalty on U.S. citizens simply for marrying someone who doesn’t carry a U.S. passport, or, in the case of my daughters, for having a non-citizen as one of their parents,” he writes, noting more than a million Americans have been similarly denied assistance because of their marriage to a non-citizen. He hopes a new bill, the American Citizen Coronavirus Relief Act, is passed so that pandemic relief funds are extended to families like his.

RESETTLEMENT DEADLINE – The Trump administration’s cuts to refugee resettlement could be on the minds of voters in Michigan this November, where business advocates see immigrants as key to the state’s economic recovery, Ted Roelofs reports in Bridge Michigan. With an October 1 deadline for the administration to decide how many refugees will be admitted to the U.S. next year, Jen Smyers, director of policy and advocacy for the immigration and refugee program at Church World Service, told Heather Sells at CBN News: “The administration has claimed to support people who are fleeing religious persecution and yet with the numbers we're seeing such few refugees coming in. There are only 946 Christians fleeing religious persecution who are settled this year, which is the lowest it's ever been.”

BORDER LENS – The Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC) just launched Border Lens, an interactive portal featuring real-time data and in-depth stories on the southern border region, gathered and told by people who live and work there. “At launch, Border Lens showcases a demographic profile of the population living within 100-miles of the southern international border line. Data on education, employment, poverty rates, and racial and ethnic composition paint a picture of who lives on the southern border, and how communities differ across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas,” writes SBCC border research manager Gustavo López.

ONLY IN AMERICA – For this week’s “Only in America,” I talked to Tina Vasquez about her work as a movement journalist and building trust within the communities she reports on, including the Black immigrant community. Tina is a senior reporter at Prism with more than 10 years of experience focusing on immigration, reproductive justice, and culture. And if you’ve listened to “Only in America” — whether one episode or 100 — please take a moment to fill out our listener survey.
Thanks for reading,

Ali