Friend,

ICE is literally removing immigrant women’s wombs.

This Monday, a whistleblower at ICE reported that detained immigrant women have been coerced into hysterectomies without their consent.¹

A hysterectomy is a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed, rendering it impossible to have children. If performed without someone’s consent, it’s an outrageous human rights abuse and violation.

This is known as forced sterilization, or eugenics—a violent tool of genocide and white supremacy. And our tax dollars are paying for it.

It’s time to close the camps and abolish ICE. Please add your name to show the growing public demand for change.

Our country has a long, shameful history of forced sterilization, especially on Black and Indigenous women, and other women of color.

Now we know that ICE is perpetrating this inhumane terror to this day.

In a complaint filed on Monday to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, reports from detained women and a whistleblower on staff paint a horrifying picture of life in Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center.

One detained woman spoke with 5 other detained women who’d had hysterectomies in the span of just 3 months at the end of 2019. She 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.”

We can't be silent. We must stop this terror. Please sign now to speak out.

Whistleblower Dawn Wooten, a Black nurse in the facility, heard from these women as she worked. She and other staff noticed that one doctor in particular was behind the confusing hysterectomies. They began to refer to him as the “uterus collector.”

Multiple women went to see this doctor for medical concerns unrelated to reproductive organs, only to get pressured into having unnecessary hysterectomies—without understanding what the surgeries were or that the procedures would sterilize them.

Nurses often told the detained women conflicting and false reasons for why the surgeries were happening, if explaining any information at all. Medical staff rarely spoke Spanish, and apparently never sought true informed consent.

Wow. This is outrageous, cruel, and a huge red flag about how ICE dehumanizes immigrants.

And as my colleague Rep. Pramila Jayapal recently wrote, these women’s stories “raise serious questions about not only this particular doctor but about the entire detention system—largely for-profit—that is complicit in the abuses and has long neglected the health, wellbeing, and human rights of immigrants.”

Sign now if you agree: Abolishing ICE is an imperative for human rights, reproductive justice, and public health.

These forced sterilizations are the latest example in a long string of ICE’s mass human rights abuses, including widespread sexual assault, intentional medical neglect (which has killed caged children), and horrific conditions that have contributed to the spread of COVID-19 in detention centers.²

Just 17 years ago, the agency was created to criminalize immigrants. And since then, it’s terrorized Black and brown communities in Michigan and throughout our country, including at our borders.

It’s become abundantly clear that we cannot reform ICE. The agency is rotten to the core, and it’s time to abolish it altogether.

Please sign and share this petition to abolish ICE now.

We all deserve to be treated with dignity and like human beings, which includes bodily autonomy and control over our reproductive choices. Please keep speaking up so more people hear about ICE’s human rights abuses, and encourage your network to support the movement to abolish ICE.

Thank you for all you do.

In solidarity,

Rashida