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“He’s the uterus collector,” a detained immigrant woman told Dawn Wooten, a nurse at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail operated by the private, for-profit prison company LaSalle Corrections. Wooten’s complaint, sent to the Homeland Security Inspector General, describes horrifying conditions at the Irwin County Detention Center in rural Ocilla, Georgia, including inadequate COVID-19 protections for both prisoners and staff, filthy living conditions, inadequate medical care, and disgusting, ant- and cockroach-infested food. Wooten says imprisoned immigrant women she cared for told her a gynecologist subjected them to hysterectomies and other sterilizing procedures without their knowledge or consent. The inhumane conditions at Irwin expose the cruelty embedded in the treatment of immigrants here in the US, exacerbated by these shocking allegations of the forced sterilizations, a sinister practice with a long history in the United States.
Press accounts named the gynecologist as Dr. Mahendra Amin, who has an office not far from the Irwin immigrant jail. Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, nurse Dawn Wooten explained, “I had a couple of women come to me…that was the term, that he’s ‘the uterus collector.’ It’s jaw-dropping.” Mahendra Amin was the principal defendant in a federal Medicare and Medicaid fraud case that was settled for $520,000 in 2015. He reportedly performed a procedure on Irwin prisoner Pauline Binam without her consent, leaving her sterilized. After speaking out, Binam was targeted for deportation and put on a plane for Cameroon, the country of her birth that she left for the U.S. at the age of two. Public and Congressional outcry pressured ICE to remove her from the plane, after which she received compassionate release.
Dawn Wooten also described LaSalle’s inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic: “We didn’t have proper PPE. It was like a cover-up. As time progressed…more [COVID] cases systemically appeared.” She recalled instructions she ... Read More →
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