Immigrant women are speaking out about Dr. Mahendra Amin, the gynecologist accused of performing surgeries on women detained at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia without their consent. Adolfo Flores and Hamed Aleaziz (aka the “scoop machines”) at BuzzFeed News spoke to four women or their attorneys “who allege Amin conducted medical procedures on them without revealing or fully explaining what he planned to do. This, they and their lawyers say, meant the women did not give consent.”

Pauline Binam, a 30-year-old woman originally from Cameroon, “was sent to Amin after experiencing an irregular menstrual cycle. Binam was set to get a procedure … that would hopefully regulate her menstrual cycle again. But when Binam woke up from the general anesthesia after the surgery in August 2019, Amin told her he had removed one of her Fallopian tubes.”

The allegations come “after a whistleblower — Dawn Wooten, who worked as a nurse at the detention center — filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.” The women affected are left to pick up the pieces: “People who are in immigration detention are robbed of so much time with their family, and it’s a physical and emotional strain,” said Vân Huynh, Binam’s lawyer. “Now ... immigrants in detention are being robbed of future opportunities to be able to conceive children.”

Welcome to Friday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. If you have a story to share from your own community, please send it to me at [email protected].

EXCUSE TO EXCLUDE – This year the U.S. “is on track to admit just over 10,000 refugees, which is also the lowest number of admissions since 1975, according to U.S. government data,” ABC News’ Conor Finnegan reports. Now, a bipartisan group of seven former officials who ran the refugee admissions program in prior Democratic and Republican administrations is joining the chorus of advocates calling on the Trump administration to increase refugee admissions in the coming fiscal year: “We believe that any further reduction in refugee resettlement would represent the disregard of dire needs of displaced people around the world,” the group wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Over at The xxxxxx, Linda Chavez writes that “[t]he pandemic gives the administration an excuse not to welcome refugees … But the greater risk to American security is the administration’s hostility to refugees generally (and some refugees more than others).” As a reminder, the administration may announce the refugee cap for fiscal year 2021 in the coming weeks — the deadline for an allocation is October 1.

STUDENTS – The Trump administration is yet again targeting international students: CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet and Geneva Sands report that the administration is changing the current policy that allows students, exchange visitors and foreign media to remain in the U.S. for “as long as they maintain compliance with the terms of admission” and instead requiring a “fixed period of stay.”  Furthermore, people from countries with higher visa overstay rates would only be issued for a maximum of two years, a policy that “could affect students from more than 40 countries.” In a tremendously helpful Twitter thread, the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick lays out the repercussions of the new proposal.

MEDICAL DEFERRALS – Immigration lawyers are criticizing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for denying medical deferred action requests without providing clear reasoning, Shannon Dooling at WBUR reports. Medical deferrals “allow severely ill people who don't have legal status in the U.S. — and who can't access adequate health care in their home countries — to temporarily stay here while receiving what's often life-saving treatment.” Though the Trump administration re-started these deferrals last year after quietly attempting to phase them out, USCIS data reveal that the approval rate for medical deferred action requests dropped from 44% in 2018 to 11% in the first five months of 2020.

THIRD DEATH –61-year-old Cipriano Chavez-Alvarez is the third immigrant to die of COVID-19 while detained at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, Jeremy Redmon and Alan Judd report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His death comes a week after officials were warned of inadequate virus precautions at another Georgia detention center, the Irwin County Detention Center (which has also come under fire for its gynecological care, outlined in today’s intro.) “As of Thursday, 339 cases of COVID-19 had been documented at Stewart and 43 at Irwin, ICE data shows.” Across the country, “almost 6,000 ICE detainees have contracted the virus and seven have died.”

STAND WITH IMMIGRANTS – Latter-day Saints should support immigrants, Brian D. King argues in an op-ed for The Salt Lake Tribune, citing his faith’s history in America and the teachings of Christ. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is no stranger to homelessness. Its members remember that early pioneers meandered the continent in search for a home,” King writes, adding that “Jesus was no stranger to immigration.” He concludes that as followers of Christ, Latter-day Saints “must support policies and political candidates that align with all of our values, and that includes how we treat those who are in the greatest of need.”

Thanks for reading,

Ali