The Irwin County Detention Facility in Ocilla, Georgia, is under scrutiny for malpractice, endangering immigrant lives in the middle of a pandemic and performing mass hysterectomies on non-consenting women.
The Detention Facility is one operated by LaSalle Corrections. A non-profit called Project South has filed an official complaint against the Irwin County facility based on testimony and evidence provided from a nurse whistleblower. This is not the first complaint that LaSalle has received. The complaint notes that a few months ago, the Richwood Correctional Center (also owned by LaSalle) received complaints over the lack of COVID-19 safety regulations and unsanitary conditions.
The whistleblower points out that ICE agents subjected immigrant women to non-consensual hysterectomy procedures en masse. They also refused to test immigrants for COVID-19, shredded evidence of medical requests submitted by immigrants, fabricated medical records, allowed employees to work while showing symptoms and hid information about who tested positive.
Women in the facility reported that they had to see an untrustworthy third-party gynecologist, claimed to be Mahendra Amin, according to Prism. Amin has accumulated several complaints over his practice in the past few years. The whistleblower compares the process of mass hysterectomies as “an experimental concentration camp.” Young, healthy women were receiving hysterectomies despite never asking for one or having a pre-existing reason for one.
For one woman, the gynecologist accidentally removed the wrong ovary and then proceeded to remove the right ovary, effectively performing a hysterectomy on a woman who did not need one. Even worse was the lack of consent for these medical procedures as most women were confused about what was happening to them. In addition to this evil, immigrants were denied access to COVID-19 tests despite being at risk. When immigrants asked for tests because they showed symptoms, some nurses refused to see the patient and fabricated medical information assuming they had colds and prescribing them medicine based on that.
In Puerto Rico, from the 1930s-1970s, about one-third of women were forcibly sterilized. This was the highest rate of sterilization seen in the world. Many of the women who were sterilized through these procedures were misinformed on what the procedure actually was and later regretted the decision. At the same time, about 200 Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, were given syphilis by the U.S. government under the lie that they were receiving free government healthcare. Nine decades later and our people’s bodies are still being used as experiments for the sadistic medical industry.
This unthinkable evil is the culmination of a white supremacist, fascist ideology that exists in one of the most genocidal nations in the world. That legacy of genocide has never disappeared. It exists to this day in the form of mass hysterectomies, lack of healthcare which allows thousands of immigrants and millions of poor to be left for dead in a pandemic, and in sanctions on nations fighting to get their people the necessary medicine to survive.