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kottke.org posts about Brooke Binkowski

Horrifying Reports of Forced Hysterectomies at ICE Detention Camps

A coalition of organizations led by Project South (which was founded as the Institute to Eliminate Poverty & Genocide โ€” more on that last word in a minute) has filed a complaint based on a whistleblower about an ICE concentration camp in Georgia where, the complaint alleges, detained immigrants are not being properly treated for Covid-19, important medications are being withheld, conditions are appalling, and women are being given unnecessary hysterectomies. From a piece about the complaint:

Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies โ€” a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed. Additionally, many of the immigrant women who underwent the procedure were reportedly “confused” when asked to explain why they had the surgery, with one detainee likening their treatment to prisoners in concentration camps.

“Recently, a detained immigrant told Project South that she talked to five different women detained at ICDC between October and December 2019 who had a hysterectomy done,” the complaint stated. “When she talked to them about the surgery, the women ‘reacted confused when explaining why they had one done.’ The woman told Project South that it was as though the women were ‘trying to tell themselves it’s going to be OK.’”

“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,” the detainee said.

According to Wooten, ICDC consistently used a particular gynecologist โ€” outside the facility โ€” who almost always opted to remove all or part of the uterus of his female detainee patients.

“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy โ€” just about everybody,” Wooten said, adding that, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”

According to the UN’s Genocide Convention of 1948, “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” is genocide. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commented:

The fact of the matter is the United States has engaged in a program of mass human rights violations targeting immigrants.

I’ll remind you, as I have with increasing frequency lately about the activities of our country’s increasingly authoritarian government, that forced sterilization in detention camps is literally what the literal Nazis did (inspired by, you guessed it, America’s treatment of “undesirable” populations).

You can read the complaint here and check out this thread from Brooke Binkowski for more context and examples of detainee mistreatment at the hands of the increasingly extra-legal ICE.