Last week, a nurse submitted a complaint in conjunction with several humanitarian organizations about the treatment of immigrants in an ICE detention facility in Georgia. Dawn Wooten is the nurse alleging the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) is responsible for medical neglect, refusing to test for Covid-19, and coercively performing hysterectomies on immigrant women. “I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor and they’ve had hysterectomies and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going”. The majority of the immigrants in these camps come from Mexico and Central America, and the language barrier is being exploited to violate the rights of immigrant women.

A hysterectomy is the removal of a woman’s uterus and the United States has a long precedent of doctors performing compulsory hysterectomies against women of color. This often occurs with women who are unaware they will be operated on, or are coerced into signing for it, for example, while actively in labor.

Alexandra Stern reports in her book Eugenic Nation that 60,000 people were sterilized during the 20th century, federally mandated programs along with 32 states who passed sterilization laws helped ensure “socially undesirable” people could never reproduce. Among those populations disproportionately affected were Native American, African American, and Spanish-surnamed families, mainly of Mexican descent. 

In 1975, ten women accused Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center of systematically sterilizing Mexican-American women while giving birth. The documentary No Mas Bebes explores the stories shared by over 100 women forcibly sterilized during the 1960s and 70s, irreversibly stripped of their reproductive rights after being misinformed or coerced into signing for the procedure. One key witness, Karen Benker, recounted a conversation with Dr. Edward James Quilligan, stating “poor minority women in L. A. County were having too many babies; that it was a strain on society; and that it was good that they be sterilized”.

Eugenics fueled the 20th century. This pseudoscientific ideology sought to better the human race by controlling the population of those deemed socially inferior, and compulsory sterilizations continue long after it was outlawed. The Trump administration has made very clear who is socially undesired. His immigration policies have perpetrated a breach of human rights in line with ethnic cleansing. Another complaint made against ICDC is medical neglect, simply refusing to attend to medical needs of detainees. 

Nurse Dawn Wooten alleges one nurse shreds all medical requests regarding Covid-19 symptoms without reading the paperwork. In several cases, symptomatic detainees were denied Covid-19 tests and medical evaluation of their conditions, the head nurse would brush them off saying “they just want some attention”. Even when detainees were exposed to other inmates known to be Covid-positive, they were never supplied with tests for themselves. “Despite this exposure to COVID-19 and the fact that several women had pre-existing conditions like diabetes and hypertension, ICDC refused to test the women for COVID-19 even when the women submitted multiple requests to get tested”. 5,878 people have tested positive for Covid-19 while in ICE custody, but these practices are questioning the validity of the statistics reported by the agency. 

In the Adelanto detention center of San Bernardino County, California, the ACLU discovered 1,900 Covid-19 tests were provided in May, but “officials refused to allow the vast majority of them to be used”. Similarly, officials from a detention center in Mesa Verde, Bakersfield refused to test all detainees because it would be difficult to deal with the inmates who tested positive. District Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco wrote “The documentary evidence shows that the defendants have avoided widespread testing of staff and detainees at the facility, not for lack of tests, but for fear that positive test results would require them to implement safety measures that they apparently felt were not worth the trouble”.

Now the Adelanto center is experiencing a Covid-19 outbreak, with 39 positive tests of immigrants as of September 17, 2020. This is the same detention center that was recently scrutinized for spraying detainees with HDQ Neutral – an industrial strength chemical disinfectant. This is according to immigrant advocacy groups who report staff spray the solution every 15 minutes, landing on detainees eyes, mouths, skin, drinking water, etc. on an ongoing basis. Multiple immigrants have reported “bloody noses, burning eyes, headaches” as a result from exposure to the spray, one detainee said “when I blow my nose, blood comes out. They are treating us like animals”.

Physicians for Human Rights note the chemical manufacturer of HDQ Neutral states “Anyone exposed to the disinfectant must wear protective equipment (i.e. chemical-resistant gloves, eye protection, protective clothing). If someone inhales, swallows, or makes contact with the disinfectant with eyes or skin, they should contact a poison center or physician”. Physicians point out that exposure to the toxic disinfectants may actually be “weakening the respiratory systems of those exposed”, and “exposure has also been linked to potential reproductive health issues”.

These acts are eerily reminiscent of gasoline baths at the border. Falling in line with eugenics, nationalist sentiments portrayed Mexicans entering from south of the border as being dirty, depicted carrying diseases such as typhus and smallpox. While the United States benefited economically from the Bracero program, border officials actively sprayed working Bracero migrants with chemicals such as kerosene, gasoline, Zyklon B, and pesticide DDT. 

After being stripped naked and forced to bathe in these chemical showers, several Mexican women crossing into the United States were secretly photographed by border personnel. Currently, ICE sits on thousands of allegations of sexual abuse from migrant youth, with numbers surging since the Trump Presidency. 

Over 4,500 detained immigrant youth have alleged sexual abuse or sexual harassment over the past four years – a nasty result of family separation policies. The claims include adult staff members watching as minors showered, fondling, and raping immigrant children. All this is to say immigrant detention centers are traumatizing detainees and are unequipped to meet the medical and human needs of those incarcerated. 

The United States has a long, dark history of eugenic attitudes which evidently persist to this day. Zyklon B is the cyanide-based compound used in the Southern Border more than a decade before its use inside Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz. Indeed, Nazi Germany looked to the United States for inspiration in policies to treat “social undesirables”, The Third Reich’s “Law for the Prevention of Offspring for Hereditary Diseases” was specifically modeled after American sterilization policies such as those employed in California and Indiana. 

Meanwhile Attorney General William Barr claims the calls for national lockdowns during the time of Covid “is the greatest intrusion of civil liberties in American history, other than slavery”. This administration is completely blind to the abuse of human rights in these detention centers, as is the general public, but these are the ramifications of flirting with fascism. Justice is partisan, and as long as a Trump sympathizer sits as appointed chief lawyer of this nation, crimes against humanity will continue.