Last month, a nurse at a federal immigration detention center in Irwin, Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint detailing the abhorrent treatment of people detained there. She charged that women in detention were subjected to hysterectomies and invasive gynecological exams without their knowledge or consent, and often without assistance from interpreters.
The complaint is heartbreaking, but far from surprising. These atrocities are consistent with practices employed at U.S. detention centers for decades, and they are sadly consistent with our tragic history of forced sterilization of minority women. The implications of the complaint are perfectly clear: we must end the civil detention of immigrants, so fraught with systemic racism that undervalues the lives of Black, Indigenous and other people of color. There is no other option.
With over 200 detention centers, the United States has the largest immigration detention system in the world. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has over the past two years detained an average of 40,000 daily, an astonishing number that surpasses the population of Wisconsin cities like Brookfield and Wausau. Yet the detention of immigrants is just a microcosm of the inhumanity that characterizes our immigration system today. Many immigrants come to the U.S. to seek refuge and a better life for themselves and for their families. But when they arrive in this country, they are forced into conditions that violate human rights principles under both international and domestic standards, and that, frankly, violate our moral obligations to each other as human beings.
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ICE has the authority to release most people from detention through monetary bonds or parole, and ICE policy requires that people seeking asylum are released from detention when they can establish their identity and demonstrate they are neither a danger nor a or flight risk. Instead of using these tools, though, ICE almost always chooses detention, ostensibly to deter others from coming into the country. But far from showing detention to be an effective deterrent, statistics reveal the opposite: harsher penalties have not reduced the numbers of undocumented migrants crossing U.S. borders. What the data does show is how immigrant detention has become a big business, with taxpayer dollars helping to subsidize a billion-dollar private prison industry that profits from human trauma.
Often located in remote places, immigrant detention facilities are ripe for the abuse of detained migrants. There is no community oversight and little — often no — access to legal representation. People in detention will only have an attorney if they can afford one or are lucky enough to find pro bono representation.
The news of women detained in Irwin sharing stories of non-consensual hysterectomies is not entirely unexpected. The U.S. has a dark and racist history of forced sterilizations. In the early 1900s, 32 states passed the first eugenics sterilization laws in the world. This, along with the federal funding of a coordinated program, led to approximately 60,000 forced sterilizations of people deemed unfit to reproduce by our government. North Carolina forcibly sterilized more than 7,600 people between the 1930s and the 1970s. Sixty percent of these were performed on Black women. In Puerto Rico and California, the U.S. forcibility sterilized Latinas to control population and test the safety of birth control pills. And after the passage of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, 25% of Native American women who were able to bear children were forcibly sterilized. This country even has the ignominious distinction of having its early eugenics efforts cited as a positive example of “beginnings toward a better conception” of citizenship by Adolf Hitler.
We may have thought these horrific acts were behind us, but we learned last month that our government, in at least one facility, is controlling the reproductive rights of women in immigrant detention without their informed consent. This disregard for the health, safety and agency of immigrants in detention is not an unfortunate anomaly, and goes beyond forced sterilizations.
I have witnessed ICE’s dangerous and senseless policies relating to parole and medical attention. Prior to the dangers of COVID-19, ICE did place one client on parole, a man from Cameroon seeking political asylum. My students in the Immigrant Justice Clinic and I were able to demonstrate the merits of his asylum case, his good moral character, and proof that his U.S. citizen family was ready and willing to house and support him. Since then, ICE has repeatedly denied parole requests for my clients in detention, clients in very similar situations: they have meritorious and well-documented claims for asylum, pose no flight or security risks, have U.S. citizen family ready and willing to house them, and no criminal record. But ICE refuses to release our clients on parole, even with the dangers of COVID-19 infecting the air they are forced to breathe in detention centers.
After ICE denied parole for one client, a young man seeking political asylum from Cuba, there was a COVID-19 outbreak at the Otay Mesa Detention Facility where he was detained. ICE failed to provide him with protective gear, despite his high-risk medical condition, exposing him to COVID-19. Other clients have been denied important medication that could help protect them from vulnerabilities to COVID-19. Across the nation almost 6,000 people have contracted this virus, and seven have died, all while ICE detained them. A recent report from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found that people detained at ICE facilities operated by for-profit contractors "often do not receive critical treatment or face delays.”
According to an American Civil Liberty Union Research Report, 40 new detention facilities opened since 2017, most run by private prison corporations. The report further found that the Trump administration plans to expand the number of detention beds in the fiscal year of 2021 to 60,000, over a 30% increase.
If these numbers increase as forecasted, we have every reason to believe that the forced sterilizations, medical dangers, and deaths will mount. And Black, Indigenous, and other people of color will bear the burden. We must rebuild the system from the ground up and work toward a future in which immigrants are treated with respect and dignity. Our shared humanity demands it.
Erin M. Barbato is the director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She teaches second and third year law students to represent individuals in removal proceedings and those seeking humanitarian-based immigration relief. She also leads groups of law students to volunteer at detention centers close to our southern border and to work with people seeking asylum forced to remain in Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols.
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