Dozens of Women Allege Unwanted Surgeries & Medical Abuse In ICE Custody
'Dozens Of Women Allege Unwanted Surgeries And Medical Abuse In ICE Custody.' NPR, Dec. 22, 2020.
One former detainee says she was already in a hospital gown this past July, waiting to be wheeled into surgery, when she began to suspect something was very wrong. Jaromy Floriano Navarro thought she was getting an operation to remove a cyst on her ovary — until the driver who brought her to the hospital said otherwise.
"She was just like, 'You know you're having a hysterectomy, right?' " Floriano tells NPR in an interview. "And I was in shock, because I knew what that meant."
- Jaromy Floriano Navarro says she was coerced into having unwanted reproductive surgery while in immigration detention and alleges that she was deported for speaking out about it.
Floriano is one of more than 30 undocumented immigrants who've come forward with allegations of medical abuse, according to court papers filed late Monday — all of them current or former detainees at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga. Many of the women say that they were coerced into having unwanted or unnecessary gynecological procedures while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or that they were retaliated against for speaking out.
In Floriano's case, she says the surgery didn't happen — because she tested positive for the coronavirus and was quickly sent back to the Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia. But the confusion continued. Floriano says a nurse at the detention center told her she wasn't going to have her uterus removed but was having another procedure known as a dilation and curettage, or D&C. Floriano says she had never discussed or approved that with the doctor, either.
"I felt like I had no control of my immigration case, of my body, of my health, of my life, for that matter. And that's why I spoke up," she says, "because they were trying to mess with my body." Lawyers are seeking class action status for those women. They allege that immigration authorities knew about complaints against a local gynecologist, Mahendra Amin.
"ICE knew about the abuses as far back as 2018, and they continued to ignore the complaints," says Azadeh Shahshahani, a lawyer with Project South, a nonprofit in Atlanta, who served as co-counsel on the litigation...
More, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/949257207/dozens-of-women-allege-unwanted-surgeries-and-medical-abuse-in-ice-custody
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