Georgia Law News: Migrant women were medically abused at Georgia ICE facility, US Senate report says
This article is by Dawn Wooten, the Government Accountability Project whistleblower, and was originally published here.
WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate members of a committee of inquiry on Tuesday grilled federal immigration officials over a bipartisan report detailing how migrant women were subjected to questionable gynecological procedures at a Georgia immigration detention center.
The U.S. Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee released a bipartisan 18-month report that found migrant women detained at Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center, known as the ICDC, “received excessive, invasive and often unnecessary gynecological procedures “ were exposed. were subjected to and many of the women did not agree or understand the procedures they were undergoing.
Following the report’s release, the panel held a hearing to question Deputy Director Stewart D. Smith of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Health Service Corps at the US Department of Homeland Security and Pamela Hearn, the medical director of LaSalle Corrections, who has federal contracts Operate correctional facilities across the country, including one at the ICDC.
The report focused on one doctor, Dr. Mahendra Amin, who was responsible for treating inmates and performing a “high rate” of unauthorized hysterectomies on ICDC inmates.
“It’s hard for me to think of anything worse than the federal government subjecting incarcerated women to unnecessary gynecological surgeries,” said Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, chair of the panel.
dr Margaret G. Mueller, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern Medicine, who testified before senators, said the women in the detention center were subjected to aggressive, unnecessary procedures. She said there have been instances where Amin has not received consent.
“It mustn’t happen again,” she said.
Witness reports abuse
One of the witnesses, Karina Cisneros Preciado, told the senators how Amin diagnosed her with an ovarian cyst when she had a Pap smear at the medical center. The treatment he undertook included a Depo-Provera injection, a type of birth control that suppresses ovulation.
Cisneros Preciado said she had no idea she would be given birth control and said she turned it down because many of the women in her family had responded poorly to certain types of birth control.
The PSI report noted that another doctor who treated Cisneros Preciado found no signs of a cyst.
Democratic US Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire said she was concerned that Cisneros Preciado said she never gave consent during her treatment. Hassan asked Cisneros Preciado if Amin asked about her family medical history before prescribing the shot.
Cisneros Preciado said he never did.
“To this day, I’m very scared of going to a doctor for me and my kids,” she said.
Cisneros Preciado said she was brought to the United States when she was 8 years old. She told senators their relationship became abusive when she got married at 18, and when she called the police to prevent the abuse of one of her children, she was arrested.
While charges were dropped because of her residency status, she was transferred to a pre-trial detention center shortly after her daughter was born.
Cisneros Preciado said she was still breastfeeding when she was taken to the detention center. She said she had been separated from her daughter for seven months and when she was finally released, “her daughter was already on the way, she didn’t know who I was. She was afraid of me.”
In December 2020, former ICDC inmates filed a class-action lawsuit against ICDC, ICE, Amin, Irwin County Hospital and other state and non-state parties alleging patients had undergone non-consensual and unnecessary pelvic hygiene procedures.
Cisneros Preciado is one of the plaintiffs in this class action lawsuit.
The subcommittee invited Amin to his report to testify, but “through his attorney he produced an affidavit stating that he declined to testify under his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination,” the report said .
Amin has no board certifications, and in 2013 the Justice Department and the state of Georgia sued him alleging that he committed Medicaid fraud by ordering unnecessary and excessive medical procedures. That lawsuit was settled in 2015 when Amin and his co-defendants were ordered to pay the federal government $520,000 in settlements without admitting wrongdoing.
Ossoff questioned Smith, who is in charge of inmate health care, how his agency allowed this to happen and why Amin was not monitored.
“We were not aware of these complaints,” Smith said. “Until the whistleblower complains.”
Ossoff continued to pressure Smith about how Amin is allowed to treat inmates, despite not being certified by the board and being sued by the government and the state of Georgia for Medicaid fraud.
“It’s a pathetic failure,” Ossoff told Smith. “What we heard today is that there was no real verification.”
Whistleblower testifies
Whistleblower Dawn Wooten was a registered nurse who worked at the Irwin County Detention Center. She claimed women at the facility were sent to an outside medical provider, Amin, who performed gynecologic procedures — including but not limited to hysterectomies — without their informed consent.
High-ranking US Democrats have also launched their own investigations into the allegations made by Wooten’s institution.
In May 2021, DHS directed ICE to terminate its contract with ICDC, and as of September 2021, all immigrant detainees were removed from that facility and relocated to other detention facilities.
And as of October 2021, ICE terminated its contract with LaSalle. However, the federal government still has contracts with LaSalle to operate other detention centers in the United States
Hearn, representing LaSalle, clarified that LaSalle is not involved in reviewing outside medical providers like Amin, “nor could we have done so under the contracts or regulations governing our involvement with the ICDC.”
However, the ICDC currently has the authority to arrest individuals in US Marshals Service custody.
Impartial report
The almost 100-page report contains interviews with more than 70 contemporary witnesses. Investigators reviewed more than 541,000 pages of records from the detention center, the US government, LaSalle Corrections and Irwin County Hospital.
At the Irwin County Detention Center, between 2017 and 2020, about 4% of the inmates housed there were women. The report found that during that period, Amin accounted for about 6.5% of all inmate gynecological visits and performed more than 90% of the best gynecological procedures for female inmates across the country.
“Dr. Amin was a clear outlier in both the number and type of procedures he performed compared to other gynecologists treating ICE detainees,” the report reads.
That was the opinion of all external medical experts interviewed in the PSI report. Amen did not follow current medical guidelines for patient care, and all medical experts concluded that “Dr. Amine followed a treatment pattern for nearly all of the patients he treated, regardless of their specific diagnosis or condition.”
The medical experts interviewed by the committee were part of a medical team tapped by attorneys and advocacy groups involved in the December 2020 lawsuit to review the medical records of 19 ICDC detainees that Amin treated.
“These experts concluded that Dr. Amin subjected women to aggressive and unethical gynecological treatment,” the report said. “They found out that Dr. Amin quickly planned surgeries when nonsurgical options were available, misinterpreted test results, performed unnecessary injections and treatments, and proceeded without informed consent.”
The report interviewed six ex-convicts treated by Amin.
“These women described that after being treated by Dr. Amin felt confused, scared and hurt,” the report reads. “Several reported still living with physical pain and uncertainty about the impact of his treatments on their fertility.”
The report found these women were not told what procedures they were going through, and when they asked for more information, Amin told them he was “unauthorized” to give them more information.
The report details how a former licensed practical nurse who worked with Amin observed patients sign informed consent forms when they were “about to fall asleep from anesthesia” and “just coherent enough” to complete the medical forms sign.
