U.S. Immigration Detention System: “A Living Hell”
This article features Government Accountability Project’s whistleblower client, Dawn Wooten, and was originally published here.
In mid-September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging dangerous medical practices at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility. According to The Intercept, which first broke the story, Irwin had “underreported Covid-19 cases, knowingly placed staff and detainees at risk of contracting the virus, neglected medical complaints, and refused to test symptomatic detainees, among other dangerous practices.”
Wooten also disclosed that immigrant women held at the facility underwent surgical procedures without having consented to or having been informed of them. Several detainees reported that they had their uteruses removed in this way.
These shocking revelations form part of investigative journalist Seth Freed Wessler’s gripping documentary, The Facility. The film starkly reveals the inhumanity and oppression at the center of the immigrant detention system. Two other recent works also investigate this topic, including historian Jessica Ordaz’s book, The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity; and “Cruel By Design: Voices Against Immigration Detention,” a new report just released by the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)....
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