Violence Against Immigrant Women in Detention Is Not New
Women are not safe in American immigration detention centers.
Just this week, nurse Dawn Wooten filed a whistleblower complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, alleging that an OBY-GYN at an ICE detention center in Irwin County, Georgia is sterilizing immigrant women without their consent. The complaint describes how the physician, who became known at the detention center as the “Uterus Collector,” pressured women into undergoing unnecessary medical procedures and conducted irreversible procedures, including hysterectomies. Ms. Wooten likened the environment to an “experimental concentration camp.”
This revelation is horrifying, but it is hardly surprising in the context of our country’s historical treatment of immigrant women.
I am an immigration lawyer and a clinical teaching fellow at UConn Law’s Asylum and Human Rights Clinic. Many of my clients have been ensnared in the immigration detention system at some point of their journeys, from the asylum-seekers we represent today to those I counseled as a volunteer attorney at the 2,400 bed family detention center in Dilley, Texas during the previous administration. Through my work and my research, I have seen how the U.S. government has long obsessed over the sexuality and perceived fertility of immigrant women and has sought to control their reproduction.
Proponents of ending birthright citizenship, motivated by a fear of losing a white American majority, rely on racist perceptions of immigrant women’s fertility rates to justify their efforts. Emails by former Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, a longtime advocate for repealing birthright citizenship, reveal that his preoccupation with immigrant women’s birth rates motivates his restrictionist immigration positions. Pearce would go on to sponsor Arizona’s infamous SB 1070, which was signed into law in 2010 and later struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States. The private sector has also taken it upon itself to prevent immigrant women from given birth has on U.S. soil. Earlier this year, for example, a Hong Kong airline made a passenger take a pregnancy test before letting her board a flight to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth. Weeks later, before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most international travel, the State Department issued a rule that directed U.S. consular officers to deny visas to pregnant women who they suspected would be likely to give birth in the United States.
In addition to coerced sterilization, the government also attempts to control immigrant women’s reproductive choices. In 2018, when the federal government lost the children it tore from asylum-seeking parents as it implemented its family separation policy, the government managed to create a meticulous tracking system to monitor detained girls’ menstrual cycles, pregnancies, and details on the cause of pregnancies. The Trump Administration would later unsuccessfully try to block a 17-year-old asylum-seeking rape survivor from accessing an abortion, even after she had secured private funding for the procedure.
There are also constant reports of sexual assault by employees of these detention centers. From 2014 to 2018, the government received 178 complaints from children who reported being sexually assaulted by adult shelter staff members. A family detention center in Pennsylvania recently settled a lawsuit after a guard raped an asylum-seeking woman in detention (in plain view of a detained 7-year-old girl). And just this week, we learned that the Department of Homeland Security deported a key witness in an investigation into allegations that guards in El Paso were systematically sexually assaulting detained women in security camera blind spots.
Detention is not only dangerous for women — it is utterly unnecessary. Alternatives to detention are markedly less costly to the American taxpayer, facilitate access to legal representation, and are highly effective at ensuring compliance with immigration check-ins and hearings. While the investigations into the forced sterilizations in Georgia and patterns of sexual assault in El Paso are still ongoing, we don’t need to see the final findings to know that immigration detention breeds abuse and fosters impunity, which is why we may never be able to hold our government accountable for its violence against immigrant women. The only solution is to end the abusive practice of immigration detention immediately.
Valeria Gomez is a Clinical Teaching Fellow at the University of Connecticut School of Law’s Asylum and Human Rights Clinic. Before teaching at UConn Law, she practiced immigration law in Tennessee and represented people held in immigration detention across the Southern United States.