Trump’s made it easy to buy report of forced operations
The macabre story of the doctor dubbed by immigrants as “uterus collector” swirled through Latino social media circles. It ignited Democratic condemnation of the Trump administration and sent a chill down the spine of all who heard it. If anyone in GOP circles finds those facts alarming, they might want to revisit the last four years.
Note especially just about everything ... out of the mouth of President Donald Trump in regard to immigrants. Don’t cry now if people are willing to believe the outlandish versions of this story, some of which align with organ harvesting and eugenics-driven calls for forced sterilizations.
A whistleblower’s allegation of abuses at Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia started it all. A nurse there alleges a gynecologist performs unnecessary hysterectomies, has removed the wrong ovary when performing a procedure to eliminate a cyst and has a high rate of Fallopian tube removal; and all of this is done without the proper consent of the immigrant women under his care. Dawn Wooten made the charges in a complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security and supported by statements from the human rights group Project South. Other immigrant detainees detailed their own stories that seemed to corroborate Wooten’s allegations.
In subsequent days, other attorneys for immigrants there have reported their clients feared medical care, which they found rough and questionable in necessity. “These immigrant women, I don’t think they really, totally, all the way understand this is what’s going to happen depending on who explains it to them,” Wooten says in the complaint. If true, that’s a mockery of informed consent and a huge violation of human rights.
The 27-page complaint deals predominantly with charges about medical care that wasn’t given, mostly protections around COVID-19. Detention centers are virtual incubators for COVID-19, not unlike prisons and jails . ...
Time will reveal much more. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is tasked with ferreting out the truth.
Democrats seized on it immediately ... easy fodder for boosting the presidential candidacy of Joe Biden, who while not always the most eloquent speaker, doesn’t utter the hateful anti-immigrant screeds of Trump. The biggest problem for Trump is so many, so quickly, even sans solid evidence, are ready to believe the worst. He earned it.
Trump has gloated about putting migrant children in cages like animals. He’s called their parents rapists, thieves and murderers and tried to decimate the network supporting the legal resettlement of refugees . ...
Trump sees them as tools to set his most vulture-like and uninformed fans to wailing about invasions from the Mexico-U.S. border. Wooten’s allegation lands on that bedrock of hatred.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has pushed back, stating that two women at Irwin have been “referred” for hysterectomies since 2018. What that means and if more procedures somehow could be performed outside of that system, remains unanswered.
The much maligned “mainstream media” are being careful. The Washington Post used the wording “lightly substantiated claims,” and others noted that some of the accounts are secondhand, as should be expected when dealing with people in custody speaking about the experiences of others also being held.
Wooten, like many whistleblowers, has an ax to grind. A licensed practical nurse, she worked full time at Irwin before having her hours decreased this summer. She says, because she was stirring up this trouble, questioning medical practices.
Whistleblowers are valuable and often noble. Generally, they give not a perfect path to truth, but quite often a thread to pull, a direction to begin searching.
The accused doctor wasn’t named in the original complaint. But further reporting by Prism Reports and the Atlanta Journal Constitution verified that Dr. Mahendra Amin is the person in question. And that he paid part of a $520,000 settlement in 2015 after state and federal officials charged his involvement with a scheme to bilk Medicaid and Medicare. Detention centers are fertile territory for swindlers. Like the Irwin facility, most are in rural areas, further isolating the migrants. Language barriers, let alone cultural ones, exacerbate communication. Stir in the profit motive and patterns emerge. Irwin is privately run by LaSalle Corrections, which earns more the higher the headcount and the number of services rendered. Taxpayers foot the bill.
This is an administration that views immigrants as political pawns and worse, as less than human. As the November election draws near, people are judging Trump’s pitch for another four years by how he has behaved during the last four. And how quickly many accepted these atrocities, with only this complaint filed, may tell you all you need to know about what America has come to believe about Donald Trump . ... A reputation truly earned by the very real atrocities committed by this administration regardless of what comes of this complaint.