An Update on Immigrants in US Custody: What is the government currently doing?

This month, after a nurse, Dawn Wooten, filed a whistle-blower lawsuit alleging that ICE inmates had told her that they had removed their uteruses without their full comprehension or consent, the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga., attracted national attention. Since then, both ICE and the Irwin County hospital have released data showing that in the past three years, two complete hysterectomies have been conducted on women detained at Irwin. But first-hand reports of prisoners, including Ms. Dowe, who have undergone other invasive gynecological procedures that they have not fully understood and may not have been medically appropriate in some cases, are now emerging.  Early one morning in January 2019, when guards called her out of her cellblock at the Irwin County Immigration Detention Center in rural Georgia, where she was entering her fifth month, Wendy Dowe was frightened awake. That day, she was going to have surgery, they said.  The 48-year-old Jamaican woman had been living in the United States for two decades without legal status before being picked up by immigration officials. An outside gynecologist who saw patients in immigration detention advised her the massive cysts and masses needed to be removed and were triggering the menstrual cramping she had. The doctor repeatedly insisted, and as she sat shackled to a hospital bed, she felt forced to agree.  It was after she was deported to Jamaica and had some other doctors study her medical reports that she became righteously concerned. A radiologist's report identified her uterus as being a healthy size, not housing enlarged masses or cysts. Based on ultrasound photographs, the cysts she had were minor, and were the kind that naturally occurred; they typically did not need surgical intervention.  Similar experiences were also brought forward by 16 ICE detainees, who were concerned about the gynecological treatment they received while at the same center. All 16 were handled by Dr. Mahendra Amin, who practices gynecology and has been identified by ICE officials as the "primary gynecologist" of the detention center.  The cases were investigated by five gynecologists, four of them board-certified. They found that Dr. Amin repeatedly overestimated the size or risks associated with cysts or masses attached to the reproductive organs of his patients. Small cysts do not call for surgery, where massive or otherwise alarming ones often do, the doctors said. They noticed that Dr. Amin seemed to be regularly advocating surgical action, even though at the time, it did not seem medically appropriate and options for non-surgical care were abundant.  Dr. Amin identified symptoms such as excessive bleeding with clots and chronic pelvic pain in almost every woman's chart: these symptoms may explain surgery. All of the women, however, said they had never encountered these symptoms or reported them to him. Dr. Sara Imershein, chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said the diagnoses and treatments are "poorly supported" and "not well documented." Even if the patients had reported the symptoms recorded by Dr. Amin, "before rushing to surgery, there would have been several paths to follow," she said. "Advil for one."  Speculation as to why this has been occurring to ICE detainees has been plentiful: Is ICE doing this to women to stop the possibility of them having children (who would be born as US citizens) in the US? Or is this the fault of poorly practiced medicine?