The claim that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) idetention center in Georgia is reportedly the site of a mass involuntary sterilisation project is disturbing to say the least.
The Guardian reports that
"A whistleblower report published by the non-profit Project South alleges that large numbers of migrant women held at the Irwin county detention centre, a privately run facility that imprisons undocumented immigrants, received hysterectomies that they did not want and which were not medically necessary.
The allegations reported by Project South were first made in a formal complaint by a nurse working at the detention center, Dawn Wooten, who describes the conditions there and conversations she had with imprisoned women in detail. The hysterectomies were all allegedly performed by the same outside gynecologist, Mehendra Amin, of Douglas, Georgia. Wooten says that one migrant woman referred to Amin as the “uterus collector”. Amin told The Intercept that he had only done “one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years.” Responding to the allegations, he said “Everything is wrong” and urged Intercept reporters to “talk to the hospital administrator” for more information.
The women say they were not told why they were having hysterectomies, with some saying that they were given conflicting reasons for the procedures or reprimanded when asked about them. Wooten’s account in the Project South report was corroborated by two lawyers, who told NBC News that four women in the facility whom they represent, had been sterilized without medical cause and without their consent. According to the Project South report, a detained woman at the Irwin county center said: “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.
As horrific as the allegations are, it’s not likely that either the Irwin county officials or Dr Amin were experimenting. More likely, they knew exactly what they were doing. If true, the allegations of forced sterilizations would make the Irwin county detention center only the latest in America’s long history of eugenics, which has disproportionately targeted women of color.
In the early 20th century, white American intellectuals were pioneers of race science, advancing the idea that “undesirable” traits could and should be bred out of the population with government planning and selective, involuntary sterilization programs. Everything the Nazis knew about eugenics, they learned from the United States. The 1927 Buck v Bell supreme court case, in which the court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a 20-year-old named Carrie Buck against her will, led to an era of enthusiastically racist population engineering by state governments. Federally funded eugenics boards were established in 32 states, through which tax dollars were spent to sterilize approximately 70,000 people, mostly women. These programs were used to enforce via state law the racist fiction of America as a white country, and forced sterilization disproportionately targeted Black women".
The accusation has an echo of Chinese policies against minorities.
Two Uighur organizations who filed a complaint against China in the International Criminal Court alleging crimes against humanity and repression of minorities.
The International Criminal Court complaint represents the first time members of the Muslim minority group have attempted to hold the Chinese government accountable for repressive policies, NBC News reported. Uighurs are a minority group of Muslim Turkic ethnicity numbering 11 million who mainly live in China’s Xinjiang region, according to BBC News.
“I didn’t see, but I could hear the unbearable screams coming from both sides of the corridor,” said Mamattursun Omer, a Uighur whose account of being detained in Xinjiang is one of many that NBC News reported are included in the International Criminal Court complaint.
“They should be punished for the crime they have done to us,” he told NBC. “It is my responsibility to give my testimony.”
he complaint specifically claims that China enforced birth control, carried out mass surveillance, and committed massacres on the Uighur population inside the Xinjiang region.
The Associated Press detailed China’s practices of forced birth control policies in Xinjiang in a July report that referred to the policies as “demographic genocide.”
Hundreds of internal Chinese government files, leaked in 2019 and published by The New York Times, purport to expose China’s mass incarceration policies in Xinjiang.
In July, the U.S. State Department imposed sanctions on multiple Chinese Communist Party officials over the government’s treatment of Uighurs. It specifically condemned “forced labor, arbitrary mass detention, and forced population control, and attempts to erase their culture and Muslim faith.”
“The United States is taking action today against the horrific and systematic abuses in Xinjiang and calls on all nations who share our concerns about the CCP’s attacks on human rights and fundamental freedoms to join us in condemning this behaviour,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said of the Chinese Communist Party in a formal statement.
So If the "ICE" allegations have any foundations the US is carrying out a similar abuse of Human Rights on a minority and reeks of hypocrisy.
Now these are "accusations" and not prof but they both should be taken seriously and the failure to do so might well be because the US and China are so big and powerful that they can easily flaunt world human rights relegation , whilst smaller less powerful countries would be treated like a world pariah.
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