https://www.commondreams.org/further/2020/09/16/so-everyone-knows-jim-crow-josef-mengele
by
Child prisoners at Auschwitz
The fallout continues from the gruesome revelations of black nurse and whistleblower Dawn Wooten on forced sterilizations and "jarring medical neglect" of women held in a Georgia ICE detention center - where "only God is taking care of us here" - and other for-profit, LaSalle-owned "experimental concentration camps." Wooten's whistleblower complaint, first reported by Law & Crime and filed with lawyers from
Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for
Human Rights and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, cites dozens
of instances of medical malpractice at the Irwin County Detention
Center, which advocates say mirror longtime, egregious human rights abuses in other ICE centers that see detainees "as dollar signs not human beings." Charges include
filthy unsafe conditions, spoiled food, denial of needed medications,
one shower for fifty people, and punitive handcuffing, pepper-spraying
and solitary confinement. "This is the dirtiest facility I have ever
been in," said one detainee. "It is all nasty." Once COVID hit, the
violations mounted, with officials allegedly refusing to test, wear
masks, quarantine or provide care for those infected. In July, staff at a
LaSalle facility in Louisiana wrote to Congress
charging that management withheld PPE from staff and detainees, ignored
positive test results, and threw ill migrants into solitary without
soap and water. There were also multiple charges of sexual abuse by
guards often assaulting female detainees in areas hidden from security
cameras; a probe was recently launched after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported the government deported a 35-year-old Mexican woman who was a key witness in an investigation at an El Paso facility. Says Wooten, who's worked three years at the Irwin center, "You don't want to see what you're seeing."
