Migrant Women for Liberation and Freedom in Coalition - Caro Campos 

In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a licensed practical nurse employed by the Irwin County Detention Center, spoke out about forced mass hysterectomies in the ICDC, where hundreds of asylum seekers and migrants were detained. Dawn Wooten, in an MSNBC interview, said: “As a human, you just don't treat people inhumane. I have a title as a Licensed Practical Nurse, and I protect that title with dignity to where I was raised by you treat people as you want to be treated.”¹ Wooten spoke to the lack of PPE and proper quarantine protocols and said “I admit I refused, I have sickle cell and kids with underlying conditions, they are asthmatics.” News erupted nationwide, leading to Project South - Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide, an Atlanta-based leadership development organization that has worked to create spaces for movement building for over 30 years² and one of the principal investigators of the violations at ICDC, identifying at least 57 people in the detention center who had undergone forced gynecological procedures without their consent.³ These women, “some still detained and others deported, who had been at Irwin County Detention Center filed a class-action lawsuit alleging medical misconduct by ICE doctor Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist accused of performing unnecessary and unwanted medical procedures, including hysterectomies since 2018.”⁴ Many women, including Wooten, knew Amin as ‘the uterus collector.’⁵ The movement for reproductive justice is rooted in the radical Black feminist tradition. As Kimala Price articulates in “What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm,” that “the reproductive justice framework recognizes the importance of linking reproductive health and rights to other social justice issues such as poverty, economic justice, welfare reform, housing, prisoners’ rights, environmental justice, immigration policy, drug policies, and violence.”⁶ She challenges the individualist approach of the pro-choice framework, and situates this reckoning by understanding how Black and other marginalized women and their health are situated in a larger network of families, communities, friendships, jobs, institutions, structural oppressions, and intimate partnerships. Price acknowledges that “the spectre of eugenics looms in the backdrop of the reproductive justice framework” and the medical industrial complex broadly. The notion and practice of “rights” and “choice” mean that the state must give something to you for you to have freedom, as opposed to a freedom that is always and already present. Relegating reproductive justice to women is limiting as it ignores those who have reproductive organs such as uteruses and vaginas yet who are not women. Price challenges the individualist paradigm of choice, which engages in conversation with Audra Simpson in “The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia,” as she notes that “the problem of justice imagines ‘recognition’ to be the philosophical and institutional remedy to the matters of ‘historical injustice’ — to matters of dispossession, violence, and [...] matters of inequality and thus of power.”⁷ This recognition of migrant women’s rights is not enough for their freedom if they are still in the detention centers.

Simpson notes that recognition is “the orgasm of justice today” and encourages refusal as “an option for producing and maintaining alternative structures of thought, politics and traditions away from and in critical relationship to states.”⁸ Noting how the state has control over the dispersal of rights, Simpson articulates the “trickery of consent in colonial contexts, which papers over the very conditions of force and violence that beget ‘consent.’”⁹ The detained women do not desire rights or political theater, but liberation.

The historical origins of the movement the detained migrant women are engaging in extend as far back to colonization and the Atlantic slave trade. In the wake of the news, countless journalists, organizers, communities, and scholars reckoned with the long history of forced sterilization, locating the violations in the ICDC as a thread woven in a larger fabric of settler colonial reproductive violence. Black Mamas Matter Alliance articulates that, “the U.S. has consistently targeted Black, Brown, Indigenous, people of color, immigrant women, and women with disabilities with forced sterilization, birth control, and experimentation as a means of control, domination, and extermination.”¹⁰ Tracing these legacies to enslavement, enslaved African people were sterilized against their will in medical experiments and modern gynecology was founded by J. Marion Sims’ experimentation on enslaved people without anesthesia. Native “as many as 1 in 3 mothers in Puerto Rico who were sterilized without consent after giving birth in hospitals.”¹¹ According to Impakter, over 3,000 Native American women were sterilized without their permission between 1973 and 1976.¹² With the 1927 Supreme Court ruling Buck v. Bell, a state's right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate due to the racialized and classed notion of being “feebleminded” or “promiscuous” was upheld, leading to 70,000 Americans being forcibly sterilized during the 20th century.¹³ Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights and Black liberation organizer, was sterilized without her knowledge or consent in 1961. According to PBS, “she was given a hysterectomy while in the hospital for minor surgery, a procedure so common it was known as a ‘Mississippi appendectomy.’” Hamer is quoted saying: “[In] the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of the 10 Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied,” three years after she was sterilized.¹⁴ According to Daily Kos, just last March, Cameroonian women in detention protested severe medical neglect and mistreatment.¹⁵ A USA Today investigation on ICE detention centers found that in the past few years there have been “over 400 allegations of sexual assault or abuse, inadequate medical care, regular hunger strikes, frequent use of solitary confinement, more than 800 instances of physical force against detainees, nearly 20,000 grievances filed by detainees, and at least 29 fatalities, including seven suicides.”¹⁶

Recognizing the conditions of a carceral society whose sustenance is systemic individualization and isolation, the people detained who underwent forced sterilization mobilize the power of coalitional organizing across multiple sectors of race, nationality, language, documentation status, educational level, and profession. They resist the not only the condition imposed on incarcerated people as beings incapable of consent, but they also resist the colonized conceptions and practices of consent that are rooted in neoliberal ideas of a single transaction. For example, the people detained joined forces with EndFamilyDetention to publish dozens handwritten testimonies of life within the detention centers. By using their own words to describe their experiences, feelings, desires, and relationships, they also resist the ways that incarceration works to deprive people of their senses. A Tumblr page called “Visions from the Inside” includes the artistic collaborations between visual artists and the people in migrant detention who penned letters. The page represents a partnerhip between the organizations CultureStrike, Familia Trans Queer Liberation Movement, End Family Detention, Families For Freedom, NWDC Resistance, and 12 artists from across the country. Their homepage articulates their vision: “By visually illustrating these letters we aim to bring awareness and a better sense of the realities that people are experiencing inside of for-profit detention facilities, what led them to migrate in the first place and, most importantly, highlighting the resiliency of the migrant spirit.” Mobilizing the power of artistic representation alongside handwritten testimonies, these organizers resist the carceral state which desires to quell, suppress, remove, isolate, demolish, eliminate, silence, and coerce the colonized into submission. While this coalition does utilize the notion of resilience as a focal point for their work, the content of the letters clearly demonstrates otherwise. Detained women, mothers, children, families, do not desire to exist in cycles of trauma and resilience. As Kimala Price notes, storytelling is a form of collective identity formation, as an organizing tool, as a way of consciousness raising.¹⁷ They desire freedom, they are actively and collectively engaged in a deep, fervent struggle for their freedom from this cycle and from incarceration. Ultimately, the use of letter writing and artistic expression serves as a vehicle for resistance in the face of incarceration of pregnant women, newborns, toddlers, children, and people of all ages, abilities, genders, sizes, races, nationalities, and beliefs. They serve as resistance to the deepest and most violent forms of violation against a human body. By writing these letters, they are documenting and resisting an on-going symptom and real-time practice of settler-colonialism. They are decolonizing neoliberal understandings of choice, agency, and autonomy as qualities connected to the market and the capitalist state, and rather are calling for the abolition of the detention centers and the conditions they and their families endure. If the prison is a place that is void of ethical reckoning, detained migrants are subjects of expendability. They become malleable to the violences of the state, and yet resist and struggle and organize as is part of a generational legacy.

These detained migrant women include Lilian Oliva,¹⁸ a 19-year-old mother who was found attempting suicide in Karnes concentration camp, or Yeslin, a nine-year-old girl who recorded herself speaking to call out in support from inside the Berks Family detention center, having spent a year locked up in jail, with her 2 year old brother and their mother.¹⁹ They are the redacted names who are fighting in coalition and leading the struggle for their liberation and imagining militant forms of refusal. Their goal is not the mere choice within the detention center, but the abolition of their oppressive structures and the structures of all oppression. As Kimala Price notes: “choice does not exist in a vacuum. There are systemic, structural obstacles that can limit the options that exist for individuals and communities.”²⁰ Their long-term term goals include abolishing not only all detention centers, ICE, DHS, CBP, FBI, and CIA, but also the abolition of the conditions which allowed these institutions to exist in the first place.

Reproductive violence does not only occur in the migrant detention center or the prison or the hospital, it occurs in the mundane, the quotidian, it is found in the passive and transient and mobile. How is the Greyhound bus a site of reproductive violence? The experience of a pregnant woman or a mother with her new born child riding a Greyhound bus for over 48 hours straight wearing an ankle bracelet occurs within this site. Expanding our perceptions of where reproductive injustice can be found is also central to the struggle the detained women are engaging in. While the people detained in the ICDC and their co-conspirators in Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network mobilize state bodies such as Congress to call for protections from deportation and defunding private prisons, this coalition of people locate the condition of liberation not under the guise of these state bodies, but in the collective freedom of women and all people to self-determine for themselves and their communities.

¹ MSNBC. “ICE whistleblower Speaks Out, Alleges Mass Hysterectomies Performed On Migrant Women.” MSNBC, 15 Sept. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIlOudbgliA.

² “Home Page,” Project South, https://projectsouth.org/

³ Conway, Eddie. “Update: Forced-Hysterectomy Victims in ICE Detention Deported.” The Real News Network, December 21, 2020. https://therealnews.com/update-forced-hysterectomy-victims-in-ice-detention-deported.

⁴ Haley H. Beech & Amber Sutton. “Forced Sterilization Is a Form of Systemic Reproductive Coercion.” Impakter, March 11, 2021. https://impakter.com/forced-sterilization-systemic-reproductive-coercion/.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Price, Kimala. "What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm." Meridians: feminism, race, and transnationalism, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 43.

⁷ Simpson, Audra. “The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia,” Postcolonial Studies 20:1 (2017), 19.

⁸ Simpson, 19.

⁹ Simpson, 20.

¹⁰ “Shut down Irwin Detention Center and Defund ICE.” MomsRising, January 16, 2021. https://www.momsrising.org/blog/shut-down-irwin-detention-center-and-defund-ice.

¹¹ Krase, Kathryn. “The History of Forced Sterilization in the United States.” Our Bodies Ourselves, September 21, 2020. https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/health-article/forced-sterilization/.

¹² Haley H. Beech & Amber Sutton. “Forced Sterilization Is a Form of Systemic Reproductive Coercion.” Impakter, March 11, 2021. https://impakter.com/forced-sterilization-systemic-reproductive-coercion/.
¹³ “The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations.” NPR. NPR, March 7, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/07/469478098/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-force d-sterilizations.

¹⁴ “Fannie Lou Hamer.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. Accessed May 14, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-hamer/.

¹⁵ “'A Cry for Help': Cameroonian Women Allege Medical Neglect, Discrimination in ICE Detention.” Daily Kos. Accessed May 14, 2021.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/10/1925916/-A-cry-for-help-Cameroonian-women-allege-medical-neglect- discrimination-in-ICE-detention.

¹⁶ Martinez, Arlene. “ICE Detention Centers Rife with Abuse, Investigation Finds.” USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, December 24, 2019.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/23/ice-detention-centers-rife-abuse-investigation-finds/27360 84001/.

¹⁷ Price, Kimala. "What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm." Meridians: feminism, race, and transnationalism, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 42-65.

¹⁸ Admin. “Suicide Note from a 19-Year-Old Mother Imprisoned at Karnes with Her Baby.” End Family Detention, July 29, 2015.

https://endfamilydetention.com/suicide-note-from-a-19-year-old-mother-imprisoned-at-karnes-with-her-baby/.

¹⁹ Admin. “Yeslin, Just 9, Speaks out from inside the Berks Family Detention Center.” End Family Detention, July 6, 2019. https://endfamilydetention.com/yeslin-just-9-speaks-out-from-inside-the-berks-family-detention-center/.

²⁰ Price, Kimala. "What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm." Meridians: feminism, race, and transnationalism, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 42-65.

Works Cited

Krase, Kathryn. “The History of Forced Sterilization in the United States.” Our Bodies Ourselves, September 21, 2020. https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/health-article/forced-sterili zation/.

Admin. “Yeslin, Just 9, Speaks out from inside the Berks Family Detention Center.” End Family Detention, July 6, 2019. https://endfamilydetention.com/yeslin-just-9-speaks-out-from-inside-the-berks- family-detention-center/.

Conway, Eddie. “Update: Forced-Hysterectomy Victims in ICE Detention Deported.” The Real News Network, December 21, 2020. https://therealnews.com/update-forced-hysterectomy-victims-in-ice-detention- deported.

“'A Cry for Help': Cameroonian Women Allege Medical Neglect, Discrimination in ICE Detention.” Daily Kos. Accessed May 14, 2021. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/10/1925916/-A-cry-for-help-Cameroo nian-women-allege-medical-neglect-discrimination-in-ICE-detention.

“Fannie Lou Hamer.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. Accessed May 14, 2021. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-ham er/.

Haley H. Beech & Amber Sutton. “Forced Sterilization Is a Form of Systemic Reproductive Coercion.” Impakter, March 11, 2021. https://impakter.com/forced-sterilization-systemic-reproductive-coercion/.

Martinez, Arlene. “ICE Detention Centers Rife with Abuse, Investigation Finds.” USA Today. Gannett Satellite Information Network, December 24, 2019. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/23/ice-detention-centers-rife-abuse-investigation-finds/2736084001/.

MSNBC. “ICE whistleblower Speaks Out, Alleges Mass Hysterectomies Performed On Migrant Women.” MSNBC, 15 Sept. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIlOudbgliA.

Price, Kimala. "What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm." Meridians: feminism, race, and transnationalism, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 42-65.

“Shut down Irwin Detention Center and Defund ICE.” MomsRising, January 16, 2021.https://www.momsrising.org/blog/shut-down-irwin-detention-center-and- defund-ice.

Simpson, Audra. “The ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous North America and Australia,” Postcolonial Studies 20:1 (2017), 19.

“The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations.” NPR. NPR, March 7, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/07/469478098/the-suprem e-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations.

———. “Suicide Note from a 19-Year-Old Mother Imprisoned at Karnes with Her Baby.” End Family Detention, July 29, 2015. https://endfamilydetention.com/suicide-note-from-a-19-year-old-mother-impris oned-at-karnes-with-her-baby/.