Homeland Security’s deportation agency performed at least two unnecessary sterilizations on immigrant women, the department’s inspector general said Thursday, confirming the gist of whistleblower allegations raised during the Trump administration.
The inspector general said the hysterectomies, a procedure where a woman’s uterus is removed, were part of dozens of surgeries performed on migrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement despite never being properly approved.
Out of 227 major surgeries reviewed, investigators said nearly a third lacked the proper approval of a clinical director. Without that approval, the surgery should never have happened and there is no way to determine if it was medically necessary, the audit said.
Extrapolating to all 553 major surgeries performed from 2019 to 2021, that means as many as 214 of them were not properly approved and ICE “did not have assurance that these surgeries were medically necessary.”
Investigators took a deep dive into six hysterectomies performed from 2019 to 2021 and had the files reviewed by an obstetrician/gynecologist who determined that two of them shouldn’t have been performed.
ICE’s Health Service Corps agreed with the investigators’ conclusions.
A whistleblower had accused ICE of performing unnecessary hysterectomies and other surgeries in 2020.
The whistleblower said some migrants — and particularly the women who faced hysterectomies — were operated on without fully understanding or consenting to the procedures.
Those allegations centered on Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia.
The inspector general said those cases — 56 surgeries, including one hysterectomy — were not part of this current review because they were referred to a different office for investigation.
A Senate report in 2022 concluded that one doctor at the Irwin County facility was too aggressive in his approach to surgery.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced in 2021 that he was cutting the department’s ties with the Georgia facility.
ICE, in its official response to the inspector general’s report Thursday, did not address the hysterectomies directly but said it has updated its directives to require surgeries be approved by a clinical director before they can be performed.
Those directives were issued in late 2022.
“ICE strives to ensure detained noncitizens are housed in a safe, secure and humane manner and have access to medical care,” Jennifer Cleary, ICE’s chief financial officer, wrote in the agency’s response.
Investigators complained in their report that they didn’t get full cooperation from ICE for the audit.
In particular, the agency refused direct access to ICE’s system for off-site medical visits. Instead, the agency offered to extract data for the inspector general. The inspector general said that the process delayed the report by more than 100 days.
Ms. Cleary disputed that characterization, saying the agency didn’t deny access but did want to protect sensitive medical information contained in the database. She said ICE took a “balanced approach” to providing what the investigation needed.