The report comes after a bipartisan investigation conducted over an 18-month period carried out by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by its Chair, Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, and Ranking Member Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican.
In addition to the excessive gynecological procedures, the report found that ICE did not conduct “thorough oversight” of these offsite procedures, and that there “appears to have been repeated failures to secure informed consent for offsite medical procedures.”
“This is one of the most outrageous things this subcommittee has investigated over the past two years,” Ossoff said during the hearing, which Newsweek attended. “This is an extraordinarily disturbing finding, and in my view represents a catastrophic failure by the federal government to respect basic human rights.”
“There is obviously an urgent need for reform of the processes that overview and oversee the provision of medical care to detainees,” Ossoff told Newsweek, when asked what actions should be taken to address this issue.
“The process of developing potential legislation or requesting specific administrative changes will be based upon the testimony we received today,” he added.
At the center of this report is a Doctor Mahendra Amin, who worked as an offsite OB-GYN providing care to individuals detained at the Irwin County Detention Center ICDC, a private facility in Ocilla, Georgia, which is owned and operated by LaSalle Southeast, LLC.
In 2013, the Department of Justice and the State of Georgia sued Amin, saying he had committed Medicaid fraud by “ordering unnecessary and excessive medical procedures,” the report states. Although the suit was settled in 2015, the report said Amin continued to administer excessive procedures from 2017 to 2020.
Karina Cisneros Preciado, a 23-year-old mother who was brought to the U.S. from Mexico at the age of 8, found herself in ICE detention from July 2020 to January 2021 after the report said she was arrested in Georgia for “domestic violence against an abusive partner.”
She described the center as being a place with “moldy” showers and water coolers where detainees where given “dirty and used underwear.” Cisneros Preciado had given birth to her daughter prior to being placed in detention and needed a post-partum exam. She testified Tuesday before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on the treatment she received at the hands of Amin:
“When Dr. Amin comes in, he doesn’t acknowledge me, he doesn’t say a word,” she said. “He just sits in front of me prepping for the procedure which he doesn’t explain. Then, he just says ‘open your legs’ and continues with ‘it’s going to be cold, and inserts a white tube inside of me.’”
Cisneros Preciado said nurses later injected her with a shot and did not tell her it was birth control, something she would have refused had she known. Amin told her she had an ovarian cyst that he planned to treat. A later exam found an “[u]nremarkable evaluation of the pelvis” and that “[t]he uterus is normal in its appearance.”
“I thank God that the news came out because he didn’t get to do anything else to me,” Cisneros Preciado told the subcommittee.
The report writes that the Department of Homeland Security knew that that medical care provided to detainees at IDIC was “deficient,” but that “neither ICE nor LaSalle took effective corrective action.” Meanwhile, Amin was carrying out a staggering number of procedures.
Despite ICDC housing about 4% of all females detained by ICE nationwide from 2017 to 2020 and Amin accounting for roughly 6% of total total OB-GYN visits during that same period, the doctor performed about one-third of OB-GYN procedures across the country and “more than 90% of some key procedures,” the report found.
When asked by Ossoff about this figure, Stewart Smith, assistant director of ICE’s Health Service Corps, said he was not aware of the extent of these procedures at the time. Ossoff asked whether ICE vets the doctors it hires. Smith said “no,” and added that he was unaware of the previous suit against Amin.
“These providers are not contracted directly with ICE,” he said. “They are not an employees of ICE. They are referred off site.”
“In this particular case, Dr. Amin’s case, he was the only provider in the area that was willing to see these patients,” Smith added. “However, we were not aware of all the particulars until the whistleblower application.”
Ossoff took exception to the response from ICE, saying he was not satisfied by the agency’s testimony. He elaborated further on his displeasure with the organization when asked by Newsweek whether the Amin situation was an example of a bad actor or of greater systemic issues within ICE.
“This is by no means the only example of detainees in DHS custody not receiving adequate medical care,” Ossoff said. “There are widespread examples of that, some of which the Inspector General detailed today in his testimony, so it’s not an isolated case.”
“It’s the case that we looked at specifically in the course of this investigation,” he added, “because the severity of the underlying facts required us to focus on it.”
