What happened to me at Irwin is not a one-off aberration—it’s a legacy of American white-supremacist pseudo-science going back decades.
The Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia—a notorious prison known for its human rights abuses—has finally been forced to. That’s a huge victory for immigrants and their allies, who advocated for its closure for over a decade.
Our illegal and inhumane surgeries at Irwin … did not happen in a vacuum. They are a consequence of a cultural through-line of racism and anti-immigrant fervor, reinforced by systemic inequities and bias. Once, when I was pregnant, I was stopped and searched because they were looking for undocumented Jamaicans in the area. When I refused to reveal information about other immigrants, I was told I would be locked up for a long time and would be forced to have her baby inside a prison.
But the worst was yet to come. A doctor told me that I had cysts in my stomach that needed to be treated, but there had not been any follow-up. Then, weeks later, I was woken up early one morning and told I would be going to see a doctor. I assumed it was about my high blood pressure, but when we arrived at the hospital, I was told I was getting surgery to remove the cysts.