UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs

For years, immigrants held at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in the U.S. state of Georgia, and the advocates with whom they shared their experiences, raised complaints about the abusive detention conditions they were subjected to at ICDC with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and with LaSalle Corrections, the ICE-contracted private, for-profit prison corporation that owns and operates ICDC. Those complaints went largely unaddressed. For years, immigrants and advocates called upon members of Congress and the international human rights community to safeguard the fundamental human rights of persons detained by ICE at ICDC, and other detention centers in rural Georgia, most notably the Stewart Detention Center, owned and operated by the GEO Group, and recognized as one of the deadliest ICE detention centers in the country. Those calls also went largely unheeded. Then, in the fall of 2020, a group of women locked up by ICE at ICDC, bravely stepped forward—joined by a whistleblower-nurse who worked at ICDC—to file a public complaint with the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General addressing the ICE and LaSalle’s grievous medical neglect and denial of basic hygienic protections in the face of the then deadly COVID pandemic, and retaliatory use of disciplinary procedures—including solitary confinement—taken against anyone who spoke up. The complaint also contained documented allegations of non-consensual, invasive gynecological procedures carried out by a doctor contracted by the detention center. Those documented allegations of medical abuse are what ultimately garnered national and international media attention, followed by Senate scrutiny, as well as attention from the international human rights community. The women at ICDC finally experienced a moment of validation: their fundamental human rights that had been so grievously violated were getting the recognition they had long been calling for.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations conducted an investigation culminating in a report and hearing that highlighted the failures of officials from LaSalle Corrections, as well as ICE, in the provision of medical care to women held in their custody—failures that directly resulted in women being subjected to non-consensual, contraindicated, and invasive gynecological procedures. The international human rights community issued communications expressing their grave concerns surrounding the documented allegations, noting the host of rights violations under international law. In the summer of 2021, at a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights “IACHR”), the women subjected to abuse at ICDC finally got their day of rights recognition. During that webcast hearing, members of the IACHR, representatives for the United States, and the public, heard the powerful and courageous testimony of Wendy Dowe, one of the women harmed by the documented medical neglect and abuse at ICDC. Members of the IACHR expressly recognized the experiences to which Ms. Dowe testified as torture, and noted the obligation of a state under whose authority torture is carried out to provide reparations. For its part, the U.S. Government, represented by the DHS Officer of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, publicly apologized to Ms. Dowe for the abuses she endured. The DHS Officer also took personal responsibility for following-up on the investigation and ensuring measures were in place so that the abuses Ms. Dowe and those detained alongside her suffered were not repeated.

The IACHR’s public hearing—together with the Communications from different United Nations human rights mechanisms—marked an important moment of rights recognition and an important moment of collaboration among the often-siloed rights-communities. But the women behind the ICDC complaint, and the thousands of other immigrants subjected to rights abuses at ICDC and Stewart, and in immigration detention sites across the country, have yet to receive redress or reparations for the right violations they suffered, and in the absence of accountability, rights violations persist. This Article tells the story of efforts to achieve rights recognition, accountability, and redress for individuals subjected to ICE detention, focusing on advocacy specific to rights abuses at ICDC and Stewart while placing that story in the national context of abusive systems of immigration detention across the United States. It shines a light on the opportunities for advancing rights recognition before the international human rights community, particularly the IACHR, the headquarters for which are housed in this country’s capital, Washington, D.C. In noting the shortcomings and frustrations that come with international human rights advocacy, the Article makes the argument for continued engagement with international human rights mechanisms, and the norms they have established to protect and promote, and provides recommendations for moving from rights recognition to accountability, redress, and, ultimately, non-repetition.