Federal agencies specifically targeted pregnant migrants as part of the “zero tolerance” policy, setting off a chain of events in which hospitals separate mothers from their newborns. Former Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Scott Lloyd forced teen migrants to remain in federal custody because they wanted to access abortion care. He took the battle all the way to the Supreme Court, fighting migrants’ constitutional right to abortion because abortion did not gel with his staunch religious beliefs. Lloyd even blocked teens from accessing care when their pregnancies were the result of rape. ICE also covertly changed its policy regarding pregnant people requiring they be detained instead of released, and Border Patrol has pushed doctors to “clear” pregnant migrants for detention.

According to the whistleblower in Project South’s complaint, Amin recently took out the wrong ovary on a detained woman.

“She was supposed to get her left ovary removed because it had a cyst on the left ovary; he took out the right one. She was upset. She had to go back to take out the left and she wound up with a total hysterectomy. She still wanted children—so she has to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids,” Wooten said in the complaint, explaining that the woman wasn’t fully under anesthesia when she heard the doctor tell the nurse that he took the wrong ovary.

Ethel Byrne was the first female political prisoner in the United States to be subjected to force feeding[18] after she was jailed at Blackwell Island workhouse on January 22, 1917 for her activism in advocating for the legalization of birth control. She subsequently went on a hunger strike and refused to drink water for 185 hours.

Under United States jurisdiction, force-feeding is frequently used in the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, prompting in March 2006 an open letter by 250 doctors in The Lancet, warning that, in their opinion, the participation of any doctor is contrary to the rules of the World Medical Association