The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Trials of a Whistle-blower

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

As a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center—a Georgia facility run by LaSalle Corrections, a private company operating an immigration-detention contract with ICE—Dawn Wooten became aware of some frightening violations, including numerous hysterectomies and other medical procedures performed without patient consent. When she asked questions, she was demoted and eventually pushed out. Wooten supplied critical information for two complaints about I.C.D.C., which were submitted to the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security. The complaints were first reported in The Intercept in September, 2020, and then covered widely in the national press. Last May, in a victory for Wooten, the detained women who spoke up about their mistreatment, and the advocacy groups that had fought on their behalf, ICE ended its I.C.D.C. contract with LaSalle. Wooten’s own troubles, however, had just begun. Receiving death threats and kidnapping threats, she and her five children stayed under security in a series of hotels. Her whistle-blower-retaliation complaint with the federal government is still awaiting a finding, as the Office of the Inspector General has requested two extensions on its legally required deadlines. Meanwhile, Wooten found that hardly anyone would hire a nurse who had made front-page headlines: despite her twelve years of experience, she was rejected from more than a hundred jobs during a national nursing shortage. She couldn’t get hired at McDonald’s. Wooten, and the detained women who shared their stories at great risk, are still awaiting justice. For Sarah Stillman, who covers immigration for The New Yorker, Wooten’s case draws attention to the fact that low-wage whistle-blowers, in particular, can face almost insurmountable obstacles to coming forward to expose wrongdoing. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When we hear from a whistleblower, it often sets off frenetic news cycles. Think of the recent Facebook revelations, first in the Wall Street Journal and then absolutely everywhere. Whistleblowers are insiders, and without them, many abuses would never come to light. Often enough, they're celebrated for a while for their bravery, and then, the story recedes. But for those people who are brave enough to blow the whistle, the repercussions don't end with the news cycle. Sarah Stillman covers immigration for the New Yorker, and she has this story.

If you were paying attention to the news back in September of 2020, you probably heard about the really chilling allegations of medical mistreatment at the Irwin County Detention Center, which is a for-profit detention facility in Georgia. Breaking news today. It's about an alarming new whistleblower complaint that alleges, quote, high numbers of female detainees, detained immigrants at an ICE detention center in Georgia received questionable hysterectomies while in ICE custody. Women were describing having experienced forced hysterectomies, heinous medical neglect in the midst of the pandemic. A failing to protect both prisoners and employees from the virus. And one of the central faces you may have seen is the face of a woman named Don Wooten,

who was a nurse at the facility where all of this was happening. And she, along with a bunch of the women who had these experiences in detention, she spoke up about the really chilling things that she was seeing and experiencing. Recently, I got a call after all this time had passed from Don Wooden's attorney, and she said, you know, so many people followed that story in the news. It sparked congressional investigations. It sparked civil lawsuit and criminal investigation about all the misconduct that Don had helped. to reveal. But what very few people know is what happened to Don after she blew the whistle

on this place. Dawn is a mother of five kids, and she lives in a small town about three hours from Atlanta in Tifton, Georgia. Their decorations, this year was kind of rough. This year, this whistleblowing is rough. Yeah. So we decorated. I really was not Christmas-spirited. But the kids were already in put things out. And I told them, I said, if they give me to get something in working motion, then we can have a Christmas in July, maybe. So what kept them from doing a Christmas? Finances. Finances. Yeah. Finances.

You know, there's not a lot of information about what whistleblowers go through after they come forward. And particularly for those who are low-wage workers, I think oftentimes the whistleblowers that we see who have made such a difference in our society, people like recently the Facebook employees who came forward or people who have come forward to reveal things happening at the upper echelons of the U.S. government, we don't think as much about what is the cost of coming forward for those who have at a more precarious end of the economic spectrum. What are the emotional, but also even the basic financial effects on their ability to get by? to be actually asked where am I how my faring means the world at this moment to us and I'm going to include the babies too because we've been on a topsy-turby downward spiral around the mountain world it's kind of like fruit basket turnover so I'm grateful I'm grateful for the opportunity I'm curious like if you were talking about

to someone who you didn't know at that time and who was asking you, like, what is your job? Like, how would you have described your job to someone who knew nothing about the immigration detention context at that time? Describing the actual place that I worked that was not fit for my pet chihuahua that I don't own. And I'm being facetious when I say this and very sarcastic. It was more of a place of a kennel or I would say an animal shelter. It was not clean to the point they did not have adequate, at times adequate water. It was not adequate for them. The food, I have seen maggots in the food.

Oh, my God. As appalling as that is to hear, Dawn started to learn things that she found even more disturbing. So I have this young lady that I can see her, Sarah, to this day. I can call her name. We had a conversation because we always had conversations talking about her family and her kids and her children. And when she gets out of here, she comes to me and she said, Ms. Wooten, can you see what procedure I've had? I brought back, hey, you've had a hysterectomy. And other ladies, hey, you've had your tubes removed.

Hey, you've had your ovaries. Hey, you've had a D&C. Your uterus has been thinned. Hey, you've had this surgical procedure. And in the midst of talking to these ladies from one person to 12, 12 to 24 requests at this time, I walk over to the pharmacy and I'm sitting at my cart and I'm going, what in the world is going on here? What in the hell did I walk into?

And after I go through all of those emotions, Sarah, it's like I'm coming home one day in my truck. And my eyes are full of water. And I'm like, okay, God, what do you want me to do? You've got a sense of humor. This is not funny. What do you want me to do? And I'm 20 minutes home. I pull in my driveway and I sit and I was like, now I understand the assignment.

You want me to speak for those. Because my grandma told me that this mouth was going to write a check one day so big my butt couldn't cash. So we always joked about it. But it's like, so now I see what it is. So now I get the work. I come back and I'm asking questions. Like my supervisor, oh, you're going to leave that alone. Oh, you don't want to touch that.

Oh, you don't want to bother that. Oh, you don't want to talk about that. So now I'm getting that type of treatment now coming through. And I'm like, it's got to be something that's going on here. So now I've turned from LPN to inch eye, private eye, because I just can't let this go. Do you remember what was the moment when you realized you were being retaliated against at work? The moment I realized I was being retaliated on when I was written up, and I hadn't been written up out of the 12 years I've been nursing,

or I hadn't been written up out of the three cycles I had been through that place. I automatically knew that they were building a case with this write-up because I didn't have a write-up on my file. So when she wrote me up bogusly for no one, call, no call, no show. I've never been a no call or no show. When I had the conversation with the deputy warden, he said, don't just take it. It's just a write-up. That's all you have to do. I said, but it's a lie. It's not the truth. I have a doctor's excuse for the day she's proclaiming that I was a no-call, no-show. I went outside of my car, came back with the

doctor's excuse for the time, where you might want to take this to the warden. I asked him, I said, what is going on? I've never been written up. I was. I've never had a problem in this place. You've never had any issues with me. He said, he'll call me when he need me. Suddenly, Dawn just stops getting work. They demoted her from full-time status to an as-needed employee, and then essentially they just never call.

Dawn's really struggling with that. She's floundering about what to do. And then at that point, she hears about this grassroots advocacy organization called Project South. And they have been looking into these conditions at the detention center for years. They've been talking to many, many women who've been directly affected by it and organizing around it. And then together with a bunch of other groups, they all decide to file a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security at the Office of the Inspector General. And Don also files a separate whistleblower complaint. And those land in September of 2020. The Intercept picks it up. A small legal blog does too in an even more sensational way. And suddenly, the story just goes viral on social media. You know, suddenly Dawn is making appearances on the national news networks on Rachel Maddo. She's on Chris Hayes.

Ms. Rootan, I want to start with you and just ask you to tell us what you did. What was your job at this facility? When did you start working there? I was first employed at Irwin County Detention Center in 2010. I've been to this facility. It just exploded. September 14th, I never forget 2020. You can find me now on Google. You never could type my name in, but you can type my name in. So this thing became live. And I'm still brain fogged at this time. Like, what is a whistleblower? What did I just do? Or, you know, never thought that I would wake up every day for a certain period of time and have to hear it and hear it and hear it and hear it and hear it. I never thought that it would be to this degree. I was everywhere.

My emotions were everywhere. I was depressed. I should have been excited. I've done a good thing. I'm angry and I'm fearful at the same time. So if doing a good thing costs me my job and doing a thing costs me now my life, now I also have people on the reverse end that want my throat. now I'm messing with the commodity in a small hecktown city that they make their money

is the biggest industrial part of them flourishing in the city. Now I'm messing with that economically. So now I don't know who wants my head on a platter. That's Dawn Wooten, the whistleblower in the revelations about the Irwin County Detention Center in 2020. Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

We're listening to a story about an extraordinarily brave woman named Dawn Wooten. Wooten is a nurse in her 40s, and she's got five kids. In 2020, she was working at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia. It's an ICE facility run by a for-profit company. Wooten learned about medical maltreatment of female detainees at the center. Some truly heinous abuses were being committed. And working with an organization called Project South, Wooten helped file a complaint with the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security. But after that revelation became big news, Don Wooten's own ordeal just began.

We'll pick up her story there. My baby was at school, and somebody called me and said, we're going to kidnap your children. My son told me there was a car that hung outside of the school that they were attending every day for about a week. So I don't know if somebody wants them or not, or if somebody's after my kids to hurt me because they feel like I've hurt them because I've spoke up for something that was right. You can imagine that this kind of blowback would be so hard to navigate. And frankly, Dawn was lucky in this case to have an attorney. She also had the support of grassroots groups she was working with, like Project South, which ranged for security for her. We were whisked away under security for a couple of months.

Living hotel to hotel, every so often we had to leave a hotel in Atlanta to go stay at another hotel. It was very, very depressing. And with kids in the beginning, it's an adventure. But by the time you get to the third hotel, they're tired of being in a hotel 24, just about 7. We only came out to eat and we're back in. I mean, then going to strange places to wash clothes. And it was just not home. It was very, very depressing.

I wound up on antidepressants and my child on antidepressants and anxiety. And it was mortified. I mean, do you remember any of what they would ask you during that time or what they would say during that time? My daughter is, she'll be 20 next month. She's 19, 18 at the time. So she's got her first boyfriend at the time. They're having to talk by phone, not being home. She was like, I hate it.

I really hate it. She was like, Mom, I'm glad you spoke up, but I hate this. I hate it. So I had to sit down and talk with her and say, hey, sometimes I feel like you. Sometimes I'm like I should have kept my mouth closed. Then I have to shake myself and say, wait a minute, what if it was you? So I brought it to her that way. What if it was you wanting to bear children or you wanting to be heard or you wanting to know what was going on?

Nobody had any answers for you. That's kind of scary, isn't it? And she was like, yes, ma'am. So I brought them in that way and what we're really standing for in that moment. And let's talk about the effects that's had on you financially. I mean, it sounds like you've gone through this stretch, having a really difficult time finding work elsewhere. It has, whenever this, when it started, there was a first,

there was a go-finding out there at first. Whenever that first go fund, it did. It helped me catch my rent up. So I was caught up with the rent here, a few bills. I was able to catch my vehicle up because they were getting ready to drag it or repossess it. And then not knowing, I was not thinking that I was not going to be employed. So paid things up, paid things off, got things, bought things because I didn't want any overhead, things that the kids needed. So that money just kind of went like the wind blowing a grain of sand.

So at this point you might be thinking, don't we have whistleblower protections in place that would help someone in Don's position? And maybe you've even seen in the news stories about whistleblowers who have made millions of dollars coming forward about corporate wrongdoing. But the truth is there is no single law that protects whistleblowers. And it's actually a very complex patchwork of laws and protections. And those protections really depend on what kind of employee you are, the kind of information that you're disclosing. And so in Dawn's case, her main option was to file a whistleblower complaint with an incredibly backlogged system at the Department of Homeland Security at the Office of the Inspector General. And after that, there was very little she could do, but just wait and wait some more for the government to act. And during this time, she's trying to find steady work.

applying to job after job. And in fact, her lawyers actually sent me a spreadsheet that showed more than 100 jobs to which she'd applied, and that included, you know, COVID vaccination jobs, jobs, doing COVID tests with the nasal swabs, jobs in palliative care, nephrology. I was actually employed with the local hospital here at their nursing home facility 20 minutes from here. One of the nurses called me and said, Don, they just took you off payroll. Oh, my God.

My supervisor there at the time didn't even have. the decency to call me and say, hey, don't, they took you off your liability, whatever, whatever. So I'm thinking, okay, so, and here I am going to McDonald's. I went to the McDonald's here, and Tisner was going to flip some burgers as a nurse. And the girl recognized, you're so-and-so's mama. So she calls my daughter's name. She's like, yeah, TV.

So the manager comes out and was like, well, I better call the main office. So I never heard anything back from the McDonald's. I was like, well, darn, darn, I can't even flip burgers. Yeah. It's wild to think at a moment when our country so desperately needs nurses in the midst of this pandemic. It sounds like mostly, most of the time you just don't hear back at all. Or if I hear back from somebody, they're calling me saying, hey, we can interview you. They do their research and somebody calls back and said, oh, like I had the nursing home here in Tifton. I had them to call me and say that me and my daughter were hired. So I'm like, yeah, this was up in last year. We're going to go to work. She calls me back on a Saturday and say, I'm sorry, Ms. Wooten. They did some hiring over the weekend. If anything comes open, I'll call you. So I waited a week and I called back and I pretended to be somebody else. And I said, hi, my name is Melissa. I'm calling from Tifton, Georgia and I'm an LPN. I've been nursing for about 12 years.

Do you have any open position? Yes, yes, yes, yes. We need nurses like today. We need nurses like today. who can't put two and two together to realize that it's connected to the urban county detention center? So I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do. So I'm falling further and further and further and further behind financially. And family is like, well, we kind of needy ourselves. So it's not that you can go to family and say, hey, I need my lights or $1,100 for rent is not a lot to come by. Now I'm back in the same boat with my truck, $400 a month.

back at $1,300. And I had to tell the lady, I was like, look, I'll park it's side the road. You can come and pull it. Not even going to fight with it. Once I get back up on my feet, I just get me something else to the point to where, hey, I've got a vehicle. Now the motor's blowed up in it.

That's where I am now. The motor's gone in it. Yeah. And it sounds like right now you currently do have this nursing home job, but that you've basically been having to walk. you know, maybe even more than a mile to work, is that right? It's probably about a mile, probably about a mile and maybe an inkling, a little over, not much, but I know it's a mile, so a mile there and a mile back.

I wonder, this might be a hard question, but I wonder, like, if you could take us to kind of the lowest moment since all this happened for you. I was in a motel room dealing with security, And I think we had been arguing because at one point, security became very unprofessional. They were cursing each other out and one didn't want to take us here. And I have these kids and we're hungry. We don't care if y'all have to figure it out, drive each other, we're hungry.

So at this point, it's like, forget it. So we go back in the room and we sit. And it's like if I had just kept my mouth closed, we wouldn't be in this situation. So this is my conversation out loud and my kids are sitting. And I'm apologizing saying I should have never, I should have never brought y'all. I took y'all through this. I never thought that y'all would be going through this. Hey, I never thought it was going to be this way.

It got to a point to where it was like if I disappear, then y'all will be good. Y'all will be good because nobody will talk about me, nobody will discuss me. I'll be a figment of their imagination. I'll be a memory. I mean, and then I sit about 20 minutes and I have to pull myself back in. And I'm looking at my children going, I can't die now. I mean, not now. I can't, don't you can't die now.

Don't you can't get depressed now. Don't you can't clam up now. But I shake myself and I'm like, wait a minute. Hey, so you lay down, you wake up the next day and it's like, okay, so who wants to hear my story today? And what do you wish people knew about your experience looking over everything that you have been through in this past year? Like, what do you feel like people don't know about the long-term aftermath of what you faced? It's okay to blow the whistle. It's okay. It is okay. And this is going to sound probably weird, but you need to prepare readiness course.

life itself did not prepare me for your possibly won't be employed. If you speak out, you won't be employed. And I'm kind of sort of glad you don't get that in the beginning because I probably would not have. But it's feasible. It's workable. In the long run, you're saving somebody's life. In the long run, you're saving somebody's productivity and mental welfare and well-being, even if it means that you at some point pay a price for yours.

In May of last year, the government made a really big announcement, which is that they were terminating their ICE contract with ICDC after the revelations that had been brought public by Don and by the detained women and by the activists who've been fighting for this for so many years. So as you can imagine, that was a really big victory for all of them. But it was also very far from the end of the story because Don and the women are still waiting for justice. many of the women have filed a civil lawsuit and that is still winding its way through the courts and for Don in her case her whistleblower retaliation complaint has still not been resolved. The government legally had 180 days to respond and they blew past that deadline. They asked for more time and then they blew past another. So Dawn's lawyer, Dana Gold at the Government Accountability Project, told me that her team is fighting to change federal policy

so that people like Dawn with a credible claim could get some kind of temporary relief while they wait for the deeper investigation, which can be a really long and costly process. So gold stressed that the current protections that are in place for whistleblowers, especially low-wage ones, really just are not enough. So the question that sticks with me is, you know, what would it look like if we actually created an environment in which a whistleblower who wants to step forward and do the right thing can feel, protected to share information that really in the end protects all of us. It's like everybody's getting answers but me. And everybody's getting relief but these women. So we're the only two love hanging in the balance. These women still have scars that they have to carry from here until the end of their time on this earth.

And my voice, with their bodies, paved the way for the decision to be made. So what's holding up? Each day has lost time for me. It's lost time. Dawn Wooten is a nurse in Georgia. The company that operated the Irwin County Detention Center, LaSalle Corrections, did not respond to our request for comment about Wooten's retaliation complaint. About the allegations of mistreatment of detainees, they previously issued a statement saying this.

LaSalle Corrections is firmly committed to the health and welfare of those in our care. We are deeply committed to delivering high-quality, culturally responsive services in safe and humane environments. Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and recently she reported for us about the migrant workers who go around the country, repairing towns after hurricanes and other climate disasters. It's a really fascinating piece, and you can find it on the podcast of The New Yorker Radio Hour, anywhere that you go to to find podcasts. I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for listening to the show this week. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrillo, Brita Green, Callalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Alison McAdam, Harrison Keithline, and Mengfei Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin. We had special assistance this week from Philip Grateser on location in Georgia.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.