Newsweek: Whistleblowers Keep America Honest, So Keep Them Safe | Opinion

Newsweek: Whistleblowers Keep America Honest, So Keep Them Safe | Opinion

This article was written by Government Accountability Project Senior Counsel, Dana Gold, and was originally published here.

If we care about the information provided by whistleblowers, we need to care about the whistleblowers too.

Last month, the bipartisan Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing on the medical mistreatment of women in ICE detention after conducting an 18-month investigation spurred by “a September 2020 whistleblower complaint.” The subcommittee found that dozens, and possibly hundreds, of immigrant women at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia had been subjected to nonconsensual, medically unnecessary surgeries that created health risks and rendered many women sterile, with the contracted doctor at the facility performing 90 percent of four types of invasive procedures on just 4 percent of the entire population of women in ICE detention. It also found that ICE Health Services Corps’ processes for vetting contracted medical providers and approving procedures were woefully inadequate and would have failed to detect the wrongdoing.

At the hearing, PSI Chairman Sen. John Ossoff (D-GA) asked Dr. Stewart Smith, the ICE Health Services Corps assistant director, a question that should have never been necessary to proffer: “[h]ow did you allow dozens if not hundreds of women to be subjected to unnecessary gynecological surgery? How did that happen?”

Dr. Smith testified, “…we weren’t aware of these complaints until we… received those… the whistleblower complaint, so we just didn’t have access to that information.”

While reference to the “whistleblower complaint” was made throughout the hearing, the recognition, not to mention humanization, of that whistleblower was strangely absent. That whistleblower, like all whistleblowers, is a person. Her name is Dawn Wooten.

Wooten is a Black single mother of five, who worked as a nurse at ICDC and chose to speak up rather than stay silent in the face of horrific conditions she encountered at the facility. Wooten began raising concerns internally about the utter disregard by management for preventing the spread of Covid-19 among immigrants and workers, as well as, most shockingly, that numerous immigrant women were undergoing life-changing gynecological procedures that left them sterile without knowing why or what had happened to them.

Wooten’s questions prompted her demotion from a full-time to an on-call position, after which she filed a whistleblower disclosure with the DHS Office of the Inspector General and Congress in September 2020. The complaints sparked viral media coverage, spurred multiple congressional and agency investigations, and opened the door for immigrant survivors to come forward and file a class action lawsuit.

Within a year after her decision to publicly speak out about the shocking negligence and abuse, DHS terminated the ICE contract for immigration detention at that facility. And as last month’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing just established, but for Wooten’s whistleblower complaint, women would still be undergoing nonconsensual surgeries at ICDC today.

But how was Wooten rewarded for her heroism? In short, she has been explicitly blacklisted from hundreds of pandemic-era nursing jobs after being recognized as “the whistleblower,” the national press coverage of her whistleblowing led to threats to her and her children’s lives, and many in her community blame her for the economic woes that accompanied the misconduct she exposed.

Wooten’s whistleblowing, critical as it was to exposing and stopping grotesque abuses at ICDC, has exacted enormous mental, emotional, and financial costs—costs that are unfortunately predictable and familiar to many whistleblowers. And while DHS acted quickly on Wooten’s disclosures, it has not issued findings in her retaliation complaint filed more than two years ago. This delay in justice is all too common for whistleblowers, most of whom wait for years, typically un- or underemployed and professionally radioactive, for agencies to investigate and enforce the patchwork of whistleblower protection laws.

To be sure, Wooten has also been commended for her truth-telling, receiving the HMH Foundation’s First Amendment Award, as well as awards from the Public Health Nursing Section of the American Public Health Association and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). As her attorney, I can attest that these honors validating the importance of her whistleblowing have helped sustain her resilience and firm conviction that she did the right thing despite the costs.

But honors don’t restore careers or offer justice; better legal protections do. In this lame duck session, Congress has multiple opportunities to strengthen legal protections for whistleblowers. One, an amendment to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, would give FBI whistleblowers parity rights with federal employee whistleblowers. This dovetails with the most significant reform, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act, H.R. 2988, which would modernize current law to provide federal employee whistleblowers with access to courts to seek justice from a jury if the administrative investigative process is unduly delayed and would protect against retaliatory investigations as soon as they’re opened. These bills have passed the House and are now in the hands of the Senate to pass into law.

Whistleblowers are often the only defense against abuses of power—like those suffered by immigrant women at ICDC—that would otherwise go unchecked. As the bipartisan Senate HSGAC Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations just demonstrated, fraud, waste, and abuse aren’t the province of a single party, and Congress, no matter which party is in power, depends on whistleblowers—ethical employees just like Dawn Wooten—to do its job of oversight.

Congress this term could—and should—renew its historically bipartisan support for whistleblower protection legislation. Our whistleblowers, and all of us, deserve nothing less.

Dana Gold is senior counsel and director of the Democracy Protection Initiative of the Government Accountability Project, a national non-profit whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.