Detroit physician Dr. Jumana Nagarwalawas first charged with performing mutilations in 2017.
She was accused of performing barbaric mutilations on young girls in several states.
Federal prosecutors say Nagarwala was part of a secret network of physicians in a tight-knit Indian-Muslim community who were cutting 7-year-old girls across the country for years as part of a brutal and barbaric custom.
Federal prosecutor Amy Markopoulos said in court “this was not a discrete, one-time occasion. ... It was not arbitrary.”
The Detroit Free Press reports:
“In a courtroom hearing Thursday, the government disclosed for the first time publicly that female physicians in California and Illinois also were performing FGM procedures on minor girls who belonged to their small Indian Muslim sect, known as the Dawoodi Bohras. They also alleged that Nagarwala — the lead defendant in Detroit's historic FGM case — traveled to the Washington D.C. area to perform FGM on as many as five minor girls there…
Nagarwala is charged with performing FGM on nine minor girls from Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota, including some who cried, screamed and bled during the procedure and one who was given Valium ground in liquid Tylenol to keep her calm, court records show. Prosecutors allege she performed these procedures after hours in a Livonia clinic that belonged to another doctor, who is also charged in the case, along with his wife.”
Back in 2018, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman ruled that federal law banning female genital mutilation was “unconstitutional” and thus many of the charges against Nagarwala was dropped.
Congress has since passed a new and tougher federal female genital mutilation statute, which went into effect in 2020 and calling the practice “a form of child abuse, gender discrimination, and violence."
That new law allows federal authorities to prosecute people who carry out or conspire to carry out female genital mutilation and increase the maximum prison sentence from five to 10 years.
Prosecutor believe Nagarwala carried out the brutal procedure on as many as 100 minor girls over a decade.