Immigration Deportation: Female Genital Mutilation Of His Daughter Gets Man Kicked Out Of US

An Ethiopian man who was convicted for performing female genital mutilation surgery on his 2-year-old daughter was deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in Atlanta on Monday.

Khalid Adem, 41, a native and citizen of Ethiopia, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Nov. 1, 2006, after he was found guilty of using scissors to remove his daughter’s clitoris in his apartment in 2001, according to an ICE report Monday. A Georgia state judge convicted Adem for aggravated battery and cruelty to children in the first degree, causing him to be ordered moved out of the country by ICE officials on Oct. 31, 2016.

Read: Violence Against Women: Female Genital Mutilation Statistics For FGM International Awareness Day

Adem’s case was reportedly the first criminal conviction in the U.S. for female genital mutilation. Adem's wife helped efforts to create state laws specifically criminalizing the practice in 2005. The procedure entails surgically cutting the majority or all a woman or girl's external female genitalia for nonmedical purposes.

“A young girl’s life has been forever scarred by this horrible crime,” Sean W. Gallagher, an office director for the Atlanta Enforcement And Removal Operations Field Office, was quoted saying in the ICE report. "The elimination of female genital mutilation/cutting has broad implications for the health and human rights of women and girls, as well as societies at large."

Roughly 200 million girls and women living in 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East have experienced undergoing female genital mutilation at some point in their lives, the World Health Organization reported in 2013. The majority of the girls were cut before turning 15-years-old. In Africa, where the practice is largely implemented along cultural and religious lines in an effort to reduce a woman’s sexual libido and ensure virginity and marital fidelity, three million girls and women were at risk of undergoing the procedure every year, the Independent reported in 2014.

ICE has arrested more than 380 people for human rights-related violations since 2003 and deported more than 780 known or suspected human rights violators from the country.

The Department of Homeland Security currently has more than 160 active investigations into suspected human rights violators in the U.S. and is pursuing more than 1,750 possible deportation cases involving alleged human rights violators from 25 different countries.