First posted on Instagram
Minutes after the final Michigan U.S. Senate debate ended at WXYZ-TV in Southfield on Wednesday night, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff cornered Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed in front of the assembled cameras and pressed him on the record he does not campaign on: the Wayne County juvenile detention facility he was put in charge of as the county's health director, where children in state custody were given expired medications and the state twice stepped in over conditions.
The documented record behind LeDuff's questions is long. In December 2023, two nurses at the facility filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging they were fired after complaining to superiors that the children were being given expired medications. In February 2024, the juvenile jail was placed on a second provisional license by the state after a boy was savaged by other inmates. Weeks later, a detention worker was charged — and later convicted — of sexually assaulting two boys; she is now serving a 6-to-15-year prison sentence, and one of the victims is suing the county in federal court. A security staffer, retired Detroit police officer Jalal Malik-Ikram, secretly photographed conditions inside, including a distraught teenager who ate glass from a ceiling light so he would be taken to a hospital; Malik-Ikram was fired and has his own whistleblower lawsuit.
El-Sayed's campaign pitch runs the other way. Wayne County Executive Warren Evans put him in charge of the department at a $280,000-a-year salary, and after an emergency was declared at the facility he was authorized $10 million to fix staffing, therapeutic services and other problems. He has repeatedly described the result as a triumph of his leadership — "We rebuilt it from the studs up," he has said — and presents the tenure as proof he can run big health systems. LeDuff's investigations, built on state licensing records, court filings and former employees, say the abuse allegations, licensing failures and whistleblower complaints continued long after county officials declared the intervention a success. "Nothing was fixed," Malik-Ikram told him.
That gap is why the exchange matters beyond one facility. El-Sayed's signature promise in the Senate race is Medicare for All — a federal health system for some 350 million Americans — and he asks voters to judge him on his record running health care for Wayne County's 1.8 million residents. The question put to him after the debate, and now circulating with the video, is the arithmetic of that claim: a health director who could not keep expired medicines and state shutdown threats away from roughly 150 detained kids is asking to be trusted with the medical care of a nation. The children have since been moved into the new Wayne County Criminal Justice Complex, where violence and staffing levels remain serious issues.
The confrontation capped the final debate of one of the country's most-watched Senate races, where El-Sayed faces Republican former congressman Mike Rogers for the seat that will help decide control of the Senate. Rogers spent the debate accusing El-Sayed of a "pattern of deception," and the two campaigns have less than two weeks left before the November 3 election.