On the campaign trail, Michigan’s left-wing Democratic Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, has boasted that he “rebuilt” the troubled Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility “from the studs” while serving as the Detroit-area county’s health chief. Court filings, whistleblower reports, and state health records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon tell a different story.
They show that in the months after El-Sayed declared a March 2023 “public health emergency order” that put him in charge of the facility—and provided him with millions of tax dollars to improve the facility—state investigators found it “flooded with sewage and garbage” as well as “dried feces and bodily fluids.” Rooms went months without being cleaned, and juvenile inmates were “not able to brush their teeth daily or shower,” according to the investigators. When Wayne County lifted the emergency order in June 2023, El-Sayed said he had addressed the facility’s most pressing issue—overcrowding—by hiring dozens of additional staffers, and floated plans to “build in-facility mental health treatment.” Three months later, in September 2023, state officials revoked the facility’s full operational license, placing it on probationary status, records show.
The records contradict comments El-Sayed has made as a Senate candidate running in a tight Democratic primary against congresswoman Haley Stevens and state senator Mallory McMorrow. El-Sayed—who, unlike his opponents, has not served in elected office—has cited his time overseeing the facility as proof of his governance chops, arguing that he took over the jail during a state of “emergency,” transforming its operations.
“We worked with the county executive to declare a public health state of emergency. For three months we rebuilt from the ground up the operations in that facility,” El-Sayed told the Michigan Chronicle in May. “We upgraded the food quality three times over.” Days later, he tweeted that he “led the rebuild from the studs.”
El-Sayed, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment, was tapped to replace the outgoing director of the Wayne County Health, Human, and Veterans Services Department in December 2022. He served as a consultant to the department before formally starting the role on March 1, 2023.
Less than two weeks after he started, on March 14 and 15, a 12-year-old male detainee was “viciously beaten and anally gang raped” by a group of fellow inmates who had been left unsupervised by staff, according to a lawsuit the detainee’s mother filed one year later. The incident prompted El-Sayed and Wayne County executive Warren Evans (D.) to declare a public health emergency order due to “violent incidents, accusations of physical and sexual assaults, [and] an environment that is dangerous and not conducive to mental, physical or general health.” The declaration created an “incident command structure” that reported to El-Sayed and authorized him to spend $10 million in emergency funding to “expedite action to adequately staff and provide therapeutic services in the facility.”
At the same time, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services conducted an investigation. On March 23, 2023, two days after El-Sayed declared the emergency, a state investigator visited the facility, observing “poor living conditions” that were “flooded with sewage and garbage.” One “pod”—a living unit housing multiple detainees—”had smeared and dried feces on the walls and bodily fluids splattered on the walls. The middle bedroom had dried feces in the air vent. Trash was on the floor.”
County officials told the investigator that the pod had been cleaned the next day, but when the investigator returned on March 30, the “walls continued to have the same dried and smeared feces on the wall as well as other bodily fluids.” That was still the case about a month later, on April 20, 2023, when the investigator noted that “the same walls have not been cleaned yet.”
“Pod C had youth feces on the air vents in a bedroom that was being occupied by Youth A,” the investigator wrote in a report sent to Wayne County. “Youth A has been in that room for over three months with no one cleaning or disinfecting the room. The walls outside of his room also had dried feces and bodily fluids on it. Even after reporting this information … it was not cleaned or disinfected in a safe manner.”
The state investigator also reported that juvenile detainees “do not have proper hygiene supplies,” including toothbrushes, toothpaste, and deodorant, and some went a week and a half without showering. “Youth D reported that they sometimes don’t have toilet paper or only just a few sheets,” the investigator wrote.
The state submitted those investigative findings in September 2023, determining that the facility was “not in compliance with all applicable licensing statutes and rules” and placing it on probation for six months. Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) spokesman Bob Wheaton told the Detroit News that while the county had “made progress” during the public health emergency, it needed to “improve more to meet licensing requirements.”
“MDHHS will maintain its 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week presence at Wayne County Juvenile Detention Center and will continue to work collaboratively with the county so it can make the changes needed to have its license restored to regular status and for the good of the youth there,” he said.
El-Sayed had portrayed the facility in a different light months earlier, in June 2023, when the county lifted the emergency order after claiming to have addressed “staffing and overcrowding conditions.” In an interview with CBS News, El-Sayed said the hiring of an additional 54 staffers had allowed the facility to place “no more than 20” juvenile detainees in a “pod” instead of 50. As a result, the chair of the Wayne County Commission, Alisha Bell, said the facility was “operating the way it’s supposed to operate.” With the overcrowding issue addressed, El-Sayed added, the county could begin focusing on other issues, such as building an “in-facility mental health treatment for youths who have been adjudicated, meaning they require a long-term residential stay bed, but haven’t necessarily gotten one.”
El-Sayed left his role as director of the county health department in April 2025, but not before the facility was plagued with additional allegations of abuse.
Two nurses at the facility who were hired during El-Sayed’s tenure, Tanzy Huddleston and Shermanstine Morrow, said inmates were given expired medicine and staffers failed to properly document medical treatments. They sued the county in December 2023, alleging that they were fired after reporting their concerns to their supervisors.
In April 2024, a female “juvenile detention specialist” at the facility was arrested for sexually assaulting two male detainees, one aged 16 and the other aged 17. She was found guilty two months after El-Sayed resigned as county health director, and she was sentenced to between 71 months and 15 years in prison shortly thereafter.
One of the victims sued the detention center last month, saying that county officials and the facility’s staff failed to protect him. The complaint cites El-Sayed’s “public health emergency order,” along with the whistleblower complaints and assault allegations that followed it, as proof that the county “fostered an atmosphere and widespread culture of deliberate indifference to the protection of the civil rights.”
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