Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has built a central piece of his campaign around a claim that he "rebuilt from the studs" a troubled juvenile detention facility in Wayne County. Court filings, whistleblower reports, and state health records paint a starkly different picture, one of feces-smeared walls, children denied showers for over a week, and a facility that lost its full operating license on his watch.
The Washington Free Beacon reviewed the records and found that months after El-Sayed declared a public health emergency and took charge of the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility, armed with $10 million in emergency funding, state investigators described conditions inside as "flooded with sewage and garbage." Rooms were caked in "dried feces and bodily fluids." Juvenile inmates could not brush their teeth daily or shower regularly.
By September 2023, Michigan revoked the facility's full operational license and placed it on probation. That was three months after El-Sayed and Wayne County officials declared the emergency over and celebrated their progress.
El-Sayed was tapped to lead Wayne County's Health, Human, and Veterans Services Department in December 2022. He served as a consultant before formally starting on March 1, 2023. Less than two weeks later, on March 14 and 15, a 12-year-old male detainee was, in the words of a lawsuit filed by the boy's mother, "viciously beaten and anally gang raped" by fellow inmates left unsupervised by staff.
That assault prompted El-Sayed and Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, a Democrat, to declare a public health emergency on March 21, 2023, citing "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 reporting directly to El-Sayed and authorized him to spend $10 million in emergency funding to hire staff and provide therapeutic services.
Two days after the emergency declaration, on March 23, a state investigator from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services visited the facility. What the investigator found was not a facility under competent new management. It was a facility in squalor.
One "pod", a living unit housing multiple detainees, "had smeared and dried feces on the walls and bodily fluids splattered on the walls," the investigator wrote. "The middle bedroom had dried feces in the air vent. Trash was on the floor."
County officials told the investigator the pod had been cleaned the following day. It had not. When the investigator returned on March 30, the walls still bore the same dried feces and bodily fluids. A month later, on April 20, the investigator noted the walls remained uncleaned.
The state's report described one youth, identified as "Youth A," who had been living in a room with feces on the air vents for more than three months. No one had cleaned or disinfected it, even after the investigator flagged the problem.
Juvenile detainees lacked basic hygiene supplies. Some had no toothbrushes, toothpaste, or deodorant. One detainee reported going a week and a half without a shower. Another said they "sometimes don't have toilet paper or only just a few sheets."
These are the conditions that persisted while El-Sayed held authority over the facility and had access to millions in emergency funds earmarked to fix it. Progressive candidates often campaign on compassion for vulnerable populations. The question here is whether the compassion extended past the press release.
El-Sayed is not alone among left-leaning figures whose records clash with their rhetoric. Similar gaps between stated principles and actual conduct have surfaced across the progressive wing in recent years.
In June 2023, Wayne County lifted the emergency order, claiming it had addressed "staffing and overcrowding conditions." El-Sayed gave an interview to CBS News in which he said the hiring of 54 additional staffers allowed the facility to cap a pod at 20 juvenile detainees instead of 50. Alisha Bell, chair of the Wayne County Commission, declared the facility was "operating the way it's supposed to operate."
El-Sayed used the moment to outline his next ambitions, building "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."
Three months later, the state pulled the facility's full license.
Michigan DHHS 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." The state placed the facility on six months of probation and committed to maintaining a round-the-clock presence at the detention center.
None of this has stopped El-Sayed from running on the record. In a May interview with the Michigan Chronicle, he framed his tenure at the facility as a success story:
"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. We upgraded the food quality three times over."
Days later, he tweeted that he "led the rebuild from the studs."
El-Sayed is running in a competitive Democratic primary for Michigan's U.S. Senate seat against Congresswoman Haley Stevens and state Senator Mallory McMorrow. Unlike his opponents, he has never held elected office. His oversight of the Wayne County facility is the closest thing on his résumé to a governing credential, which makes the gap between his claims and the state's findings all the more consequential for primary voters trying to evaluate his competence.
His campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon's request for comment.
El-Sayed's candidacy has drawn support from progressive allies. Bernie Sanders rallied with him in Detroit, lending the national progressive brand to a candidate whose signature achievement now faces serious scrutiny.
El-Sayed left the county health department in April 2025. But the facility's troubles continued throughout his tenure, and the allegations grew worse.
Two nurses hired during El-Sayed's time at the department, Tanzy Huddleston and Shermanstine Morrow, filed a lawsuit in December 2023 alleging that juvenile detainees were given expired medicine and that staffers failed to properly document medical treatments. Both nurses said they were fired after reporting their concerns to supervisors.
In April 2024, a female "juvenile detention specialist" at the facility was arrested for sexually assaulting two male detainees, ages 16 and 17. She was found guilty two months after El-Sayed resigned as county health director and was sentenced to between 71 months and 15 years in prison.
One of the victims sued the detention center last month. The complaint cites El-Sayed's public health emergency order, the whistleblower complaints, and the subsequent assault allegations as proof that the county "fostered an atmosphere and widespread culture of deliberate indifference to the protection of the civil rights" of the juveniles in its care.
That phrase, "deliberate indifference", carries legal weight. It is the standard courts use to evaluate whether officials failed so completely in their duty that the failure amounts to a constitutional violation. The lawsuit names the facility and county officials, not El-Sayed personally, but the timeline it lays out runs directly through his period of authority.
Sanders, for his part, has shown a pattern of standing by allies even when their records come under fire. He doubled down on a scandal-plagued Maine Senate candidate rather than address the underlying concerns, a posture that may not serve Michigan primary voters looking for honest answers about El-Sayed's record.
The central question for Michigan Democrats is straightforward. El-Sayed took charge of a juvenile facility in crisis. He had emergency authority. He had $10 million. He had a staff mandate. And by the time the state weighed in, children were still living in rooms smeared with feces, going days without basic hygiene, and the facility had lost its full license.
Did El-Sayed make some improvements? The state acknowledged "progress" on overcrowding. But progress on one metric does not excuse the conditions investigators found on every other. And it certainly does not justify the campaign-trail claim that he "rebuilt from the studs" a facility the state placed on probation.
Voters can judge whether progressive rhetoric and governing results match up as often as the left claims. In this case, the record is in the state files, the court filings, and the whistleblower complaints. It does not match the stump speech.
El-Sayed wants a promotion. The children who lived in those conditions didn't even get clean walls.
