[Archival audio]: No, madam.
[Archival audio]: I need help, Uta.
[Archival audio]: Are you in jail?
[Archival audio]: Yes. In prison, yes, by name …
Dhruv Mehrotra: So the sender called back. And when the sender phoned back, staff answered the phone, and essentially rejected it, saying, “Look, sorry, we are in a detention center, a detainee named 911.” And no ambulance was sent.
[Archival audio]: I’m sorry, we’re at A-
[Archival audio]: [Inaudible]
[Archival audio]: We are a detention center, Stewart Detention Center and the detainee named 911. I’m sorry.
[Archival audio]: Okay, thank you.
Dhruv Mehrotra: And even in that call, you can hear this arrested request in the background. So clearly this is a moment where someone thought they needed medical care, and they couldn’t get it, and they were prevented. And really, this is just one example, numerous family members of detainees told us the same thing. That their loved ones could not worry that they needed, even at times when they believe their loved one should be brought to the hospital for a serious crisis.
Leah Feiger: Right, and as you said, you talked to family members and you also spoke to lawyers and experts for immigration to really fill these shortcomings and contextual what you found because you had the 911 calls and not much more. What were some of these shortcomings they filled for you?
Dhruv Mehrotra: We took care not to deal with the 911 data as the full story, because sometimes it’s just an audio we have, other times it’s just a short storytelling about a medical emergency. So these calls just catch moments when an emergency was enough bad or visible enough for staff to pick up the phone and call. But experts and advocates quickly point out that for each call there are probably many others who have not been made. So in the conversations we had with lawyers and families and previously detained people, those conversations were of great importance, they gave us the context the records alone could not. A woman named Mildred Pierre, her boyfriend is a double amputist who is detained at Stewart. She told us that in the last month, he broke his prosthetic members in a fall. And he had to wait days to be even seen by medical staff at Stewart. Another example is a woman named Kylie Chinchilla, who said her daughter, who is a nursing student with a scoliosis and also an detainee at Stewart, often lets sleep on the floor with pain with parts of her face. And her condition gets worse and she hurts.
Leah Feiger: Let’s take a quick break. We will return immediately. And when we return, we will investigate further, which has led to this growth of medical crises at ice centers. When considering what factors caused this growth of medical crises at ice centers, overgrowth is one of the main one. Dhruv, can you tell me how bad is now? And is this a direct result of the immigration of current administration?
