Abdul El-Sayed's House of Horrors

Abdul El-Sayed, the unlicensed doctor, says he’s got the chops and experience to govern from D.C.

But does he?

On the campaign trail, on television, and online, he talks about his tenure as the Wayne County Health Director and his miraculous turn around of the fetid and violent juvenile detention facility.

“We had to rebuild it from the ground up,” he told a crowd of black pastors.

“We rebuilt it from the studs up,” he told a group of black Democrats.

“When the juvenile detention facility was in shambles, I declared a public health state of emergency to rebuild it,” he told CBS.

But those claims don’t hold up when you examine the officials records, court filings, or talk to people who actually worked at the juvenile jail. Those employees paint a picture of horror, abuse, and incompetence.

“Nothing was fixed,” said Jalal Malik-Ikram, a retired Detroit cop and former security officer at the juvenile jailhouse. “It was like prison. The kids called the shots, and their care and safety were beyond terrible.”

Malik-Ikram was fired for taking secret photographs to document the abuse. El-Sayed may have built the studs, but he forgot to lay a foundation.

“They were giving the kids expired medications,” Malik-Ikram said. “Or we couldn’t give the meds at all because it wasn’t safe. School? Education? There wasn’t none to speak of.”

El-Sayed came to work for Wayne County in 2023. His resume listed few professional jobs beyond his 16 months as the Detroit Health Director. He quit that job in 2017, ran for governor, and lost. From there he became a paid talking head for CNN during the Covid pandemic. Citing standard talking points, El-Sayed got most things wrong, including the benefits of school lockouts, masking outdoors, and the efficacy of the vaccine.

But El-Sayed was a “get” for the scandal-plagued county, whose Covid nursing home response was under intense scrutiny as was the plummeting life expectancy of Detroiters. In El-Sayed, they had themselves a real life TV doctor.

Wayne County paid him big—about $280,000 a year. That was $100,000 more than his predecessor, a black female, and $100,000 more than his successor, also a black female. This disparity came despite El-Sayed’s social justice position decrying the pay gap between white men and black women.

The month El-Sayed came aboard full-time with the county—March 2023—a 12-year-old boy was gang raped in the juvenile jail. Squalid and overcrowded, the deteriorating facility with overflowing sewage was a dumping ground not just for Detroit and Wayne County delinquents, but also for juveniles from across the state.

It was the embarrassed County Executive Warren Evans—not El-Sayed—who declared a three-month state of emergency. It was Evans who appointed El-Sayed his juvenile jail czar and handed him $10 million. El-Sayed spent the money. The kids got fresh underpants, the guards got a pay raise, but little else changed.

“[We] reorganized healthcare at the facility, raised salaries and wages by 35% to retain staff, and provided daily access to to hygiene products and clean underwear,” he told the Detroit News.

And it was Evans, the county executive, who lifted the emergency declaration in June 2023, calling El-Sayed’s 10-week tenure a great success.

But it wasn’t a great success. A week later, another kid was raped. Another week, and another beating. A few months later, the facility’s license was downgraded to a “provisional” status—requiring state supervision.

The findings by a state investigator were appalling—violence, irregular meals, 22-hour lockdowns.

In December 2023, two nurses filed a whistleblower lawsuit, alleging that they were fired after complaining to superiors that the children were being given expired medications.

In February 2024, the juvenile jail was given a second “provisional” license after a boy was savaged by other inmates.

Weeks later, a detention worker was charged and later convicted of the sexual assault of two boys. She is currently serving a 6-to-15-year prison sentence. One of the victims is now suing the county in federal court.

That’s when Malik-Ikram began snapping his photographs.

He tells the story of a gay teenager so distraught about being left in the general population that he pulled the florescent light bulbs out of the ceiling to harm himself.

“The kid ate the glass so they’d take him to the hospital,” Malik-Ikram recalled. “That way, he figured, when he come back to lock-up, he’d get placed on the safe floor. But they wouldn’t put him on the safe floor, so the kid would eat glass again. When that didn’t work, he got violent, and that’s when security officers slammed the kid’s head into the wall. I saw that, and I took pictures.”

Malik-Ikram was fired. He, too, has an active whistleblower lawsuit.

Last year, the children were moved into the new Wayne County Criminal Justice Complex, a project engulfed in corruption and cost-overruns. Violence and staffing levels remain serious issues there.

El-Sayed is now asking voters to consider his record at the juvenile jail as he pushes for Medicare for All when the truth is that he couldn’t manage medical care in a juvenile jailhouse.

But on the upside, he got kids toothbrushes and underpants.