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In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that's my priority.”

It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In the summer of 2021, I had just returned to work from maternity leave and was scouting around for my next story. By chance, I was connected with an immigrant rights advocate who told me about a fatal fire a few years earlier in a house for workers at a large dairy farm in southwestern Michigan. Two Mexican immigrant workers had died.

Until then, I hadn’t thought about the immigrants who work — and often live — on America’s dairy farms. I am the daughter of immigrants, and I grew up in Michigan. But much of what I knew about immigrant labor was about people who work in other industries: construction, factories, restaurants. Dairy work was unfamiliar terrain.

I began requesting records related to the fire, but soon other stories pulled me away. It took close to a year before I was able to return my focus to that fire and the broader issues affecting immigrant dairy workers. I requested logs of 911 calls tied to some of the largest farms in the Midwest. The records I received showed a dark slice of life: horrific accidents, unpaid wages, problems with overcrowded housing and extreme isolation. I also got records from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and saw how limited that agency is in its ability to investigate deaths and injuries on smaller farms.

From the start, one case stood out: the death of a Nicaraguan boy named Jefferson Rodríguez, who lived on a dairy farm in Wisconsin with his father, a worker there. The sheriff’s report was devastating: The boy had been run over by a skid steer, a 6,700-pound piece of machinery used to scrape manure off barn floors. Just one deputy investigating what happened spoke any Spanish. When she interviewed José, the boy’s father, he was almost incoherent. Eventually, the deputy concluded that José had been operating the skid steer, and the boy’s death was ruled an accident. But José was publicly blamed. Local media covered what happened as the tragic story of an immigrant who accidentally killed his son. It appeared that reporters never spoke with José or any of the other workers on the farm that night.

The first time I visited Wisconsin, I looked for José. I drove past the farm where Jefferson had died to get a sense of the place, then pulled over in a spot where my phone got reception and searched for the nearest Mexican restaurant. Once there, I went straight to the kitchen and asked if anybody from Nicaragua worked there. I couldn’t imagine there would be many immigrants from that part of Central America in this tiny community a little north of Madison. As luck would have it, a man from northern Nicaragua came out and told me he had once worked with José on a different farm. Later, during his lunch break, we went to his apartment and I watched as he sent José a voice message on WhatsApp about me. José told him he could give me his phone number.

Until this moment, I assumed that law enforcement had gotten the story right. But in the weeks and months that followed, I learned about an entirely different version of events from José, his attorney and dozens of immigrants in the community: Another worker, on his first day on the job and with little training, had accidentally run over the boy. Deputies never spoke to that man, who like José was undocumented.

Around this time, my colleague Maryam Jameel joined me in the reporting. Like me, she is bilingual and the daughter of immigrants. As an engagement reporter, she has given a lot of thought to how we find and get our journalism to hard-to-reach communities. We knew that writing about Jefferson’s death and the broader issues affecting dairy workers would be difficult. Workers are isolated, often living in old houses or trailers on the farms. Workers routinely put in 12 to 18 hours a day and are exhausted. And they’re afraid of losing their jobs and their housing, or getting deported, if they speak out.

It took months to convince José, who was in the midst of a wrongful death lawsuit against the farm, to sit down for a lengthy interview. He finally did one morning in December 2022 in a cold mobile home on the farm where he now works. As José described his decision to make the dangerous trek across Central America and Mexico with his oldest son, Maryam and I wept. Once in Wisconsin, José and his son moved into a room above a milking parlor, the barn where cows are milked day and night. (In a deposition, the farm owners said workers only stayed in the rooms above the parlor between shifts or when the weather was bad. More than a half-dozen former workers and visitors to the farm told us that Jefferson, his father and other workers lived there.)

José told us he knew people in his community thought he was an irresponsible father. And he was bewildered by law enforcement; he wondered if deputies didn’t ask him direct questions about the accident because they felt sorry for him. That day, he seemed relieved to talk, as if he’d been waiting for somebody to ask him what had happened that night on the farm.

We spent months searching for others who worked on the farm, including the worker who accidentally killed Jefferson. He’d left the state and was trying to start over. He was scared to talk, but Maryam — in her gentle but persistent way — was able to convince him to do so. We also interviewed the deputy who questioned José the night his son died. We discovered she’d made a grammatical error in Spanish that led her to misunderstand what had happened.

Maryam and I tried to write this story with nuance and empathy. It was important to us to show every person’s humanity and agency, particularly the immigrants we interviewed who rarely saw themselves as victims but live and work in conditions that few Americans can imagine for themselves.

After we published the story about Jefferson’s death, we continued our reporting, interviewing more than 130 current and former dairy workers. We wrote about the consequences for Wisconsin’s dairy industry and workers of a state law that bans undocumented immigrants from driving. We examined OSHA’s haphazard track record of investigating deaths on small farms in Wisconsin and across the country. And we wrote about how workers are routinely injured on dairy farms — then discarded, fired and evicted. Many were unable to get help to treat their injuries, as small farms are excluded from the state’s workers’ compensation requirements.

And on Tuesday, we published a story about the unregulated, often substandard housing that many dairy farms provide for their immigrant workers. Because dairy jobs are year-round — unlike seasonal agricultural work such as picking cherries or tomatoes — many federal and state laws covering migrant farmworker rights, including housing standards, don’t apply. As a result, employer-provided housing on dairy farms typically doesn’t get inspected.

Which brings me back to the fatal house fire in southwestern Michigan that left two immigrant workers dead in the early hours of April 25, 2018.

This month, I dug out the inch-thick, green file folder where I’d stashed the records I had begun collecting back in the summer of 2021. The workers’ employer, Riedstra Dairy, provided lodging to the two men who died and a half-dozen others in a house a few miles from the farm in the town of Mendon, according to records.

Because dairy workers don’t meet the state’s definition of migrant workers, the house wasn’t required to undergo an inspection by the state’s migrant labor housing program. And so it hadn’t been inspected, according to a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

The local Fire Department investigated the blaze, as did the Michigan State Police. Neither could determine what caused it.

In a phone interview, the farm’s owner told me that the house was routinely inspected by a third party who, just a few weeks before the fire, had ensured there were working smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers. “We want our people to be safe,” he said.

Reading through the files again, I remembered what it felt like to be back at the beginning of a new project, learning about the lives and deaths of the people who, as one sociologist put it, are “milking in the shadows” of America’s Dairyland.

The men died from smoke inhalation; they were likely sleeping at the time of fire. The others were either working a 12-hour shift or buying groceries in a nearby town. One later told police that as they returned from the store, they found themselves “following a fire truck and then they realized it was their home that was burning,” according to one report.

After the fire, the local American Red Cross provided the remaining workers with emergency lodging and funds to cover urgent needs. The Mexican Consulate in Detroit helped arrange for the bodies to be sent home.

A consular official who interviewed the survivors in the days after the fire encouraged me to keep looking into the broader issues affecting immigrant dairy workers. “They’re just the most vulnerable people,” he said. “And it’s really difficult to get them to talk about any work-related incidents happening, perhaps because of fear of retaliation. They don’t want to lose their jobs.”

Maryam and I are still finishing up a few pieces for our “America’s Dairyland” series. We are also putting together a guide in Spanish for dairy workers in Wisconsin who get injured on the job, and we’re following up on some tips about assaults and racism on dairy farms.

After that, we want to look more broadly at other stories to pursue this year at the intersection of labor and immigration. If you have an idea, we’d love to hear it.

Help ProPublica reporters investigate the immigration system. Fill out our questionnaire here.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

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When Judy Kalepp became the municipal court judge in Abbotsford, Wisconsin, more than a decade ago, she was shocked to see how many Latinos were ticketed for driving without a license. She asked herself: Couldn’t they just get licensed and stop breaking the law?

Then she got to know some of the drivers, mostly Mexican immigrants who lived and worked in the community. Despite not speaking Spanish, she was able to communicate with many of them and learn that they were undocumented and prohibited by state law from getting driver’s licenses.

Over time, her views changed. While she still worries about road safety with so many unlicensed immigrants driving, she’s also come to recognize how important their labor is to the area around Abbotsford, a Central Wisconsin town that’s home to a meatpacking facility and is surrounded by dairy farms.

“The more I see of it,” Kalepp said, “the more I think we’re probably wrong in not allowing them to get a license.”

Last week ProPublica reported on how Wisconsin, a state that bills itself as “America’s Dairyland,” relies on undocumented immigrants to work on its dairy farms but doesn’t let them drive. As a result, many undocumented dairy workers struggle to take care of some of their most basic needs — from buying groceries and cashing in checks to visiting the doctor or taking their kids to school. They say they are trapped on the farms where they work and often live, dependent on others to take them where they need to go.

Immigrants who break the law and drive anyway risk getting ticketed and receiving hefty fines or even being arrested or deported. “It’s scary to drive,” said an undocumented Honduran immigrant who works on a farm near Abbotsford.

He’s lived mostly in isolation in his 10 years in Wisconsin: He’s never visited Milwaukee, he rarely sees friends from back home (they can’t legally drive either), and he doesn’t know how or when he’d ever meet a romantic partner. But he still gets behind the wheel six days a week to get to work — and then again every two weeks to go into town to cash his check, buy groceries and do his laundry. “To get anything done,” he said, “you have to drive.”

For years, advocates for immigrants have tried to persuade lawmakers in Wisconsin to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. Democrats have been mostly on board, with Gov. Tony Evers inserting the issue into his budget proposals. The challenge has been convincing Republicans, who control the state Legislature, to take an action that some of their constituents might fiercely oppose.

“I have some Republican voters and Republican colleagues that say, ‘Hey, they came here illegally. They didn’t come here through legal channels, so they shouldn’t be rewarded,’” said Rep. Patrick Snyder, a GOP lawmaker whose district sits a little to the east of Abbotsford and includes parts of Marathon County. “I understand their concerns. But in the same sense, if we suddenly kicked out all of the people here, the undocumented, our dairy farms would collapse. We have to come up with a solution.”

Snyder is one of a number of Republican lawmakers and local officials from the area who met with law enforcement officials, dairy farmers, civic leaders and immigration rights advocates in Abbotsford in March to discuss the impact on the community of a 2006 law banning undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses. Wisconsin is one of 31 states that doesn’t allow undocumented immigrants to drive legally.

The meeting in Abbotsford, which straddles the border of Clark and Marathon counties, offers a window into how the politics around this issue might be changing. Some local officials who live in these places and routinely interact with undocumented immigrant drivers or hear from local dairy farmers are becoming more vocal about changing the law.

Like much of rural Wisconsin, both counties voted solidly in 2020 for then-President Donald Trump, whose stance against illegal immigration was a hallmark of his presidency.

Abbotsford, with a population of about 2,100, has a downtown that’s lined with Mexican restaurants and grocery stores. Local residents and dairy workers from around the area drive in to cash their checks, buy tortillas and other staples from back home, and go to the municipal court to pay their tickets for driving without a license.

This $124 citation is, by far, the most common processed in the municipal court, accounting for nearly one in three cases that ended with a guilty disposition and more than $19,000 in fines last year, records show. The court does not track defendants’ race or ethnicity, but ProPublica found that 134 of the 157 tickets for driving without a valid license involved defendants with common Hispanic surnames, such as Cruz, Lopez and Garcia. (The U.S. Census Bureau says more than 85% of people with these last names are Hispanic.)

Jason Bauer, the chief of the Colby-Abbotsford Police Department, said he wishes the state would allow undocumented immigrants to get trained and tested to get driver’s licenses. But in the meantime, he said, he can’t tell his officers to stop enforcing the law when they encounter a driver without a license. “Then I’d have to say, ‘You’ve got to treat everybody the same,” he said, “including the 15-year-old white kids” who are driving.

Still, tickets for driving without a license are so common that Bauer has asked his officers to stop seeking criminal charges on repeat offenses — which is what typically happens — to help drivers avoid mandatory court appearances. Bauer said he also wants to avoid overwhelming his local county district attorneys. (Melissa Inlow, Clark County’s district attorney, said she stopped pressing criminal charges on repeat offenses for driving without a license last fall due to limited resources, but drivers still have to pay a fine.)

Abbotsford Mayor Jim Weix said he talks to Bauer several times a week and knows just how frequently drivers are ticketed for this offense. Weix is a Republican who backs Trump and supports tougher border policies. But he doesn’t think the current state law, which lets undocumented immigrants own cars but prohibits them from driving, makes sense.

“We need these people to learn how to drive and our rules and regulations and everything,” Weix said.

But like many fellow Republicans, Weix worries about voter fraud and said he wouldn’t want undocumented immigrants to use driver’s licenses to vote illegally. Since Wisconsin residents can use driver’s licenses as proof of ID for voting, he would urge lawmakers to ensure that any type of driver’s license that’s created for undocumented immigrants be clearly marked “not to be used for voting.”

At the March meeting, law enforcement officials expressed concern about having so many people on the road who haven’t passed a local driving test. “That’s a danger. We want to keep roads safe,” Clark County Sheriff Scott Haines said in an interview. “I am looking more for the safety of all citizens.”

Haines said the meeting opened his eyes to the issue’s complexities. But he said changing the law “is out of our hands.” Like Bauer, he said that unless the Legislature allows undocumented immigrants to get licenses, he has to enforce the law.

Dairy farmers at the meeting spoke about how the state law makes it difficult for their workers to get to and from work without risking tickets and arrest. Among the farmers: Hans Breitenmoser, who operates a 470-cow farm in Lincoln County, northeast of Abbotsford.

“Dairy cows are 24/7,” Breitenmoser said in an interview. “I don’t have the luxury of just shutting down the machines. We have to milk them every single day, three times a day. If someone doesn’t show up it’s kind of a big deal compared to in other industries; we’re dealing with live creatures.”

ProPublica reached out to the four Republican lawmakers who attended, as identified by the meeting’s organizers and other attendees. Sen. Jesse James declined to comment, though he recently told Wisconsin Public Radio he would be open to considering legislation to give undocumented immigrants access to driver’s licenses. Rep. Calvin Callahan did not respond to interview requests. But in a June press release, he explained how Republicans had removed “liberal wish list” items from the governor’s budget proposal, including driver’s licenses and other “new benefits for illegal immigrants.”

Meanwhile, Snyder and Rep. Donna Rozar, whose district includes Abbotsford, said they’d support legislation restoring driving privileges to undocumented immigrants in Wisconsin. But both acknowledged it’d be a tough sell to some of their Republican colleagues.

The real problem, they said, is Congress’ failure to fix the country’s broken immigration system.

“There are a lot of us that believe we’re being invaded and the federal government doesn’t care,” Rozar said. “And I get the sense that some of my colleagues believe that if we start chipping away at this undocumented worker issue, we are taking some of the responsibility away from the federal government to do their job.”

Maryam Jameel contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The public has largely stopped paying attention to what’s happening inside shelters and other facilities that house immigrant children since President Donald Trump left office, and particularly since the end of his administration’s zero tolerance policy, which separated families at the southern border.

But the shelter system remains in place under President Joe Biden. The numbers can fluctuate but, as of earlier this week, more than 9,000 unaccompanied immigrant children were in custody, according to data from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the privately run shelters.

The vast majority are children and teens from Central America who entered the country through the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or legal guardian. The shelter system is designed to house these children temporarily — the average length of stay is about a month — until they can be placed with a relative or family friend or, in some cases, in foster care.

Last fall, ProPublica reported on one Chicago shelter’s failure to meet the language and mental health needs of dozens of traumatized Afghan children and teens who’d been brought to the country without family by the U.S. during its widely criticized military pullout from Afghanistan. Many of them had no one who could take them in; some tried to kill themselves, harmed others or ran away.

Months later, we saw those problems repeat themselves as the youths were transferred to other facilities. Office of Refugee Resettlement officials have said they’re doing their best to support the Afghan children by providing interpreters, mental health services and additional staffing. As of this week, some 84 unaccompanied Afghan minors remain in ORR custody, federal officials said. Some have been in custody for a year.

Another issue we’ve come across in our reporting is ORR’s system of “significant incident reports.” Shelter staff are required to report to ORR any “significant incidents” that affect children’s health, well-being or safety.

The system is intended to elevate serious concerns and protect children, but over the years, dozens of shelter staffers, advocates and children have told ProPublica that it has been overused and negatively affects children. For example, Afghan youth have expressed “extreme distress around how SIRs will be used against them,” said Neha Desai, senior director of immigration for the National Center for Youth Law, which is authorized to interview children in U.S. immigration custody.

“They’ve asked whether these reports will impact if or when their parents are evacuated” from Afghanistan, Desai said in an email. Some children “have been told by staff that SIRs will delay their release from custody.”

Last month, two prominent immigrant rights organizations that work with children in ORR custody issued a report calling for an overhaul of the incident reporting system. The report, “Punishing trauma: Incident Reporting and Immigrant Children in Government Custody,” is based on surveys last year of staff at ORR facilities and of attorneys and social workers who work with unaccompanied children.

An ORR official did not respond to the report’s specific findings. But, in a statement, the official said significant incident reports are primarily meant as internal records to document and communicate incidents for the agency’s awareness and follow-up. Last year, ORR revised its policies to limit the sharing and misuse of confidential and mental health information contained in SIRs. (For example, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was previously using notes taken during therapy sessions inside shelters against children in immigation court, The Washington Post reported.)

“ORR continues to clarify through technical assistance to care providers and ongoing policy development that SIRs should never be used by care provider staff as a form of discipline or punishment of the child,” the ORR official said.

I spoke with the primary authors of the report that calls for the overhaul of the incident reporting system. Jane Liu is senior litigation attorney for the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, and Azadeh Erfani is a senior policy analyst at the National Immigrant Justice Center. We discussed how significant incident reports are used inside shelters and the authors’ ideas for reform.

This is a condensed, edited version of that conversation.

Jane Liu: Children do best in a family-based setting, but the large majority of the children in government custody are in large congregate care settings, where they often face a lot of restrictions on their movement, monitoring and supervision. They’ve also likely just navigated a very difficult migration journey that may have included exposure to violence and traumatic experiences. They may have suffered traumatic experiences in their home country. They may have been separated from their families at the border. Then they go into custody and they’re navigating this completely unfamiliar environment in a large-scale setting where they often aren’t receiving the individualized care that they need. They may also be facing language barriers. And so it’s extremely stressful for them and disorienting.

Azadeh Erfani: They have been on both of our radars for some time now. They are a really central facet for children’s legal cases. A child’s placement level — where they end up within the security hierarchy of ORR — is greatly impacted by the number and the type of SIRs that they have.

On a personal level, I’ve represented kids with dozens of SIRs. I’ve seen up close how they really have widespread impact for kids who end up being branded as “problem children” and basically are stuck in the system with very little recourse.

Erfani: It could be sharing food. It could be getting up and going to the bathroom at the wrong time. It can also be a child acting out, testing boundaries. It could be a child simply disclosing something about their past. If they disclose that they’ve survived trafficking, abuse or neglect, or have been preyed upon by gangs in their home country, those kinds of things can trigger an SIR. So the scope is really broad, which really leads to overreporting.

Erfani: ICE has the authority to review every single child’s case when they are about to turn 18. They make a decision to either take them into adult custody or release them on their own recognizance. At that juncture, SIRs play a pivotal role.

We’ve also seen SIRs getting used in immigration court or in asylum interviews to basically put the child on the spot to defend something that was written up about them that they may not even have known was written up.

Liu: It can create all sorts of barriers to release. It can lead to children getting “stepped up” [to more secure, restrictive facilities] and then it’s harder to step back down. Often a long-term foster care provider won’t accept a child unless they’ve had a period without behavioral SIRs. But even if a child has a potential sponsor, we’ve seen it lead to requirements for home studies where ORR will say that “These SIRs indicate that the child may have a need, and we need to investigate whether the sponsor can fill that need.” Ultimately, what that means is that it delays the release of the child to a family member.

Liu: It’s a much bigger problem than the public may be aware of. Often those children are not getting the services that they need, such as mental health support. And by that I mean holistic services tailored to the unique experiences of each child. They’re also usually facing prolonged periods of custody, so they’re also experiencing detention fatigue. And it’s not surprising that they can act out and that there can be these sorts of behavioral challenges. But what is extremely troubling is that when these behaviors are documented in SIRs, they can sometimes prompt ORR facilities to report the incident to police, leading to unnecessary interactions for children with law enforcement and even arrests.

Erfani: One of our recommendations to ORR is to actually train staff in crisis prevention. For the most part, there’s a very passive approach to incidents. There’s not a lot of scrutiny with respect to how to prevent these crises from erupting in the first place.

SIRs very much lack the context of the child. Being in a congregate setting indefinitely can be incredibly, incredibly aggravating. And of course, they are bringing tons of trauma because of their backgrounds. So oftentimes these triggers, this background, if they receive bad news from the home country, those kinds of things are absent from the SIR and make it look like this child is incredibly erratic. That’s also really alarming from a trauma-informed perspective.

Erfani: The Afghan kids walked into a really terribly broken system right after escaping a war zone. The fact that they may not have had a sponsor lined up meant that they had to spend more time in custody. And every day they kept seeing kids leaving while they had to stay. That’s heartbreaking. Then you pile on the language barriers, the cultural competency barriers. A lot of their behavior is a manifestation of trauma that staff isn’t equipped to understand. And it was much easier to write up reports, or call law enforcement, than it was to try to put the system on trial itself, to see what’s really missing within the facility and address those needs on a systemic level.

Erfani: I think it’s really hard on staff. The SIR system is incredibly time-consuming. They have to dedicate tons and tons of resources into it. The rules are really intricate. When there’s turnover, for the new staff a compliance mindset can settle in, where it becomes less about that child’s needs, less about these child welfare principles, and instead about, “Well, I should probably be writing this report.”

Liu: It’s really critical that the government provides more support for facility staff, whether it be ongoing training or more funding for more staff with expertise in child welfare, mental health and the needs of immigrant children. I think it’s really up to the government to understand that children’s time in custody can be very difficult for them and figure out ways to prevent situations from escalating and being extremely harmful for children.

Liu: We have shared the report with the government. It is not a new revelation to ORR that this is something of huge concern for those of us who advocate for children. We have been raising concerns about SIRs in particular with greater frequency in the last couple of years.

Erfani: We strongly believe that nothing short of a complete transformation of incident reporting is going to meet their duty to these children.

Erfani: That’s a tough one. We’re just trying to really put this problem on the map and then try to address it. And it’s not a Republican problem. It’s not a Democrat problem. It’s really something that’s in the system.

Liu: We know incident reporting is not a sexy topic. It’s not something flashy. It doesn’t involve Gov. Greg Abbott or Gov. Ron DeSantis. And so it’s hard to get people to see the urgency. But I think it sort of goes to the whole family separation thing. When that occurred, I think people could understand the humanity involved. That children are not being treated as children, and children are being traumatized by government actions.

I think a lot of people think of their own children. How would they want their own children to be treated? If your child was acting out or talking back to you, would you want a report written up and for that report to be used against your child for all sorts of purposes? The reality is that immigrant kids, particularly those in custody, are not treated like other kids. And that should be a concern to all of us. That’s a failure on all our parts.

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Lawmakers have called for immediate action and a federal investigation into the “mental health crisis” among young Afghan evacuees at a Chicago shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children, where workers say that language and cultural barriers have made it difficult to provide adequate care.

Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat and Illinois’ senior senator, asked the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general to investigate the situation at a shelter run by the nonprofit Heartland Alliance. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, also an Illinois Democrat, called on HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra to have the department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement improve mental health services at the shelter.

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Rep. Bobby Rush, whose district is home to the shelter in the Bronzeville neighborhood, has said he was “horrified” by the conditions at the facility, which were detailed in a ProPublica story. “These children from Afghanistan have experienced unimaginable trauma,” he said in a statement, “and the language barrier hindering communication between them and the staff at Heartland is only compounding that trauma and confusion.”

Meanwhile, workers at the shelter said interpreters who speak the children’s languages, Pashto and Dari, are now based in the building, eliminating a shortcoming in care.

ProPublica reported Thursday that many of the dozens of Afghan children and teens at the Bronzeville shelter have harmed themselves, talked about wanting to die or required psychiatric hospitalization in recent weeks. Some have hurt other children or staff.

“Some of these incidents have escalated due to a lack of culturally-sensitive support, including appropriate translators and interpreters, and/or have been exacerbated by long stays and a lack of appropriate psychosocial mental-health services for these children — many of whom are dealing with significant trauma,” Durbin wrote Monday in a letter to the HHS inspector general’s office.

The department oversees ORR and is ultimately responsible for the nation’s shelter system. A spokesperson for the inspector general’s office confirmed receipt of Durbin’s letter and said officials were “reviewing it for appropriate response.”

“ORR takes any allegations regarding the safety and well-being of kids in our care very seriously, and we have had a team of staff at ORR headquarters working closely with all providers who are caring for unaccompanied Afghan minors,” an HHS spokesperson said. “We will continue to work closely with all providers serving unaccompanied Afghan minors to ensure that their needs are being met, including mental and behavioral health services, in partnership with community organizations and Congress.”

Durbin also wrote to ORR Director Cindy Huang asking for information about how the agency ensures that shelters housing Afghan children have adequate staff and resources.

“What policies are in place regarding interpreters at ORR-supported facilities?” Durbin asked. “How does ORR ensure that children are able to communicate with facility staff in their native languages?”

Duckworth wrote a separate letter Monday to Becerra calling on ORR to take immediate action, including making it a priority to use in-person interpreters and to help Heartland bolster the mental health care resources. She also asked ORR to conduct a “thorough review” of the cases involving children who had been at the Bronzeville shelter for long periods and work to place youths who have no relatives or family friends to sponsor them in “culturally competent foster settings.”

“As I am sure we can agree, housing children in what is supposed to be a temporary site for months at a time is not in the children’s best interest,” Duckworth wrote.

Heartland is the largest shelter operator in the country caring for young Afghan evacuees. On Tuesday, Heartland officials said 80 Afghan children were in their four Chicago shelters. Federal officials said Monday there were 185 young Afghan evacuees in federal care. Records obtained by ProPublica show that, as of Monday, 43 Afghan children were at the Bronzeville shelter, the largest in Heartland’s portfolio.

Of those, 25 had been at the shelter for at least 50 days; 16 had been there for at least 60 days; and two had been there for at least 70 days. ProPublica reported in 2018 on how prolonged stays led to despair, confusion and suicidal ideation among children in that shelter.

In a statement, Heartland officials said they welcomed the lawmakers’ intervention.

“Our country’s infrastructure to care for people seeking safety here is severely under-resourced following the intentional actions by the previous federal administration,” they said. “The country must strengthen this infrastructure to meet the cultural, language and mental health needs of children who have experienced heartbreaking traumas, including the Afghan youth who have suddenly arrived here in the last two months.”

Heartland officials said the Afghan children, who were evacuated after the end of the U.S. war there, represent the “largest influx” of minors who speak the same language — outside of Spanish — they have received in the more than two decades the organization has operated a shelter program for unaccompanied immigrant minors.

According to the organization’s statement, Heartland has worked to secure ORR funding and vet interpretation services to provide on-site interpreters “for the first time given the rapid and large arrival of Afghan youth.” Interpreters began arriving on Saturday to help ease the communication barriers between staff and children. By the end of the week, Heartland says there will be 36.

Workers said they were delighted to see them.

“The kids are calmer,” said an employee at the Bronzeville shelter.

A worker at Heartland’s Rogers Park facility said, “We are all so happy, those of us who work with the kids.”

In their statement, Heartland officials said it’s been a challenge to get the Afghan children the mental health treatment they need — a problem the officials said has been compounded by systemic barriers at the city and state level. Experts and advocates have long complained about a shortage of mental health workers and psychiatric beds for children.

“We have been working closely with City and State partners to remove significant systemic barriers to streamline access to psychiatric care for the youth in our care who are experiencing sad, profound urgent mental health needs,” Heartland said.

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Note: This story mentions self-harm and suicidal ideation in children.

Some children who were evacuated from Afghanistan and are being cared for at a Chicago shelter for immigrant minors have hurt themselves, harmed other children or threatened staff. Others have tried to escape or talked about wanting to die. Some have required psychiatric hospitalization.

These events at the shelter were described by three employees and other people familiar with the conditions there, as well as being detailed in police records and internal documents obtained by ProPublica.

Employees at the shelter, which is operated by the nonprofit Heartland Alliance, say they are overwhelmed and ill-equipped to care for the roughly 40 Afghan children and teens placed there by the U.S. government, many of them traumatized by war in their homeland and their hasty evacuation.

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The employees said they have never experienced this level of disorganization or stress, even though some of them worked through the chaos inside Heartland shelters following the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy of separating children from their parents.

Language and cultural barriers have exacerbated the problem. Workers said no employees speak Pashto or Dari, the children’s main languages, and access to phone-based interpretation lines is limited, making it difficult to deescalate tense encounters.

“We don’t know if [the children are] saying they’re going to self harm until we finally get a translator on the line,” said one worker at the shelter in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood on the city’s South Side. “They could be telling us something. ... We try to guess. We try to communicate with cues, sign language, making motions like if you’re hungry or they need this or that.”

Altogether, Heartland officials said they were caring for 79 Afghan children across four Chicago shelters on Wednesday. But the shelter in Bronzeville, the largest in Heartland’s portfolio, is where workers are reporting problems.

As of Wednesday, 41 of the 55 children and teens at that shelter were from Afghanistan, records show. Of those, 25 had been at the facility for at least 50 days, while 15 had been there for at least 60 days. ProPublica reported in 2018 on how prolonged stays in Heartland’s shelters led to despair, confusion and suicidal ideation among children.

No organization in the country is sheltering more Afghan children than Heartland at the moment. A total of 186 Afghan youth were in the government’s care as of Friday. (Federal officials did not respond to requests for updated figures this week.)

The children are among the tens of thousands of Afghans brought to the U.S. after America’s widely criticized military pullout from the country following two decades of war. In the chaos, many children were separated from parents or adult relatives at Taliban checkpoints and airports, or later at U.S. military bases in other countries. Many wound up on planes alone, according to workers and advocates who have spoken to the children.

And unlike many of the Central American children who typically pass through the shelter system with a plan and a destination in mind — and the knowledge from relatives’ experiences to prepare them — these young Afghans had no idea what to expect when they arrived. Some have no relatives or family friends here to take them in. Many didn’t even want to come here and are worried about their families back home, the workers and advocates said.

“These Afghan youth are experiencing very high trauma burdens and mental health issues from living in a war-torn country, exacerbated by their chaotic and untraditional arrival alone in a foreign land,” Heartland said in a statement. “Something as simple as a phone call home is highly emotional …. What if my parents don’t answer? Are they dead? Missing? Will I ever see them again? What if the Taliban finds me here?”

Heartland officials said that, from the start, sheltering the children has been a challenge.

“Details of arrivals, governmental guidelines, and other information has been limited or changing, literally by the hour,” they said in the statement. “National, federal, state, local, and nonprofit organizations are trying to operate within a seriously under-resourced and broken infrastructure dismantled by the previous federal administration.”

Workers at the Bronzeville shelter said they understand that factors beyond Heartland’s control are largely to blame for the problems. But they say they are disappointed in the response so far from both Heartland and the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the shelter system.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees ORR, said the “vast majority” of the more than 900 Afghan children who have come to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors have been placed with sponsors. The spokesperson said the agency is working to ensure children “are placed with care providers that are able to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services or unified directly with a vetted sponsor.”

Heartland officials said they provide “24/7 safe and welcoming residential care that includes food, clothing, shelter, schooling, and basic medical care — until we are able to safely unite them with family or a sponsor here in the U.S.” Several of the children who were at the Bronzeville shelter over the past two months have already been placed with relatives or other sponsors, workers said.

Heartland, a large nonprofit known for a range of anti-poverty and humanitarian work in Illinois and around the world, “was selected to receive youth coming from Afghanistan given our long experience in caring for unaccompanied children from outside of the Northern Triangle” in Central America, organization officials said in the statement.

The Bronzeville facility is a former nursing home licensed to house up to 250 children on its four floors. Over the years, at least a dozen current and former workers have told ProPublica they felt conflicted working there because of the conditions; they wanted to help immigrant children but have come to view the shelter as a detention center.

What has been happening at the Heartland shelter in recent weeks is a contrast to operations at an emergency facility for Afghan children in Michigan. An immigration attorney who has spent time at that shelter, where about 50 Afghan minors are being cared for, said she had not seen or heard of problems on the same scale as those Heartland workers have described. That campus-like site, complete with residential cottages spread across green space, is operated by the nonprofit social service agency Starr Commonwealth.

Almost from the start, there has been one interpreter in every cottage who spoke Pashto, Dari or both, said Jennifer Vanegas, a supervising attorney at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center’s program for immigrant children.

“So much can get in the way [of phone-based interpretation]: a bad connection, a dropped call,” she said. “It’s very impersonal. It’s much better when you can have another person in the room to interpret, look at kids and connect.”

Vanegas said she and her colleagues worry most about those children who have been there for longer than a few weeks, as the site “was not set up to be a long-term facility” and isn’t equipped to provide them the culturally and linguistically appropriate psychosocial mental services they need. So far, the lengths of stay have ranged from 10 days to about 50, she said.

In addition to Starr Commonwealth and Heartland, another network of shelters for immigrant children in Illinois has taken in a smaller number of Afghan children. Sister Catherine Ryan, the executive director of Maryville Academy, said last week that ORR had placed about a dozen Afghan children at the organization’s shelters in and around Chicago. About half of those children, she said, have been sent to live with relatives or in other placements.

The Afghan children started arriving at the Heartland shelter in Bronzeville around Aug. 23, according to records and interviews with workers. Most are boys in their teens, but workers said the youngest they received was 2. Records indicate that once the Afghan youth started arriving, the facility stopped receiving children and teens from other countries, though it’s not clear why.

It’s unusual for the shelter to receive so many children at once who don’t speak a language spoken by staff members, according to workers and people familiar with the situation. Many of the workers speak Spanish.

To communicate with the Afghan youth, workers rely on cell phones to call interpreters, but they said there aren’t enough phones. Heartland said last week it distributed 61 devices to translate information into multiple languages, including Dari and Pashto, across its four shelters, and that it will distribute 39 more this week.

Workers said they sometimes ask children who speak some English to serve as interpreters. But that can be problematic when discussing sensitive topics. Workers said they have asked for English-Dari and English-Pashto dictionaries.

In an email sent to shelter staff last week, David Sinski, executive director of Heartland Human Care and Services, the branch of Heartland that runs the shelters, wrote that the organization was working with ORR to get translators on site and to have an Afghan employee from another part of the organization connect virtually with children and staff.

In spite of Heartland’s efforts, the shelter has been the scene of a series of troubling incidents, described in police records, internal documents and interviews. In emails sent to management and staff last week, one shelter worker wrote that the young Afghans were “displaying behavior that I have not seen in my almost 5 years at [Heartland].” Another wrote that police and ambulance workers had been on site “a record amount over the last few days and weeks alone.”

A Chicago police service log shows dozens of calls for service to the Bronzeville address in the past five weeks, including 15 coded for emergency medical services, three for suicide attempts or threats, five for batteries or assaults, and two for mental health disturbances.

An incident report dated Oct. 1 describes a boy who was hospitalized after “cutting his arms with an unknown object.” A week later, police wrote another report on a boy who was hospitalized after cutting his forearm with a bottle cap and throwing items. The boy was upset about not being allowed to make a video call “and instead was given a regular phone call,” officers wrote. Neither incident was life-threatening. The reports don’t explicitly mention whether the children are from Afghanistan, though two shelter workers said they were.

Call logs for other emergency dispatch services were not available before publication.

Meanwhile, an internal report describes a 14-year-old boy threatening workers with a pair of scissors. Two emails describe instances of boys verbally accosting female staff. Other reports detail workers having to restrain a boy who tried to break a window and, in another incident, hit another boy.

Heartland officials acknowledged the challenges of meeting the children’s psychiatric needs. They said staff had met with city and state officials to “address significant systemic barriers to accessing psychiatric assessments for children in need of in-patient care” and will begin individual and group therapy for some of the children.

The organization said it has been building connections with the local Afghan community and offers Friday prayers and weekly visits to a mosque, and is “integrating many cultural comforts like foods and activities that the youth are requesting.”

Heartland acknowledged that the work is “heartbreaking for these kids and very difficult for our staff.” Officials said they “facilitate weekly staff discussions to address current stressors” and are seeking resources to help combat caregiver fatigue.

“We don’t blame our staff for being frustrated or angry,” the statement said. “The broken system is letting everyone down.”

(If you are considering hurting yourself, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or go to speakingofsuicide.com.)

Duaa Eldeib contributed reporting.

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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has proposed two pilot programs to help low-income motorists cope with the city’s punitive vehicle-ticketing and debt-collection system. One halves the cost of the citations, the other offers debt relief.

Lightfoot, who campaigned in part on a pledge to end what she has called the city’s “addiction” to fines and fees, also proposed forgiving some tickets when motorists come into compliance with the law, a solution some advocates have supported for years.

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“We know that sometimes what we need is simply an opportunity to fix the mistake,” Lightfoot said during her 2022 budget address on Monday, when she unveiled the reforms. “So, for compliance tickets, such as city stickers or license plate expiration tickets, everyone will have one opportunity to fix their violation by simply buying the sticker they need and having their ticket forgiven.”

ProPublica has reported extensively since 2018 on how parking and automated traffic camera tickets disproportionately harm low-income, Black residents, sending tens of thousands into bankruptcy over the past decade. Later reporting was done in collaboration with WBEZ and, combined with the advocacy of several organizations, prompted several reforms by the city and the state. Among them: an end to driver’s license suspensions over unpaid tickets, changes to make the city’s ticket payment plans more affordable, and some modest debt relief.

Despite the reforms, the outstanding debt owed for city tickets continues to grow, from about $1.45 billion in February 2018 to more than $1.8 billion today, according to city officials.

Lightfoot’s latest proposed reforms, which would need approval from the City Council, go further than past initiatives to reduce the financial burden that tickets place on low-income motorists. But advocates for ticketing reforms said the city needs to take more ambitious steps to address the underlying causes of the debt, including reducing the number of tickets issued (typically around 3 million a year), lowering the cost of tickets and setting a statute of limitations on debt collection.

“It’s a great place to start. Folks need help, especially after COVID,” said Rosazlia Grillier, a parent leader with Community Organizing and Family Issues, a nonprofit that works primarily with low-income women of color. “But we need more. … I don’t want us to get complacent or stagnant in thinking this is it. People need some real, real, real relief.”

If approved by the City Council, Lightfoot’s debt-relief program and reduction in ticket costs would be available only to motorists who can prove their income is under 300% of the federal poverty line, which puts the qualifying threshold at about $39,000 for an individual and $80,000 for a family of four. Motorists who qualify for debt relief would only have to pay the tickets they’d received in the past three years, minus late penalties. All older debt, including booting, towing and storage fees for vehicles that have been impounded, would be forgiven. That includes charges related to impounded vehicles that were eventually sold by the city, an issue WBEZ reported on last year.

Both proposed reforms would be run as pilot programs through the end of 2023. Eligible motorists could participate in more than one program, said Cesar Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.

The “fix-it” option that would clear tickets once motorists come into compliance would apply to anybody who, regardless of income, gets a $200 ticket for failing to have a required city sticker on their windshield or a $60 citation for expired license plates, but would only be available once per license plate. To have a ticket dismissed, motorists would have to show proof they corrected the violation by, for example, providing a receipt for a city sticker, which can cost about $144 annually for a large passenger vehicle.

ProPublica and WBEZ reported in 2018 on how residents of low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods on Chicago’s West and South sides have been disproportionately hit with city sticker tickets, one of the most significant sources of outstanding ticket debt and a debt routinely tied to bankruptcies. With late penalties, these citations could grow to $488 each. Lightfoot’s administration has since ended the practice of doubling the price of these tickets when they aren’t paid on time; late penalties have dropped to $50, though collections fees are still applied.

Lightfoot has been criticized, however, for lowering the threshold for $35 speed camera tickets from 10 miles an hour over the speed limit to 6 miles an hour over the limit.

Priya Sarathy Jones, the national policy and campaigns director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, called Lightfoot’s proposals a “step in the right direction by alleviating some collateral harm of fines and fees on low-income communities.”

“But to address the root of the problem of Chicago’s extreme overreliance on this toxic revenue source,” she added, “city leaders will need to consider fundamental changes in enforcement practices,” including issuing fewer tickets and eliminating some types of citations altogether.

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At least 19 children and two employees at a Chicago shelter for immigrant youth have tested positive for COVID-19 in recent days, in what appears to be the largest outbreak of the virus in the country in shelters for unaccompanied minors.

According to an email sent to staff Sunday, Heartland Human Care Services officials said the first positive test results were reported at its Bronzeville shelter on Friday and that additional cases there were confirmed over the weekend.

On Monday, officials from Heartland Alliance, the umbrella nonprofit organization that oversees the shelter program, confirmed the positive tests and said they expect there will be more cases.

“We are operating under the assumption that we will see additional positive diagnoses as we receive results from the other tests that have been administered, and the steps we are taking to ensure the health and safety of our participants and staff are based on that assumption,” Mailee Garcia, a spokeswoman for the organization, wrote in a statement. “The prognosis for all of the children in our care is very good, and we are continuing to focus on our participants’ health and well-being.”

As of last Wednesday, only six COVID-19 cases had been confirmed among children and adolescents housed in shelters around the country, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the nation’s shelter program. All six were at shelters in New York.

ORR officials said there were also 39 “self-reports” of positive COVID-19 tests among personnel affiliated with shelter programs in six states as of Wednesday. ORR has not provided updated figures, despite repeated requests since Friday.

COVID-19 is a less serious health threat to children than it is to adults.

Heartland, according to the copies of the email obtained by ProPublica Illinois, began “trying to secure tests” for children at the Bronzeville shelter after some of them displayed “COVID-19-like symptoms,” wrote David Sinski, executive director of Heartland Human Care Services.

The email doesn’t detail symptoms, when they became evident or when children were tested. But by Friday, Heartland officials learned that one of its “participants” — as the immigrant children and youth are called — had tested positive.

On Saturday, officials were told that three additional children had tested positive. By Sunday morning, they received positive COVID-19 diagnoses for an additional 15 children, bringing the total to 19. According to the email, 10 of the 19 children are asymptomatic. Two staff members have also tested positive.

“We understand that receiving this news may leave you feeling uncertain and scared,” Sinski wrote to staff. “I want you to know that we are committed to providing you with the information that you need to know in order to keep you and your loved ones healthy and safe.”

It’s unclear how old the infected children are or where they are from. But the Bronzeville shelter, a four-story converted nursing home that can hold up to 250 boys and girls, is licensed to house children from infancy to 17 years old.

Officials said they “immediately” move children to an isolated environment when they show any signs of any illness, including COVID-19, to minimize any risk of community spread. Since Saturday, Heartland has “enhanced our social distancing measures” at the shelters to limit the contact among children and between children and staff, Garcia said.

In his email, Sinski wrote that all remaining children at the facility are being tested and that he expected those results by Tuesday. He also asked all employees who worked on the floors where children who tested positive were living to stay home with pay for two weeks. Staff members who undertake “specific activities” with children will be provided N95 masks, gowns and gloves, and are being screened for COVID-19 symptoms before each shift.

Heartland officials said they are now contracting with additional nurse practitioners to be at the shelter for every shift. They are also exploring a house parent model, which would have a subset of staff be onsite full time for the coming couple of weeks, officials said.

Heartland officials said the organization is in close contact with ORR and city public health officials.

A message to the city’s Health Department was not returned Monday.

Garcia said the organization is “doing all that we can to advocate for additional testing kits for participants and staff across our programs.” She added that “our team have been stellar and courageous champions during this pandemic, committed to both a high level of quality care and being creative and supportive to each other during this challenging time. They are true heroes.”

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, which licenses the shelters, has been notified that children at the facility tested positive. “We’ve been in contact, and we’re offering assistance,” said agency spokesman Jassen Strokosch.

Heartland officials said a professional cleaning company has performed multiple cleanings of the facility in the past week and will continue to perform weekly deep cleanings.

According to ORR guidance meant to limit the spread of COVID-19, children who have symptoms and are recommended for testing are isolated from other children pending test results. Shelter programs are required to do twice-daily temperature checks of immigrant children and alert ORR if a child has a temperature above 100 degrees. ORR has also implemented a mandatory temperature check for anyone entering a shelter, according to officials.

ORR has also stopped placing children at shelters in California, New York and Washington, with limited exceptions, and said it is trying to find local shelters for newly arrived immigrant children to limit air travel. Previously, children were moved to shelters around the country where beds were available.

About 2,800 children are being held in the nation’s shelter system. There are 69 children at three shelters run by Heartland. The organization previously operated five shelters, all in Chicago, but has consolidated the program in response to COVID-19. “Our census was lower and consolidating sites has allowed us to implement the measures … to safeguard the health of our staff and participants,” a spokeswoman said.

No children have tested positive for COVID-19 at another group of shelters in Illinois run by Maryville Academy, a Catholic child welfare agency, said Sister Catherine Ryan, Maryville’s executive director. About 30 teens are currently housed at two Maryville shelters.

“I’m very grateful that all of our children are fine,” Ryan said. “Obviously, we are taking a lot of precautions to keep it that way.”

Lawyers and advocates for detained immigrant children say they’ve been worried an outbreak would occur in a shelter. Lawyers went to court in late March to ask the federal government to speed up the release of children in its custody.

“It’s been our concern all along as advocates that jails, prisons, detention facilities, even licensed shelter detention, it’s where we’re going to see the massive outbreaks and it’s going to be exponentially higher than in the broader community,” said Holly Cooper, co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of California, Davis.

Cooper said she is particularly worried about children who have preexisting conditions that have not been identified by shelter officials or ORR and will make them more vulnerable to COVID-19.

“The goal,” she said, “is to get kids out of congregate care because there’s no way it can comply with [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidance even if you’re using all the hand sanitizer in the world.”

Duaa Eldeib contributed reporting.

As many Illinois businesses have shut down or instructed employees to work from home to avoid the possible spread of the novel coronavirus, low-wage factory and warehouse workers continue going into work, often doing jobs that people don’t realize are considered essential.

And there seems to be as much, if not more, work available than ever — a situation unlikely to change in the near future. Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s order last week for residents to shelter in place includes exemptions for “essential activities” such as the production of food and medical supplies, and the supply chains necessary to make those goods.

“The bread that you see on the shelf is not just the bread itself. But there’s a twist tie, and there’s a plastic bag that holds the bread,” Pritzker said during a recent press conference, when asked why so many manufacturing jobs were considered essential. “The same thing is true for bottle makers for pharmaceuticals: Someone makes the tops, someone makes the bottom of the bottles.”

In interviews with about a dozen workers over the past week, many said they are afraid of going to work and getting sick but can’t afford to stay home and isolate themselves. They feel lucky to be earning a paycheck when so many others are losing jobs in restaurants and hotels, but they don’t want to risk their health. What worries them, they said, are conditions that were previously routine but now are frightening: working on tightly packed production lines or clocking in for the workday using fingerprint scanners.

“There’s parts of the line where you’re literally rubbing elbows with each other,” said one factory worker, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of job retaliation or deportation. “I’m washing my hands more, but I’m still worried.”

Fears are also spreading through factories about co-workers who test positive for COVID-19 and whether management reacted quickly enough to send the employee home and communicated a possible health threat to other workers.

“We understand the fear that’s going on,” said Mark Denzler, president and CEO of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association. “Employers need to communicate in the best fashion, but all the members I’ve talked to are asking the right questions, taking the right steps to keep workers safe.”

Denzler said his organization has encouraged member companies to follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protect their workers.

Some companies are now instituting mandatory sanitation breaks, where workers stop what they’re doing to clean their workstations or themselves, Denzler said. Other factories are splitting shifts, going from, for example, 100 employees on one shift to 50 workers on two shifts to increase the spacing.

Some workers said the factories and warehouses where they work were taking the right safety measures, including wiping down machinery with disinfectant and propping open doors to bathrooms and cafeterias so workers don’t have to touch the handles. But many more said precautions fell short.

“Companies aren’t taking the health of their workers seriously,” said Isaura Martinez, an organizer with the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, which focuses on temporary workers. “They’re exposing workers where they can be infected on the job.”

Last week, the collaborative started circulating an online petition asking Pritzker to “take swift and forceful action to enable us to safely produce the goods our state needs while protecting us, our families and the communities we live in.” Among the requests: banning the use of biometric time clock scanners, which “clock in” workers using their fingerprints; requiring 6 feet of space between employees; and mandating paid sick time for temporary workers.

Pritzker’s office did not respond to a request for comment. But as part of a public-private partnership announced Monday to ramp up production of personal protective equipment, including face masks, gloves and hand sanitizer, Pritzker said that “these factories will be adhering to strict social distancing guidelines to ensure that the workers behind the PPE are safe and healthy too.”

The use of biometric time clock scanners has become increasingly common at staffing agencies, warehouses, factories, logistics centers, fast-food franchises and nursing centers, said Brandon Wise, a St. Louis-based attorney who has filed about 80 lawsuits in Illinois because of privacy concerns related to their use.

At some work sites, “maybe 500 people a day put their hand on the machine,” he said. Before the spread of COVID-19 became a national and international crisis, the hygiene associated with this practice was an issue that rarely came up in his conversations with workers and employers. Now, it is.

“Employers need to be cognizant of making sure people are washing their hands, probably before and after using these devices, or making sure there is some sanitation process in place for the employees using it, or hand-washing or a Purell-type gel,” Wise said. “And making sure that the devices are getting cleaned.”

That does not always happen, workers at multiple factories said. At a soap and shampoo bottling plant in the southwest suburbs, two temporary workers described how the biometric scanning machine they use each day is a significant distance from the nearest sinks, which are in bathrooms across a lunchroom and down a hallway. Recently, somebody left a bottle of rubbing alcohol near the machines, which some workers were using to clean their hands.

“I’ve been trying to wipe down the machine with a paper napkin,” said one worker, who is reevaluating whether to continue working. “More than anything, it’s because my parents live with me. They are elderly.”

Officials from the bottling company or the staffing agency could not be reached for comment.

One precautionary measure some facilities have taken to try to stem the spread of COVID-19 is to check workers’ temperatures and send them home if they show signs of fever.

Workers have mixed feelings about the temperature checks. They don’t want to get sick from their co-workers, but in many cases they won’t get paid for showing up if they get sent home because they have a fever.

“To tell you the truth, last week I felt so bad I couldn’t go to work one day [earlier this month]. … I felt exhausted, like I had no strength left in my body, and I had a cough,” said a woman who works at a factory in Melrose Park, west of Chicago. “But the next day I had to go in. For three days I went in like that.”

Workers at her factory get two paid sick days a year, she said. They can use vacation time, which starts with one week after a year on the job. But many workers, paid the state minimum wage, avoid using vacation days, preferring instead to bank them so they can cash them in when they run into a financial emergency.

Temperature checks create a different set of concerns for workers employed through temporary staffing agencies, which send hundreds of thousands of employees into industrial jobs across Illinois, according to estimates from the American Staffing Association, a trade group.

State law requires that temporary workers receive at least four hours of pay if they are called into work, even if they are sent home and not used that day. There are no exemptions, said a spokesman for the state Labor Department.

Yet one temporary staffing agency sent a series of text messages early last week to workers at a food-packaging factory in Lake County that said otherwise. The Spanish-language messages from the agency said that workers with temperatures of 99.6 degrees Fahrenheit or higher would be sent home, asked to get medical attention and go into isolation.

“Anybody who comes to work sick will be sent home immediately and [the client company] will not be responsible for the four-hour guarantee,” according to a copy of the messages shared with ProPublica Illinois.

A company official said she could not “speak to the why” behind the text messages, except that they were likely intended to ensure workers don’t go to work sick and potentially spread the virus. She said the company would “absolutely make sure that [workers] are paid appropriately and in accordance with any state and federal law.”

If you’re reading this, you probably know I’ve reported extensively on Chicago’s system of ticketing and debt collection, how it’s disproportionately hurt black drivers and prompted tens of thousands of bankruptcies. The reporting, which eventually became a collaboration with our friends at WBEZ Chicago, has led to significant reforms, including some debt relief from the city, more affordable payment plans and a state law ending license suspensions over unpaid parking tickets.

Well, here’s another potential reform to add to the list: A few weeks ago, Illinois state Sen. Celina Villanueva, a Chicago Democrat, introduced legislation to end driver’s license suspensions for unpaid red-light and speed camera tickets. Five unpaid camera tickets can trigger a suspension. (Note that this really isn’t a road safety issue as you can get 100 camera tickets but not risk losing your driving privileges if you can afford to pay them.) State officials told me this week that more than 13,000 drivers currently have their licenses suspended because of unpaid camera tickets.

I met Villanueva last month at an event organized by Reform for Illinois, a good government group, and was surprised to hear her speak publicly and so candidly about how ticket debt had affected her own life. So this week I reached out to ask how her personal story had influenced her legislation.

She told me the timing was right, in part because of an ongoing federal public corruption investigation into red-light camera companies. (Her predecessor, Martin Sandoval, pleaded guilty last month to taking bribes in the case.) But she also saw this as an important issue that affects working-class residents across the state.

Here’s some of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity:

Why introduce this bill now?

            <figure data-pp-id="2" data-pp-blocktype="image" class="image small right">

People are going into debt because of these red-light camera tickets, which cost $100 or more, and then double [with late fees]. That’s hard, especially for poor people or working-class people who don’t have disposable income.

I heard you speak not too long ago about how these issues hit home for you on a personal level. Can you tell me what happened?

Villanueva: I had a car a few years ago that was at the end of its life. It was breaking down on me every couple of months, and fixing it up was costing more than the vehicle itself.

The city sticker was also about to lapse, so I thought, I’m going to get rid of this car. I called to have it taken to the junkyard. In the meantime, my car was parked in front of my house. I can’t move the car, it’s broken down, and I start getting tickets.

I was living paycheck to paycheck, working as an immigrant rights activist. Any extra money I had was going to bring down credit card and student loan debt, and paying my bills. But these tickets kept doubling and, all of the sudden, I ended up with $3,000-plus in ticket debt. A couple of the tickets were red-light camera tickets.

                    <aside class="ad-300 hide-lg"><!-- /2219821/Mobile_Leaderboard --></aside><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="5.0"><strong>How did you pay them off?</strong></p>

Villanueva: I barely had a couple extra hundred dollars to my name. I looked at the payment plans, but they were asking for about $1,500 down. It would take me a whole year to save up that amount. I looked into bankruptcy, did some research online. I didn’t want to file. That would have affected everything else in my life.

But I had to do something because I didn’t want my license suspended. I knew that pretty soon I would need to get another car. My job was ramping up and I knew I would be spending a lot of time in the suburbs. Taking public transportation to the suburbs is not reliable.

I had a very small retirement plan with my job. People take out loans against their retirement plans to make a down payment for a house. I did it to pay off tickets. If it wasn’t for that, I honestly don’t know where I would be right now.

Do you see potential for more reforms related to government debt collection and other systems of fines and fees?

Villanueva: There is definitely an opportunity. Obviously the state of Illinois has been in a difficult financial situation for the past few years that we’re trying to do get ourselves out of. We’re looking for new revenue sources.

But I think it’s also really important that we’re not creating punitive fines that harm people. We have to get away from trying to collect $10, $100 from every single time we say you’re falling out of line or you did this wrong, and then not giving people an opportunity to work and pay off the fine because we’ve suspended their license. What we’re doing is creating and reinforcing cycles of poverty and that’s not OK.

Illinois state Sen. Celina Villanueva represents the 11th District, on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

At last check, Villanueva’s bill had 10 cosponsors, all but one of whom are Democrats. No hearings have been scheduled and no opposition has been filed, though it’s early in the session. Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration has not yet taken a position, though last month Pritzker said the issue was “absolutely worthy of consideration.”

The biggest opposition will likely come from the municipalities that rely on the threat of license suspension to pressure indebted motorists to pay camera citations, thereby generating needed revenue. Historically these suspensions have disproportionately hurt Chicago residents from majority black neighborhoods, ProPublica Illinois previously found.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the city said that “while the city is still reviewing the bill, we commend lawmakers and advocates for offering up additional ideas to help lift the burden of debt for those hit hardest in Chicago and all around the state.”

        <h3>Here are a couple other bits of ticket-related news I want to share with you:</h3>

• The U.S. Supreme Court has scheduled arguments on a case that started with a city of Chicago legal strategy aimed at discouraging motorists with ticket debt from filing for bankruptcy. Starting in 2017, the city stopped immediately returning impounded vehicles to motorists who filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. A federal appeals court said last summer that the city was violating the basic protections of bankruptcy and doing it mostly to generate revenue.

  Without getting too deep in the weeds, the Supreme Court is essentially being asked whether creditors of all sorts are allowed to hang onto property after someone files for bankruptcy, without violating a legal protection known as the automatic stay. But given that this all started here in Chicago, where tens of thousands of people have filed for bankruptcy to cope with the crushing consequences of ticket debt — including the loss of their licenses or vehicles — we’ll be paying attention.

• On a related note, the city of Chicago and its towing contractor were sued in federal court this week over the impound program. The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, claims the city’s practice of towing, impounding and eventually selling off thousands of vehicles over unpaid tickets is unconstitutional. “Even if it sells the vehicle, none of the proceeds are paid to the owner,” attorney Jacie Zolna writes in the lawsuit. “Incredibly, the City does not even off-set the owner’s debts by the amount of the sale. It simply takes it all for itself and leaves the former owner’s debt as it is.”

  In a statement, a city spokeswoman declined to comment on the lawsuit but said Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration is “actively working to evaluate the city’s complex impound systems to find ways to enhance them and ensure that residents aren’t losing their cars simply due to inability to pay.”

  Read this story on the lawsuit by WBEZ data editor Elliott Ramos, my collaborator on a lot of the ticketing reporting. Elliott has separately investigated the city’s massive towing and impound program, and his reporting is cited heavily in the lawsuit. (If you haven’t checked it out, please do so even just to see the insane drone footage of one of the city’s huge impound lots.)

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As always, please send us tips or questions, or drop me a line at melissa.sanchez@propublica.org.

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