The Brief

Father's Office built its reputation on refusing to let anyone touch its burger — no substitutions, no exceptions. Just dry-aged beef, bacon fat-caramelized onions, Gruyère, Maytag blue and arugula.

Which is why a new collaboration with hand roll specialist Uoichiba had me… scratching my head.

Yes, that’s right. For a limited time, the Office Burger can be found in hand roll form at Uoichiba locations (Sherman Oaks and DTLA), packed over rice and wrapped in nori in lieu of a bun, for $16.

The collaboration

Turns out Chef Liwei Liao (owner of Uoichiba/Joint Seafood) and Chef Sang Yoon (Father's Office) are close friends who decided to bridge their culinary worlds.

Liao says he’s actually a burger guy off the clock, and considers the Office Burger one of the most iconic in L.A.

"I'm not even a blue cheese fan, but I enjoy it in that flavor combination with the grilled onions —it's basically French onion soup in a sauce —and then his blend of cheese," Liao said.

While the hand roll combo isn’t something you see every day, it's not a total left turn for Uoichiba. The spot already runs four Wagyu hand rolls on its regular menu (cheeseburger, tartare, shabu shabu, steak), so this slots into an existing format rather than a one-off gimmick.

The Uoichiba x Father's Office collaboration hand roll, available through August.

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Does it work?

So... to my verdict on trying it. Despite its unusual format, the elements hit my taste buds, and I was immediately struck by how familiar it all felt —transported straight back to the outdoor patio of Father’s Office at the Helms Bakery building, touching upon all the same notes.

That’s not a surprise, since Liao uses Yoon’s exact Office Burger recipe. “We’re literally using his cheese, his onions, his blend,” he says.

Watching the roll get assembled, it's easy to see the level of precision involved — the dry-aged beef gets a slight char from a hand-held blowtorch, then it's layered with the onion and cheese mixture and fresh arugula, the whole thing coming together like one of Vincent van Gogh's still-life vase paintings.

It's not a one-off, either — Liao said Uoichiba plans to keep doing chef collaborations like this on the hand roll bar about once a month.

More than two dozen California Assembly Democrats and one state senator sent a letter Wednesday to legislative leaders asking them to delay fees under SB 54, the state’s landmark plastic reduction law, for two years — an eleventh-hour push as the Legislature hurtles toward the end of session.

The letter, addressed to Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, was signed by 23 Assemblymembers and Sen. Melissa Hurtado. It asks lawmakers to pause fee assessment and collection this year and next, commit to a “reform package” next session, and increase legislative oversight of the program going forward.

The request lands amid a broader fight over how the plastics law is rolling out. Little by little California is demanding that the packages you pick up at your doorstep or at the store contain less plastic. A law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed four years ago aims to phase out 25% of non-recyclable, non-compostable plastic by 2032.

To get there, the state tasked a nonprofit, the Circular Action Alliance, with drafting a plan to meet the state goals. The group estimated the work would cost $17.2 billion over five years – and is asking for a three-year exemption from the source-reduction deadline.

But as the state moves to implement the law, questions are mounting over how the organization calculates the fees producers — and eventually consumers — will pay, and how much oversight the group actually faces.

Industry groups say the price tag for complying with the law could be tens of billions of dollars higher than California originally estimated. An industry-commissioned study found the law could cost consumers three times what the state projected — between $683 and $948 a year, rather than $190.

That means groceries, shampoo bottles and other consumer goods packed in plastic could cost a little more as the law takes effect.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, which oversees implementation, declined an interview but said in a written statement that the law puts consumers first and pushes producers to design packaging with recycling in mind.

“Californians are facing rising costs and pollution from increasingly complex packaging that wasn’t designed for the recycling systems local governments, ratepayers, and the state developed and funded over the past four decades,” said CalRecycle director Zoe Heller. “The law’s rollout is a dial, not a switch, giving producers flexibility to redesign packaging, invest in recycling systems, reduce single-use plastics, and make adjustments along the way,” she added.

Watching the watchers

The Circular Action Alliance published its fee schedule in June, spelling out what each producer owes into the system. The fees could add up to more than $10 million for some businesses, according to the Dairy Institute of California. The Dairy Institute is a trade association that represents milk processors and dairy product manufacturers.

But unlike a state agency, the Circular Action Alliance answers to almost no one, said Katie Davey, executive director of the Dairy Institute.

“[The alliance] does not have to go through an audit by the state auditor. They’re not subject to the (California open government law) Brown Act. They’re not subject to public records requests. The Legislature does not approve their budget and does not approve how many employees they need, or how many fees they can charge,” Davey said.

As a private nonprofit, Circular Action Alliance indeed is not subject to the Brown Act or public-records law — but records it submits to CalRecycle or other government entities may be.

CalRecycle must approve its fee schedule and implementation plan, and has the authority to audit the organization’s performance, said CalRecycle spokesperson Lance Klug, who added that the plastics law includes provisions to ensure the group’s budget and fees are appropriate.

The alliance’s role “is not to set California policy,” said its spokesperson, Larine Urbina. “Our role is to implement the framework established by SB 54 under CalRecycle’s oversight.”

Davey said the gap extends to enforcement. Businesses that fall short will face so-called malus fees, which fund bonuses for those that comply. But the Circular Action Alliance hasn’t said what those fees will be.

Shane Gusman, a lobbyist for the Teamsters, which represents hundreds of thousands of California workers, raised similar concerns. “They’re a wholly independent nonprofit organization that has no oversight. That’s part of the problem.” The union backed the plastics law hoping it would boost jobs; Guzman now says the fees could affect workers too.

Shortly after the alliance published its fee schedule, Davey and a coalition of industry leaders — including the California Restaurant Association, the California League of Food Producers, the American Forest and Paper Association and the Print Creative Alliance — commissioned a study disputing CalRecycle’s numbers.

It found CalRecycle’s 2025 estimate of $21 billion in implementation costs, or $190 a year per California household, rests on “idealized assumptions that fail to capture real-world costs and complications the regulations will create.”

The study puts the number somewhere between $35 and $58 billion, rising after the implementation period.

Klug of CalRecycle said the agency’s earlier reports were just estimates. “The actual costs will be determined by producer choices,” he said. “These costs, for example, will reflect the infrastructure needed to recycle materials that producers are choosing to use.”

Agriculture groups push back 

The biggest hurdle for producers is cutting plastic use 25% by 2032 — which state regulators say will require redesigning packaging and shifting toward reusable products, such as dishes at restaurants and paper-based packaging for produce.

Business groups say they support the state’s goals but call the timeline unworkable.

Food safety is one sticking point: alternatives like paper-based containers for berries are less breathable and spoil faster, while heavier glass or cardboard adds transportation costs, said Casey Creamer, president of the California Fresh Fruit Association.

“We just don’t want to force something out and not be able to deliver a fresh, healthy commodity, or create a situation that has more significant or adverse environmental concerns just because we look at plastics and packaging in a silo,” Creamer said.

Environmental groups oppose any pause.

“All of us pay for plastic pollution through higher garbage bills and clean-ups of polluted beaches and waterways, not to mention the damage to our environment and our health,”said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste.

Sen. Ben Allen, a Democrat representing coastal Los Angeles County who authored the law, said it’s time plastic producers are held accountable for the waste they produce.

“This 11th-hour Hail Mary is only trying to maintain status quo and avoid due responsibility, throwing years of good-faith negotiations, and affordability and sustainability improvements out the window,” he said in a statement about producers’ efforts to pause implementation of the law.

Businesses pass costs to consumers

Whether the plastics law is actually driving up grocery prices yet is hard to pin down. Creamer said businesses may already be factoring the organization’s planned fees into their prices.

Federal data show grocery prices dipped slightly in July from June, though prices have climbed year over year and that rate is accelerating, said Richard Volpe, a consumer-price expert at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Neither the USDA nor the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released August figures, and no data yet isolates the state plastics law’s effect from broader inflation.

Volpe said retailers, who run on thin margins, will eventually pass costs on to consumers — but probably not right away.

“It will not happen overnight,” he said. “And it will still be relatively small, mostly on the order of pennies on the dollar.”

Industry groups warn it will add up.

“If someone’s even on the cusp of food insecurity and they’re looking at $1,000 more a year, that’s pushing them over the food cliff,” said Nate Rose, a spokesperson for the California Grocers Association.

The Teamsters, which backed the plastics law hoping it would boost jobs, now worry the fees could affect workers too.

The law “has been morphed into something that is going to cost California consumers a substantial amount of money at a time when I don’t know if we need to spend thousands more on groceries,” said Gusman, the Teamsters lobbyist. “That also has an impact on the workforce.”

Mark Baldassare has seen his fair share of eyebrow-raising political polls in his decades-long career as a public opinion researcher.

Never, though, has he encountered a completely fake survey with made-up findings.

Until this week.

“It’s disturbing,” said Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank.

“It’s a wake-up call for all of us.”

The poll in question, published last week by a group called Median Strategies, purported to show Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading City Councilmember Nithya Raman by double digits — a surprising result given Bass’s low approval rating and her administration’s recent setbacks on homelessness. It also claimed that Bass had won support from a vast majority of voters who supported insurgent Republican Spencer Pratt in the primary election.

But on Monday, Median Strategies retracted its poll and replaced its website with a disclaimer that the survey results were fabricated as part of a “short-term social experiment” and “should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data.” The group’s website also featured “polls” from the Wisconsin and Nevada gubernatorial races.

The fake results, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, duped the California Post, several local television and radio stations and even the mayor’s own campaign, which drew attention to the survey in a now-deleted X post.

The incident further underscores the importance of accuracy and precision in polling and presents yet another challenge for a public already struggling to separate fact from fiction and genuine content from AI-generated slop.

Bass’s spokesperson, Alex Stack, said campaign leadership had reviewed the polling memo that accompanied the results and decided it was legitimate given that “the poll was reported on by multiple news outlets.”

“Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Stack said in a statement.

A scheme to rig betting markets?

It’s unclear who’s behind Median Strategies, what their true intentions were with the bogus data and whether they would’ve disclosed the deception to the public if journalists hadn’t intervened. The group did not respond to a list of emailed questions from CalMatters.

“This definitely isn’t a research experiment, right? It sounds like an excuse for very bad behavior,” said Mindy Romero, director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Inclusive Democracy.

“If we take them at their word, that this is some sort of social experiment, that’s not what reputable researchers engage in,” Romero added. “We always have to think about the harm that we’re doing.”

One alternate theory is that the false survey results were meant to manipulate prediction markets, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, in the same way that securities fraudsters “pump and dump” penny stocks. They buy low, release disingenuous information to drive the price up, then sell high and reap the windfall.

Median’s fake poll spurred high volumes of trades shortly after it was posted, though the price movements were small. The Associated Press tracked thousands of trades from roughly 20 different accounts on Polymarket within six minutes of Bass’s campaign posting about the poll on X. On Kalshi, the price of placing a “yes” bet on Bass winning the mayoral race rose roughly two cents, from 63 to 65, within 15 minutes of the post, the AP reported.

“If nothing else, Median Strategies proved the concept that a pump-and-dump scheme is easily transferrable to election prediction markets,” wrote David Dayen for The American Prospect, a left-leaning policy publication.

Could bogus polls become more common?

For Jonathan Underland, a political strategist who works with Democrat Xavier Becerra’s campaign for governor, the Median Strategies debacle reinforces how important it is to vet a poll’s reputability before sharing it on official platforms.

“I get the excitement of a poll that shows you in the lead,” Underland said. “Everything is an opportunity for your opponent to hit you. The last thing I want to do is promote a poll that’s not real.”

Baldassare detests that public opinion polls drive financial decisions, from betting markets to more traditional political decisions such as which candidates from powerful donors and political groups pour money into. He acknowledged that copycats and wannabes could follow Median Strategies’ example and pump more noise and disinformation into the political ecosystem.

But he noted a silver lining: This is happening in August, when only a fraction of people are tuned into politics, rather than October when voters have their ballots in hand.

He hopes the Median Strategies incident reminds journalists and campaign operatives to recommit to verifying the source of the information before sharing it.

When in doubt, “Call the pollster,” Baldassare said. “Make sure I’m legitimate. You know — a real person.”

One of the last remaining checks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and private-prison contractors running immigration detention centers has all but collapsed, leaving thousands of people trapped in a system with nearly nonexistent oversight, according to an NPR review.

The grievance system in immigration detention is designed to offer a safe channel to report violations of detention standards and seek redress, without fear of retaliation. It's often the only recourse for people to submit complaints about detention issues, including mistreatment, unsanitary conditions, medical neglect and sexual assault. But an NPR review of documents, available data and interviews with experts has found the system — which in the best of times was a complex patchwork — barely operates and even at times backfires for those using it. It is one of the few remaining safeguards for immigrants in federal custody after the Trump administration effectively dismantled other oversight offices.

Detainees and their families tell NPR that in the very worst cases the absence of transparency and accountability, and the subsequent failure to adhere to mandated grievance guidelines, is one of the leading factors for the record number of deaths in detention — at least 53 since the start of President Trump's second term.

Critics say it is the reason why more detainees are risking their lives to protest inhumane conditions and legal rights violations, in the form of widespread hunger strikes.

The Department of Homeland Security declined to answer specific questions about how it handles detainees' grievance claims, how DHS or private contractor employees are trained, what steps it takes to ensure private contractors — the largest being CoreCivic and The GEO Group — adhere to guidelines, or whether all detention facilities have a mandatory grievance committee. Instead, the office referred NPR to the 2011 Performance-Based National Detention Standards, which outline how the system is intended to work.

D.E.'s story

That system didn't work for D.E., who has had a brain tumor growing in his head for the last 12 years.

He was supposed to start chemotherapy the week he was picked up by ICE just a couple of blocks from his home.

The first seizure in detention was terrifying, but the second was the worst.

It was around 2 a.m. and D.E., one of more than a thousand detainees in the California City Detention Center, was lying on the lower bunk of his small cell. The CoreCivic guard who normally brought his nightly dose of Keppra, the medication he's relied on twice a day for years to keep seizures at bay, was more than five hours late, and it wasn't the first time. He'd had the first seizure just a couple of weeks earlier, and the telltale signs of an oncoming convulsion were in full effect: a relentless throbbing in his brain behind the 3-inch scar above his left ear. The blurred vision. The dizziness.

"I could feel it coming and I didn't want to hurt myself, so I jammed my arm between the metal bed frame and the wall to lock myself in place," D.E., a Mexican national who requested that NPR only use his initials because he fears government retaliation, said in Spanish. Trapping his arm was the best precaution he could come up with to keep himself from accidentally falling face-first into the shared toilet that was just inches from his bed, he said. "It's what I was most afraid of because I could have drowned."

Recalling that night, D.E. described the episode as a sustained haze of torture. The next morning, he tried to document what he could remember in a medical grievance that has been reviewed by NPR.

In practice, the grievance system should act as an internal accountability mechanism for both federally run and contracted detention facilities; the guidelines establish mandatory review and adjudication time frames.

With limited space on the paper form, D.E. was as specific as he could be. "Hello. I am writing this letter to the Medical Services Department regarding a complaint about my medical condition," he wrote on March 6. "It is a very aggressive issue involving a brain tumor that causes headaches and has triggered epileptic episodes lasting up to four hours. I am requesting that you provide me with a doctor specializing in radiation and chemotherapy, as my treatment was interrupted when I was detained by ICE on January 19."

A breakdown of oversight

Lawmakers, immigration attorneys, advocates and detainees report that experiences like D.E.'s are ubiquitous across the nation's detention centers, reflecting a broken grievance process.

Trying to enforce the rules of the grievance system has always been challenging, Chris Brundage, the former deputy of the now-closed Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, told NPR.

That's partly because it's not one single set of standards that all operators must follow, Brundage said. "It's a patchwork system that has never worked as intended," he said, explaining that there are at least three different sets of detention standards that operators are working under, depending on when they signed their contracts. (Some operators are following guidelines established in 2011. Others, an updated version from 2016, and those with new contracts are following 2019 standards.)

D.E.'s documentation of medicine taken, his seizures and medical visits during his three months in detention.

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Over the last two years, those problems have been significantly exacerbated by the evisceration of nearly all immigration detention oversight offices by the second Trump administration, he said.

The Office of Detention Oversight, created by Congress to conduct internal inspections, and the Immigration Detention Ombudsman's office tasked with investigating detainee deaths and other issues have had their budgets gutted and suffered massive layoffs. Both agencies sit within DHS. In the case of the ombudsman's office, one of the only places that detainees could turn to to challenge a grievance denial outside of the immediate detention facility, it was fully shuttered in May.

Another office whose budget has been slashed is the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Brundage noted. In 2025, the administration slashed the CRCL staff from roughly 150 employees down to just a handful, effectively halting operations. The Government Accountability Project reported more than 500 active civil rights and detention-abuse complaints — including allegations of medical neglect, sexual abuse and dangerous conditions in immigration detention — were frozen or left uninvestigated.

At the time, the Trump administration said cutting hundreds of staff positions at the congressionally mandated offices was necessary to save money and because DHS claimed they were "internal adversaries that slow down operations."

"I think what happened when these offices were effectively gutted and shut down, you lost that … legitimacy. And legitimacy means that they're following the laws, regulations. But what happens if you don't have transparency into the process and you don't have accountability? Without those two things, that legitimacy erodes, " Brundage said.

Tracking grievances

Even before the closures it has been virtually impossible for lawmakers or inspectors to know how many grievances are filed at any given detention center each year, because neither ICE nor any of the private prison companies contracted by DHS are required to disclose that data to any review body. Also, even internally detention facility operators are not required to track data on how many grievance complaints are deemed to be founded, how the issue was resolved, or if it was challenged, whether the initial rejection was overturned.

Lawmakers and immigrant rights activists say that without such mandates, they are unable to decipher any patterns that could shed light on systemic problems, either at a single facility or across the entire system. Some suggest it is a deliberate ploy to keep the public in the dark about conditions on the inside of the nation's fortress-like detention centers.

The ACLU of Northern California partnered with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice to document the daily conditions of life in California immigration detention by tracking formal grievances during the Biden administration. The findings were published in a 2024 study called Resistance, Retaliation, Repression: Two Years in California Immigration Detention. The organization obtained grievances from detainees and their families, and Freedom of Information Act requests from the state's six detention centers, which are all run by The GEO Group, CoreCivic, and Management & Training Corp. (Two new facilities, also run by private contractors, have been added since then.)

In all, the study reviewed 485 grievance complaints, concluding that the absence of accountability and transparency keeps conditions of detention, the grievances filed and their outcome hidden from public scrutiny. An analysis of the collected grievances revealed that complaints about the staff and their conduct, including facility management and bullying by staff, were the most common reason for grievances, with 179 documented allegations. Poor living conditions, including contaminated food, sleep deprivation, exposure to toxic mold and access to legal counsel, were the second most common reasons, with 141 filed complaints. And 94, roughly 20%, were medical grievances related to insufficient medical care and denial of medications.

Based on the data, 71% of the 485 grievances were deemed as unfounded or rejected by detention center officials. Nearly 21% were either closed, undecided, or unknown. Only 8% of the total grievances found in favor of detained people. According to detention standards, officials are required to provide, in writing, a reason for a rejection of a complaint and detainees can appeal an unfounded determination up to two times. In the past, the issue could be escalated up to the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Ryan Gustin, senior director of public affairs at CoreCivic, which owns or operates 12 detention centers across the country, said its facilities are closely monitored by ICE and regularly undergo reviews and audits.

"We have a robust grievance process available to all detainees at each of our ICE-contracted facilities that provides multiple safe and discrete avenues for concerns to be raised, including toll-free telephone numbers," Gustin told NPR. He added that most detainee concerns are processed through ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations' Detention, Removals and Information Line.

It is unclear if complaints made to one of the hotline numbers or those processed through ICE's ERO removals and information line are treated in the same way as a formal grievance, that is, whether it is documented and added to a detainee's file, and if detention center officials are required to abide by the same response timelines as a written complaint. CoreCivic referred all requests for clarification to DHS, which did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.

Mariel Villarreal, a senior attorney with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, told NPR that many of the denials she has reviewed rarely offer any meaningful explanation for the rejection. "It'll just be a few generic words," she said. In other instances, there is no written record of the denial on the submitted complaint. (This is what happened in all four of D.E.'s grievances, filed about two years after the study at California City.)

"But even grievances that are ultimately founded, there's often no real remedy to them. There's nothing with teeth or no enforcement mechanism for making sure the grievance is actually addressed in a meaningful way," Villarreal said.

Villarreal noted other violations that she has witnessed, including facilities that have ignored a rule prohibiting a staff member who is accused of wrongdoing from ruling on a complaint about them.

"We've heard complaints from people [saying], 'I filed the grievance about this officer or this staff who did something bad or mistreated me,' and they were the one that then adjudicated it. And the proof of that is that their name shows up in logs," she said.

The report also found that use of the grievance system can backfire. Villarreal said her clients have reported various forms of retaliation, including solitary confinement or getting transfers to detention facilities far from a complainant's family and lawyers.

"I have a feeling that a lot of people who are filing grievances in immigration detention are pretty aware of the fact that it's essentially a sham," Villarreal said. But the reason people in custody continue to file them anyway is because it's the only way to document what's happening to them, "because it's their word against the whole system," she said.

"People are at the whim of whatever ICE wants to do with them"

Despite the Trump administration's attempts to ban unannounced visits by federal lawmakers, members of Congress have the legal authority to visit ICE detention sites at any time.

Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro visits the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in south Texas about once a month. But, he told NPR, that's become more difficult as ICE is enforcing more restrictive policies designed to block unannounced visits.

"They no longer allow us to see people who want to sign up to see members of Congress when a [congressional delegation] is going to inspect the facility. Now we have to have specific permission to see particular people," Castro said after a visit to the facility in June.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, pictured at a press conference in Washington last year, visits the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in south Texas about once a month.

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Even so, Castro said he's witnessed operational violations on nearly every visit. On a chaperoned tour in June, the congressman said he was taken into a room with a phone bank for detainees to use to anonymously report abuses, including a connection to a national rape hotline. But when he tested the line, he said it asked for the caller's personal identification code.

"The [CoreCivic] warden said he didn't know why it was happening and that he would get back to me" about it, he said.

He added: "I think for all intents and purposes, the grievance process, the resolution process, is non-functioning at this point. And these people are at the whim of whatever ICE wants to do with them."

New Jersey State Attorney General Jennifer Davenport sued The GEO Group after staff at the Delaney Hall facility allegedly blocked health department inspectors from entering most of the complex during a scheduled visit in May. The inspection followed a hunger strike by detainees, who in a letter, complained about rotten or worm-infested food, medical neglect and being coerced into signing deportation orders. But the team of inspectors, which was tasked with conducting a biannual audit of more than 20 national detention standards, including the grievance system, was not allowed past the center's kitchen facilities.

In a statement to NPR, a DHS spokesperson said, "There are NO subprime conditions or abuse at Delaney Hall." However, a recently released report of an August 2025 inspection of the facility during which inspections and compliance specialists from the Office of Professional Responsibility were also blocked from touring the entire facility, noted a slew of health violations. And a review of the facility's suicide watch logs showed 19 instances where clinical staff failed to conduct mandatory 15-minute check-ins. Instead, documents showed gaps of up to 65 minutes.

The GEO Group referred NPR's questions to DHS.

In California, a U.S. District Court judge issued a preliminary injunction in a class-action civil suit brought by detainees and immigrant advocacy groups against ICE for allegedly subjecting immigrants to inhumane and illegal conditions at the Adelanto Processing Center — one of the largest immigration detention centers in the United States. At least four people have died in custody while detained at The GEO Group-run facility since September 2025.

The lawsuit called Adelanto's grievance process "slow and often futile," adding that "detained individuals routinely wait more than a month for response after filing a grievance." It also states that in some cases, The GEO Group staff have pressured detained individuals into withdrawing their grievances in order to receive help.

The judge's July ruling said the plaintiffs "have demonstrated they are likely to prevail — or at the least, raise serious questions — on the merits of their Fifth Amendment and Rehabilitation Act claims."

She ordered the facility to immediately provide basic necessities. In addition, two independent monitors will have access to the detention center for unannounced inspections and to provide monthly reports, and detainees will have direct access to them in a confidential grievance system.

D.E.'s grievances

D.E., 44, says he moved to the U.S. when he was 18 so he could help support his parents and siblings back home in Mexico. He's been undocumented the entire time.

As he was being handcuffed and pushed into an unmarked van in January, D.E. says he asked the officers to stop by his apartment so that he could grab his medication. They didn't. Then when he arrived at Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, N.J., hours later, he told the medical intake staff about his condition.

"I even told them in English: I have a Stage 4 brain tumor. I have to take 1,000 mg of Keppra at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. I'm supposed to start chemotherapy this week," he said.

He also gave them the name of his doctor and the hospital where he was being treated about an hour away. "Please call them," he begged.

It's unclear whether anyone at Delaney ever spoke to his medical team, but D.E. says the on-staff doctor at the detention facility reviewed his records and recommended that he be sent to a local hospital for chemotherapy. About two weeks later, he said an officer told him he didn't need chemotherapy.

Eventually, word got out and local activists started lobbying elected officials to intervene on his behalf. Days later, D.E. was transferred to a facility in Arizona for about a week, then shipped off to California City, where he says the inconsistent delivery of his meds triggered four seizures.

All in all, the second seizure lasted about four hours off and on. It's the worst one he's ever had. Throughout it, he lost control of his body and the ability to speak. He recorded the details of the episode in a formal grievance the following morning. It was one of four medical grievances D.E. filed with the CoreCivic staff in March alone.

"I filed them even though I knew nothing would change," D.E. said. "My lawyer told me they were supposed to respond to the grievances within a week, but I never got any kind of response," he added.

NPR reviewed all four complaints and confirmed that the documents do not contain a response to D.E.'s requests for chemotherapy, access to cancer specialists, or plans to ensure the timely delivery of his medications from CoreCivic or DHS staff.

According to the guidelines set by the DHS, a designated "grievance coordinator" is responsible for reviewing complaints, and staff must investigate and provide a written response, usually within five days. If the grievance involves an immediate threat to health or safety, the facility must respond within 24 hours.

"That never happened," D.E. said. Instead, "They would tell me that I would get treatment 'soon' but not set an appointment or a time frame," he said. D.E. was eventually released from detention after filing a petition in state court.

In more than three months in detention, D.E. never saw an oncologist.
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