JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The roadways around the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit to Canada are notoriously confusing. Just ask any Detroiter. There's a ton of traffic, lots of construction, all making for a difficult drive. And as NPR's Jasmine Garsd reports, making a wrong turn onto the U.S. side of the bridge has landed hundreds of immigrants in detention in the past few months.
JASMINE GARSD, BYLINE: The tips about the Ambassador Bridge started coming in months ago.
SARAHI: (Speaking Spanish).
GARSD: That's Sarahi, describing a drive to Costco on a Saturday morning back in March. NPR's dropping her last name because she's an immigrant without legal status. The mother was with her two kids, age 1 and 5, both U.S. citizens. So she's driving, and the GPS, she says, routed her onto the bridge. They were detained by CBP.
SARAHI: (Speaking Spanish).
GARSD: She says she was taken into a windowless office space near the bridge. It was cold. She was held there for nearly six days. When her 1-year-old got sick and feverish, she was told there was no medicine.
SARAHI: (Speaking Spanish).
GARSD: "Why aren't you letting me talk to a lawyer?" she says she asked officers. It felt like a kidnapping.
RASHIDA TLAIB: A wrong turn should not lead to a disappearance and an erosion of someone's due process.
GARSD: That's Michigan Democratic representative Rashida Tlaib. Sarahi's interview aired on NPR last month. Her story led to an inquiry by Tlaib. On a visit to the site, the congresswoman says Customs and Border Protection officials specifically told her 213 people have been detained there just this year.
TLAIB: Those are the numbers we were given during our site visit. And he offered - he said, well, I just want you to know also, Congresswoman, that 90% of them were actually here in the United States. They just made a wrong turn.
GARSD: At a press conference on Thursday in Detroit, the representative said she saw a small space without adequate food or accommodations for children.
TLAIB: I saw first-hand those conditions. And we're talking about a room with two basic cots, so this is an office space that is not equipped for detention or long-term stays, especially of families.
GARSD: NPR knows of three U.S. citizen children who were held there. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for CBP disputed that there were 213 people detained since January. He said in a statement, the number is closer to 50. When asked, the spokesman refused to give his name.
As the Trump administration ramps up its efforts to keep its promise of a historic mass deportation campaign, there's been reports of increasingly overcrowded detention centers. At Thursday's press conference, Miriam Aukerman, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Michigan, says this should not be dismissed as an issue that only affects immigrants without legal status.
MIRIAM AUKERMAN: Democracies don't deny people access to attorneys. It is naive to think that if we tolerate such incommunicado detention and disappearances for noncitizens, the government won't start doing the same thing to citizens.
GARSD: She says what's been happening on the bridge should concern everyone. Jasmine Garsd, NPR News, New York.
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