By the time eight-year-old Miguel was put on a bus for a 1,500-mile trip across the US, his leg was badly infected from a cut from barbed wire at the US-Mexico border.
On another bus, a woman who had started bleeding in federal detention in Texas had a miscarriage in the vehicle’s tiny bathroom.
The condition of these and other sick and injured asylum seekers has left medical volunteers in Chicago, who found them sleeping at police stations and airports, shocked – both because they were put on buses sick and injured in the first place, and that relieving their suffering often falls to young medical students.
“We are happy to do this work [because] there’s no one else to do it,” said Sara Izquierdo, a second-year medical student from the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine and one of the founders of Chicago’s Mobile Migrant Health Team (MMHT), who in effect act as first responders.
What the volunteers see and hear is distressing.
More than 20,000 migrants have been bussed by Texas’s Republican authorities to Chicago since August 2022. As is the case with other destination cities, such as New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and others, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, does not coordinate with the Democrat-led cities before dispatching thousands of people to those places. It’s led to fights with – and even between – Democratic leaders.
Miguel, his mother and his younger sibling were struggling across the US-Mexico border at a life-or-death river crossing in August after surviving a harrowing journey from Venezuela, Izquierdo recounted. She described how the family told her that, with Texas within reach, Miguel sliced his right leg on barbed wire that state authorities had placed under the water to deter migrants.
In detention in Texas, no one noticed at first the boy was bleeding because his pants were dark and grimy from weeks of trudging in the same clothes. He later received stitches.
After state authorities ordered their transfer to Chicago, the family ended up sleeping rough at the city’s vast O’Hare airport, where Izquierdo and her team found them.
Miguel and his family have since moved to a different city. Izquierdo has been unable to locate them, so the Guardian is not identifying them further, but Izquierdo recounted what they told her as she observed a doctor in her group remove about 10 stitches from Miguel’s leg.
“The skin was in three different flaps, from the irregular cut that he received,” Izquierdo said. “When the family was crossing the river, the boy stopped and couldn’t move. The mother thought her son’s leg was wedged in a rock, so she pulled her son back, which cut the leg even more.”
The doctor who stitched the boy’s wound in Texas gave him a dose of antibiotics and a prescription to treat the infection that was developing.
But the boy’s mother wasn’t told how to fill the prescription. By the time the family were screened by MMHT at O’Hare, the laceration was oozing.
When the stitches were removed, Izquierdo said that both she and the doctor felt upset by how poorly the job had been done.
“They just did simple sutures, which left a hole in the middle. So now he will have an indentation scar,” she said.
After his experience in Texas, Miguel was terrified of doctors until the students in Chicago helped calm him and one did drawings for him.
The MMHT volunteer group, which exists on donations, was founded earlier this year by Izquierdo and Evelyn Figueroa, a family physician at the UI Health Family Medicine Center and the director of the Pilsen Food Pantry, which has spearheaded massive mutual aid efforts for migrants in Chicago.
Currently, more than 3,000 people are sleeping on the floors of police stations and airports in the Chicago area, waiting for placement in the bursting city-run shelter.
Fernando Sigala, a second-year medical student at Rush University Medical College, has been going to police stations and airports every Saturday with the group since last summer. He said the funds the group raise are used for over-the-counter medications, prescriptions and medical supplies, as well as bus passes so migrants can attend follow-up doctor’s appointments.
“We actually go to the pharmacy, pick up the medication, call those numbers, find the migrants, and then we distribute the medications to them, whatever the physician prescribed,” he said.
The Guardian accompanied Sigala and a group of medical professionals and students to one police precinct on a cold and rainy Saturday in October.
In the overcrowded lobby, with hardly any room to walk, Sigala and others screened patients while the team called in prescriptions, or searched for medication in their duffel bags. “Most of them don’t know the language, and I’m just providing that little bridge to at least kind of help out,” he said.
Sigala’s own parents immigrated from Zacatecas, Mexico, to the US to seek better opportunities.
“I try to think about what my parents went through,” Sigala said. “I want to think that if my parents needed help, I would have provided that help for them … [These migrants are] scared, they’re in a completely new country.”
Izquierdo, whose father immigrated from Peru, said that everyone on the board of the MMHT is either an immigrant or a child of immigrants. “I think a lot of it comes from a source of passion,” she said. “But there’s also a lot of people in our volunteer group that don’t share the same backgrounds as we do or the same experiences and they’re out here fighting with us.”
At the police station, one of the first patients the doctors saw was Alex Rossy, 30, a migrant from Venezuela. Doctors removed stitches from a large cut on his right arm; he had been stabbed in the street a week earlier after getting out of work at 11.30pm from a local mechanic shop in Chicago, he said.
“It’s something of a horror,” he said in Spanish. “The two men came up to me. They stabbed me and those men took my money.”
Rossy has been living in a makeshift tent outside the police station for five months. He used to stay at two different city-run shelters, but said he was constantly surveilled and found the environment undignified. At least living in a tent, he has been able to work and can move about freely, he said.
He’s had his bike stolen, however. “I have no stability, I have been in the tents for five months fighting, fighting, raining, cold, and there I am,” he said.
Rossy said he left Venezuela hopeful but had lost some of his dreams along the way. He said he was extorted at many stops in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. “I already forgot about the American dream,” he said.
The medical team worked for five hours without a break.
At police stations and airports, the team has screened migrants with colds, allergies, diabetes and high blood pressure and children with complex medical needs. They have also encountered women who had miscarriages during their migration journey.
Izquierdo recalled meeting a 25-year-old asylum seeker from Colombia in July who had had a miscarriage that began at a Texas detention center when she was about 10 to 14 weeks pregnant.
She recounted that the woman said after she and her husband arrived at the Texas border, officials detained them separately; the woman, who preferred not to be named, agreed that Izquierdo could relay her story. Izquierdo said the woman told her she began experiencing pain while in detention and realized she was bleeding.
The woman alerted the people in charge but was warned that she’d miss a bus ride she’d been offered, with the chance of getting her own room in Chicago. She was also told she’d eventually be reunited with her husband.
“I don’t know who told her this,” Izquierdo said. “Was it someone from the government? Was it a volunteer? Like, who lied to her?” The woman had no way of contacting her husband and, as things unfolded fast, she was put on a charter bus to Chicago.
During the long trip, the woman bled profusely – and then she lost her pregnancy.
“She didn’t have any pads or anything like that, so she just used the toilet paper that was in the bathroom on the bus,” Izquierdo said.
“When they got off at the [Chicago] bus station, a person told her she could walk to a police station,” Izquierdo said the woman told her. “And she’s like, ‘What do you mean police stations? Where are the rooms?’”
The next day, the woman approached the medical volunteers when they came to the police precinct. The woman refused their offer of an ambulance because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself. “She said she’d rather walk and we’re like, ‘No’,” Izquierdo recalled. At the emergency room, an ultrasound confirmed she had miscarried.
Izquierdo and Sigala said their group is frustrated not just with southern Republican governors’ tactics but also with city authorities in Chicago for not doing more.
Mary May, the director of news affairs at the city’s office of emergency management and communications, sent a statement, saying: “With colder weather upon us, we are at an increasingly critical point in this humanitarian response. The city is also working with partners to respond to all medical emergencies and provide the appropriate care.”
It said the authorities provided healthcare “to new arrivals as needed”, fund clinical providers in official shelters and provide “coordination” for those offering screening in police precincts.
“The city is grateful to the network of volunteers and medical personnel who provide critical assistance and care at police districts,” the statement said.
It added that Chicago was seeking more federal funding for these needs and expressed gratitude to medical teams visiting the police stations.
Izquierdo said volunteers were underfunded and that while her group had a working relationship with the city, added that “it’s more of an exploitative relationship”.
She said: “The city has not given us a dollar. Our doctors are tired and our volunteers are tired. We need help and solid public health solutions that will lead to long-term change.”
