NYC NOW - Evening Roundup: Immigration Detainees Held in Brooklyn Federal Jail, Mother Seeks Answers in Daughter’s Killing, Health Officials Warn About Vaping, and Mental Health Professionals Continue to Gain Trust of Homeless Clients

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

Immigration authorities are now housing detainees at federal jail in Brooklyn. Plus, a mother looks for answers in her daughter’s Brooklyn killing. And health officials in New York warn about the addictive nature of vaping. Finally, many mental health professionals still try to win the trust of homeless clients so that they’ll accept hospital services voluntarily.

Immigration authorities are now housing detainees at federal jail in Brooklyn. A mother looks for answers in her daughter's killing. Health officials in New York warn about the addictive nature of vaping. Many mental health professionals are still trying to win the trust of homeless clients so that they'll accept hospital services voluntarily. From WNYC, this is NYC now. I'm Sean Carlson. Immigration authorities are now housing detainees at federal jail in Brooklyn.

The Federal Bureau of Prison says detainees are now. being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and other jails and prisons across the country. The Metropolitan Detention Center houses a number of high-profile prisoners, including Sean Diddy Combs and Luigi Mangione. It has long been plagued by violence, corruption by staff at the jail, and what prisoners have described as inhumane conditions. The mother of a woman shot and killed near Barclay Center says she's looking for answers about what happened. WNIC's Brittany Crickstein has more. Norma Campbell says she was in bed when she got a call with the worst possible news. Her 36-year-old daughter, Tamika Powell, had been shot and killed in the street a few blocks away.

Campbell says she heard from neighbors that Powell got into a fight at a nearby barbecue and a man put on a mask and followed her out. Campbell says she's desperate to find out more about what happened. Nobody is giving me any information. So I'm sitting here this morning that I know I want to do. Police say Powell was shot in the head around 10.30 p.m. near Carlton Avenue and Pacific Street, and the suspect is still at large. Summer vacation is a time when some kids and teens pick up a new hobby, but it might also be the right time to drop a bad habit, like vaping. New York City's health department says vaping is over three times more common among public high school students compared with cigarette smoking,

and more than seven times more common among young adults. Dr. Michelle Morris is the city's Acting Health Commissioner. She says e-cigarette companies can jam a lot more nicotine into one cartridge than a single cigarette. Near the equivalent of 320 to 640 cigarettes in just one of their products, and that is extremely concerning. Dr. Moore says, like cigarettes, peer pressure and the stress of school contribute to why kids vape, but unlike cigarettes, vapes can be smoked almost anywhere without anyone noticing. You can find resources to help quit smoking at the city's health department website. Up next, a psychiatrist with homeless clients in Manhattan tries to win their trust so they'll accept hospital services voluntarily. More on that after the break.

New York lawmakers recently updated the state's mental health law to make it easier to send people to the hospital involuntarily. It's a policy Mayor Adams has champions specifically for people living on the street and in the subway. But for many people who work with homeless New Yorkers, the goal is still to win their trust so they will voluntarily accept services. WDYC's Caroline Lewis accompanied one psychiatrist as she met with homeless clients in Manhattan. Hey, it's Dr. Freed. If you want to ping me when you're back in the neighborhood. Over voicemail, Dr. Joanna Freed is offering to buy a meal for a patient she prescribed medication to a couple of months ago. She's trying to entice her to meet up. She should be at this point, I think, out of medication, but I haven't heard, like, if the medication was working, if she liked it, if she has any side effect.

Freed is the medical director for the Manhattan Outreach Consortium. a collaboration between three nonprofits whose homeless outreach teams cover the borough. This morning, she's in East Harlem, looking for clients she's been referred to through a team run by the nonprofit Center for Urban Community Services, or CUCS. One of the nice things about being part of a team is that they are offering the things that people may want more than they particularly want to talk to a psychiatrist or a doctor or take medicine. Those things could include a single room in a safe haven shelter or a phone or a pair of socks. These teams are all contracted by the city's Department of Homeless Services to try to get people off the street and ideally into permanent housing.

This kind of ongoing trust-building work has been the foundation of what we do for a very long time. Molly Wazow Park oversees homeless services as commissioner of the city's Department of Social Services. She says about 3% of homeless New Yorkers are unsheltered, and forming relationships is essential to bringing them inside. That 3% is a universe of people who have really been failed by everybody, right? By family, by social institutions, by government. That work can be painstaking and tends to fly under the radar of most New Yorkers. In recent years, it has been eclipsed by the debate over expanding involuntary treatment.

In 2022, Mayor Adams instructs. police and clinicians to take people to the hospital against their will if their mental health symptoms prevented them from meeting their basic needs. That standard was codified into state law last month. Freed says in some cases involuntary treatment can have positive results, but she still reserves it for extreme cases. You know, they have leg wounds or they are walking into traffic. Freed's work is more often an exercise in patients. One client she visits on the street pulls a blanket over her head when she sees the doctor coming. Her only response to Fried's questions is no thank you. So just to sort of recap what happened there, like, was that

how you expected that to go? A hundred percent, yes. But Freed says even when she's rejected, she just keeps coming back, sometimes for months or years. She's responsible for conducting the psychiatric evaluations clients need to apply for supportive housing. But she tries to slip in offers of treatment too. She wrote prescriptions for nearly two-thirds of the patients she saw through CUCS over the past year. Even if it can take time, Fried says she does get to see patients go through dramatic changes. How was the debate last night? Oh, it was very good. Very good. Freed is meeting her patient, Abdi Latif Iga, in the CUCS office the day after the first mayoral debate. Ega says it can be hard to listen to politicians talk about their plans to address homelessness

and mental illness in the city. You are the boogeyman or the pariah that is going to get that guy elected. Still, he says he's benefited from city outreach services. Ego was once a PhD candidate at Columbia University, but a mix of depression and heavy drinking derailed his ambitions. CUCS staff found him sleeping in Morningside Park in 2023. They got him a transitional housing placement, and he later started therapy sessions with Freed.

It helped me to help myself to critically ask what it is that my problem was that I needed to drink 24-7. Ega says he's been sober six months now and is 250 pages into writing his second novel. It's really gratifying to see somebody kind of access the things about themselves that maybe they had to turn away from or protect or kind of like put away while they were, dealing with, you know, survival. Freed attributes those wins to the full spectrum of services outreach teams offer, not psychiatric care alone. That's WNMIC's Caroline Lewis.

Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. I'm Sean Carlson. We'll be back tomorrow.