By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

Local sheriffs are on the front lines in deciding whether to participate in the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans. But states increasingly are making the choice for them.

More and more, sheriffs’ hands are tied no matter whether they do — or don’t — want to help with deportations, though they often get the blame when conservatives draw up lists of sanctuary cities.

“‘Naughty lists,’ as we call them, are not super helpful here,” said Patrick Royal, a spokesperson for the National Sheriffs’ Association. “We all know there are places like Colorado where you can’t [help with deportations], and places like North Carolina where you have to.”

Cooperation between sheriffs and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lies at the heart of the Trump administration’s immigration detention policy. The administration plans to punish noncooperative jurisdictions with funding cuts— though many legal experts agree that cooperation is voluntary unless state or local laws say otherwise.

Sheriffs, who typically run local jails, must decide what to do when faced with immigration detainers— requests from ICE to hold onto incarcerated people up to two extra days so ICE officers can show up and arrest them. ICE issues those detainers when the agency reviews fingerprints sent electronically for background checks as part of the jail booking process.

Otherwise, arrested suspects who post bond or are otherwise released by a judge might go free despite their immigration status, prompting ICE in some cases to pursue them in the community.

In North Carolina, Sheriff Garry McFadden ran on a platform of limiting cooperation with ICE when he was elected in Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte, in 2018. But today, McFadden must comply with detainers because of a state law passed last year.

In a now-retracted Facebook post, U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in late April accused Mecklenburg and several other North Carolina counties of “shielding criminal illegal immigrants” as sanctuary jurisdictions. Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, said in the post he was writing federal legislation to prosecute sanctuary jurisdictions.

“You can’t say we’re a sanctuary county and have state laws that say we have to work with ICE. You can’t have both,” McFadden said. He added that he’d like more choice about whether to comply with detainers. A federal funding cutoff would endanger important jail programs such as rape counseling, he said.

“Everybody’s focused on immigration like that’s the biggest fire, and nobody wants to address the other things. The losers will be the prisoners who need all these services we provide,” McFadden said.

Conservative sheriffs in Democratic-controlled states also can be frustrated by state policy on detainers. Sheriff Lew Evangelidis of Worcester County, Massachusetts, said he’s been criticized for releasing prisoners wanted by ICE but sometimes has no choice: A 2017 state Supreme Court ruling prohibits holding prisoners based on detainers.

“If they [ICE] want this person and consider them a threat to public safety, then I want that person out of my community. I want to keep my community safe,” said Evangelidis. He supported a Republican-sponsored effort in the state legislature to allow 12-hour holds for ICE if a judge determines the prisoner is a threat to public safety, but the amendment was voted down in April.

States act on detainers

Many experts agree that ICE detainers can be legally ignored if states allow sheriffs to do that.

“That detainer request is just that, a request, it’s not a requirement,” said Cassandra Charles, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, which is opposing Louisiana’s lawsuit to reverse a court-ordered ban on cooperation between Orleans Parish and ICE.

The general counsel for the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, Eddie Caldwell, agreed that the detainers are voluntary under federal law.

The association supports a state bill now under consideration that would require not only the 48-hour detention but also a notice sent 48 hours before release to let ICE know the clock is running. The proposal has passed the House.

The notification matters, Caldwell said, because there can be criminal proceedings that take weeks or months, so ICE in many cases doesn’t realize the 48-hour window has started.

Tillis’ office said the senator’s disagreement with McFadden, a Democrat, and other sheriffs is about that notification.

“It’s not necessarily that [sheriffs] are breaking the law, but rather making it as difficult as possible for ICE to take prisoners into custody by refusing to do some basic things. Notification is important,” said Daniel Keylin, a senior adviser to Tillis.

States including California, Colorado and Massachusetts ban compliance with the ICE detainers, on the general principle that it’s not enough reason to hold people in jails when they’re otherwise free to go because of bail or an end to their criminal cases. Those three states have made recent moves to defend or fine-tune their rules.

California’s attorney general also has issued guidance to local jurisdictions based on a 2017 state law limiting cooperation with immigration authorities. That law withstood a court challenge under the first Trump administration.

Colorado has a law against holding prisoners more than six hours longer than required, and a new bill sent to Democratic Gov. Jared Polis last week would specify that even those six hours can’t be for the purpose of an immigration detainer.

Iowa, Tennessee and Texas are among the states requiring cooperation with detainers.

And Florida has gone further, requiring sheriffs to actively help ICE write detainers though official agreements in which local agencies sign up to help enforce immigration laws.

Cooperation boosts arrests

Such cooperation makes a big difference, experts say — jails are the easiest place to pick up immigrants for deportation, and when local sheriffs and police help out, there are more arrests.

“A larger share of ICE arrests and deportations are happening in places where local law enforcement is cooperative with ICE,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director for the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, speaking at a recent webinar.

“A declining share of arrests and deportations are happening from places like California, where there are really strict limitations on local law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE,” she added.

ICE is making about 600 immigration arrests daily, twice the rate as during the last year of the Biden administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney and policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute, speaking at the same event.

Reports on deportations are incomplete, Chishti said, but he estimated the current administration is on track to deport half a million people this year and is trying to get that number higher.

“The Trump administration has not been able to change the laws that are on the books, because only Congress can do that,” Chishti said. “It’s going to take congressional action for the Trump administration to achieve its aim of higher [arrest and deportation] numbers.”

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President Donald Trump has added more pressure, last month requesting a list from Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of sanctuary cities, which he says would face funding cuts. The administration also has sued some states, including Colorado, Illinois and New York, over their policies.

Asked for comment on the legality of funding cutoffs for sanctuary policies, Bondi’s office referred to a February memo in which she promised to “end funding to state and local jurisdictions that unlawfully interfere with federal law enforcement operations.” The memo cites a federal law saying local officials “may not prohibit, or in any way restrict” communication about immigration status.

Local jurisdictions in Connecticut, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington joined a February lawsuit led by the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California against a Trump administration executive order calling for defunding cities with sanctuary policies, calling the order “illegal and authoritarian.”

In April, a U.S. district court in California issued a preliminary injunction in that case preventing any funding cutoff over sanctuary policies to the cities and counties in the lawsuit. And on Friday, the federal judge, William Orrick, ruled that the injunction applies to any list of sanctuary jurisdictions the administration may target for funding cuts.

Trump’s new executive order seeking the list cannot be used as “an end run” around Orrick’s injunction, the judge wrote, while he decides the legality of detainer policies and other issues.

“The litigation may not proceed with the coercive threat to end all federal funding hanging over the Cities and Counties’ heads like the sword of Damocles,” Orrick wrote.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Anna Claire Vollers, Stateline.org

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Tara Campbell unlocked the front door of the Bricklayers Hall, a no-frills brick building on South Union Street in downtown Montgomery, half a mile from the white-domed Alabama Capitol.

She was dressed in leggings, a T-shirt and bright blue running shoes. It was 8 a.m. on a Saturday, and she exuded the bouncy enthusiasm of a Zumba instructor as she welcomed the handful of Black women who’d just arrived.

Like Campbell, they were dressed for a workout. Three of them wore Wonder Woman socks that boasted tiny capes, which earned some laughs.

The women were ready for a two-mile group walk around Montgomery’s historically Black Centennial Hill neighborhood. But Campbell wanted to give them a quick tour of the building first.

For most, it was their first time inside the new Montgomery outpost of GirlTrek, a national organization dedicated to improving the health of Black women. A veteran of the nonprofit group’s Chicago chapter, Campbell moved south three months ago to open the new office in Montgomery.

GirlTrek chose its location deliberately. The Bricklayers Hall was the nerve center of the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott, which successfully desegregated the city’s public buses and became a model of nonviolent protest. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other boycott leaders strategized inside the hall, where King also kept an office.

That office is now Campbell’s office. GirlTrek’s walking teams are designed to empower Black women to improve their health, but also to encourage civil rights-inspired activism to tackle broader health disparities.

The Bricklayers Hall, located in the historically Black neighborhood of Centennial Park in Montgomery, Ala., was the nerve center for the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott touched off by Rosa Parks. (Anna Claire Vollers/Stateline/TNS)

This year marks the milestone anniversaries of several civil rights victories: the 70th anniversary of the bus boycott, the 60th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But 2025 also marks the 60th anniversary of Medicaid, the public health insurance program for people with low incomes.

The creation of Medicaid isn’t typically considered a civil rights victory. But the idea of health care as a human right was very much a part of the Civil Rights Movement, as was the belief that universal coverage could help dismantle racial inequities in health care.

“The connection between Medicare, Medicaid and the Civil Rights Movement was there from the beginning,” said Zachary Schulz, a history lecturer at Auburn University who specializes in public health history and policy. “Desegregation is often discussed in education, but there could be an argument made that it began in health care.”

Many of the Alabama communities that were home to the fiercest civil rights battles of the 20th century still grapple with systemic neglect that’s resulted in poor health outcomes, high uninsured rates and a shortage of medical providers.

In the neighborhoods around the Alabama Capitol, where nearly 50,000 people gathered in March of 1965 to meet the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers and push for voting rights, nearly a quarter of residents don’t have health insurance, according to the latest U.S. census data, for 2023. Around the Bricklayers Hall, the median household income is about$23,615, less than half of what it is statewide.

The neighborhood’s closest hospital filed for bankruptcy in February.

Statewide, 12% of Black residents under age 65 are uninsured, compared with 8.2% of white people and 10.3% for all races, according to the census.

Just as civil rights activists marched for voting rights and an end to segregation, the next generation of organizers is demanding something they see as no less essential: the right to accessible, affordable health care in a system that continues to deny it.

The women in the Saturday morning walking group come from different neighborhoods across the city. Most said they have health insurance. But everybody knows somebody who’s struggled to get the health care they need.

Campbell believes unjust policies harm the health of Black women everywhere — and wants to encourage them to continue pushing for change.

One policy change that has long been the focus of rallies, committee hearings and advocacy across the state: Alabama’s refusal to expand Medicaid to more adults under the Affordable Care Act, despite evidence that the state’s health care system is failing huge swaths of Alabamians. Alabama consistently ranks at or near the bottom in health measures, including high rates of heart disease, obesity and maternal deaths.

“We’re trying to save our own lives,” Campbell said. “We’re here in the footsteps of the Civil Rights Movement where, when they walked, things changed.”

‘The most shocking and the most inhuman’

Black medical leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Dr. W. Montague Cobb, advocated for the passage of Medicaid and Medicare. Others, including King, spoke of health care as a moral imperative. “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman,” he reportedly said in a 1966 speech to health care workers.

When Medicaid and Medicare launched that year, many Southern hospitals were still segregated. The feds sent teams to thousands of hospitals over the next few years to make sure they were following federal law before they could receive federal Medicare and Medicaid funding.

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“Southern states were especially resistant back then to participation because it required compliance with federal regulations, including civil rights laws,” said Schulz, of Auburn University. Alabama didn’t launch its Medicaid program until 1970.

Some see echoes in today’s debate over Medicaid expansion.

Under the Affordable Care Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010, states can extend Medicaid coverage to adults making up to 138% of the federal poverty level — currently about $21,000 a year for a single person. The feds currently cover 90% of the costs for those newly eligible enrollees.

Congressional Republicans are now considering whether to reduce the amount the federal government kicks in. But even at the 90% rate, 10 states — most of them in the South — have refused to take the deal. Many Republicans in those states say extending coverage to working-age adults would take away resources from people in greater need.

“Yet again, as in the ’60s, Southern states, including Alabama, were slow or resistant to expansion,” said Schulz. “The parallels are there: States’ rights versus federal mandates are very much the bottom line.”

‘Connect and keep moving’

Less than three miles from the Bricklayers Hall, Valtoria Jackson pastors the St. Peter African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her flock is a small but active Black congregation whose mission work often centers on health issues. Situated in a lower-income Montgomery neighborhood that’s recently seen signs of gentrifying, the church has sponsored a community garden, fitness classes and a fund to help neighbors pay their medical bills.

Jackson has also been a nurse for 41 years, most of them in Montgomery, and reckons she’s worked at every hospital in the city.

“I see myself as a connector,” she said. “I don’t like being in front. I just connect and keep moving.”

On a recent weekday morning she was in her car, delivering boxes of food to older people as part of a nutrition program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She’s also a familiar face in Montgomery’s advocacy circles. She’s spoken at rallies on the steps of the state Capitol, protesting with organizations such as the Poor People’s Campaign against poverty and for universal health care and Medicaid expansion.

“There’s no reason we shouldn’t have Medicaid expansion here in the South,” Jackson said.

Alabama’s skeletal Medicaid program does not cover able-bodied adults without children. Its income eligibility limit for parents — 18% of the federal poverty line — is among the lowest in the nation. A single parent with one child, for example, is ineligible if she makes more than $3,816 per year.

Some of Jackson’s parishioners work low-wage jobs and fall into the so-called coverage gap, earning too much to qualify for Alabama Medicaid, but not enough to afford private health insurance.

About 161,000 uninsured adults in Alabama would gain coverage if the state expanded Medicaid, according to a KFF analysis of federal data. More than half are people of color, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank.

‘Good Sam’

In 1965, Lula Edwards was a 35-year-old nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma, Alabama. The hospital, known in the community as “Good Sam,” was the only medical center in six counties that was open to Black people.

On March 7, 1965, its hallways filled with the bleeding and injured after Alabama state troopers attacked civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what would become known as Bloody Sunday. Edwards was supposed to be off work that day, but was called in to care for the wounded.

Outside of her hospital work, she kept her Montgomery home open to people who needed treatment. For Edwards, community-based care was a human right.

“She treated people in her own home when she wasn’t at the hospital, giving people their shots, giving stitches, giving medicine,” said her grandson, Robert Stewart. “She was right there in the neighborhood and treated them for free.”

Stewart was determined to continue her legacy and that of his other grandparents, who marched in Selma during the Civil Rights Movement and helped register people to vote.

Edwards died in 2022 at age 92, a day after Stewart announced he was running for a seat in the Alabama state Senate. At her funeral, he said, mourners came up to him with campaign donations in her honor.

“My grandmother always told me I would be in politics,” he said. Stewart won his election a few months later. The Selma native now represents an eight-county district in central Alabama that has some of the poorest health outcomes in the state.

As a Democrat in a state with a Republican supermajority, his calls for Medicaid expansion go largely ignored. But he’s proud the legislature expanded Alabama’s postpartum Medicaid coverage from 60 days to a year in 2023 and eliminated Medicaid application delays for pregnant women earlier this year — significant steps for a state where Medicaid covers about half of all births.

But it’s still not enough.

“I represent eight counties, yet only two of them have pediatricians,” he said. “I have people in my district who have opted to stay out of the workforce so they can qualify for Medicaid because that’s the only way they can afford their insulin or their blood pressure medication.”

Two hospitals closed in Alabama just last year, including one in his district. Four Alabama hospitals have closed their labor and delivery units since 2023. The Alabama Hospital Association has long advocated for Medicaid expansion as a way to help financially struggling hospitals, particularly in rural areas.

Stewart and other Democrats have adapted their calls for Medicaid expansion to include the ways it could fit into Republican priorities, such as benefiting the state’s workforce.

“Expanding Medicaid needs to be a number one priority if we’re going to be serious about improving workforce participation as well as improving the overall health of Alabamians,” he said.

In recent years, conservative lawmakers in holdout states such as Alabama and Mississippi have signaled interest in expanding Medicaid. But after President Donald Trump’s reelection put federal Medicaid cuts on the table, expansion seems further away than ever.

Earlier this year, Alabama’s Republican House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said expansion was no longer a priority this legislative session because Medicaid could see changes at the federal level.

“We are better off seeing what they are going to do,” he told reporters.

Sacred ground

The front office at the Bricklayers Hall is sparsely furnished. There’s a metal desk, a small filing cabinet, a tripod with a ring light for filming social media videos. Bulletin boards lean against the wall, waiting to be hung.

In the corner, a big blue sign: “Black women, you are welcome here.”

As Campbell shows the women around the space, she tells them the office once belonged to King.

“It’s like we’re walking on sacred ground,” someone says quietly.

In a back room, posters and protest signs decorate the wall:

“When Black women walk, things change”

“We walk for healthier bodies, families & communities”

Mary Mixon, 73, is retired from the Air Force and walks at least four miles every day. She began walking with GirlTrek on Saturday mornings because of the group’ s focus on joy and health. Mixon has military-provided health care but acknowledges the challenges others face in accessing health care in Montgomery, Alabama. (Anna Claire Vollers/Stateline/TNS)

Mary Mixon, 73, is retired from the Air Force and already walks up to five miles each day. But she comes to the Saturday morning GirlTrek walks, she says, “for the joy.”

She moved to Montgomery decades ago when she was assigned to nearby Maxwell Air Force Base.

“I was literally afraid to come because I’m from the Midwest, and I’d heard of so many ugly things here,” she recalled. “But as the time went on, I learned that injustice — yes, it does happen. But initiatives happen also. You can take the injustice and turn it around to justice.”

After Campbell passed out GirlTrek T-shirts to everyone, the group began its two-mile walk.

They set a speedy pace but waited at red lights for one another — no woman left behind. They chatted about kids and jobs. Some listened to music.

Their walk took them through the same neighborhood streets where, 60 years ago, Black Montgomery residents marched for justice and equal treatment.

But their route didn’t pass the Alabama State House, where lawmakers are winding down another legislative session without expanding Medicaid.

This story is part of “Uninsured in America,” a project led by Public Health Watch that focuses on life in America’s health coverage gap and the 10 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Michelle Andrews, KFF Health News

When a woman collapsed on an escalator at the Buffalo, New York, airport last June, Phil Clough knew what to do.

He and another bystander put her flat on her back and checked her pulse (faint) and her breathing (shallow and erratic). Then she stopped breathing altogether. Realizing that she might be having a cardiac arrest, Clough immediately started doing chest compressions, pressing hard and quickly on the center of her chest, while others nearby called 911 and ran to get an automated external defibrillator. Within seconds of receiving a shock from the AED, the woman opened her eyes. By the time the airport rescue team arrived a few minutes later, she was conscious and able to talk with rescuers.

“I don’t want to ever feel helpless,” said Clough, who had flown to Buffalo that evening on a work trip for his engineering job in Denver. After an incident several years earlier in which he was unsure how to help a woman who collapsed at his gym, he took a college course to get certified as an emergency medical responder, who can provide basic life support interventions.

The woman who collapsed was lucky: She lost consciousness in a public place where bystanders knew how to help her. Most people aren’t so fortunate. In the United States, a lack of training and readiness to deal with this relatively common medical emergency contributes to thousands of deaths a year.

More than 350,000 cardiac arrests occur outside of a hospital setting in the United States annually, according to the American Heart Association. In 9 of 10 cases, the person dies because help doesn’t arrive quickly enough. Every minute that passes without intervention reduces the odds of survival by 10%. But if someone immediately receives cardiopulmonary resuscitation and an AED shock, if needed, their survival odds can double or even triple.

Fewer than half of people get that immediate help, according to the heart association. A cardiac arrest occurs when the heart stops suddenly, often because the heart’s electrical system malfunctions. About 70% of cardiac arrests occur at home. But even if someone collapses in a public place and an ambulance is called immediately, it takes roughly eight minutes, on average, for emergency personnel to arrive. In rural areas it can take much longer.

When someone has a cardiac arrest, they often require an electric shock from an AED to get their heart started again. These portable devices analyze the heart’s rhythm and instruct the user to deliver a shock, if necessary, through pads placed on the victim’s chest.

But although many states require that AEDs be available in public places such as airports, malls, and schools, they often aren’t easy to spot. A study of data from 2019 to 2022 found that after a cardiac arrest in a public place, bystanders used an AED 7% of the time and performed CPR 42% of the time.

The most comprehensive resource for identifying AEDs is a nonprofit foundation called PulsePoint, which has registered 185,000 AEDs in 5,400 communities in the United States, according to Shannon Smith, vice president of communications at PulsePoint. If requested, the organization will help a community build its AED registry and connect it to the area’s 911 service free of charge.

PulsePoint recently launched a national AED registry to further this effort.

Through a companion app, users trained in CPR can volunteer to be alerted to potential cardiac arrests within roughly a quarter-mile when calls come into a community’s emergency response dispatch service. The app also identifies registered AEDs nearby.

“PulsePoint is the closest thing we have to a national registry,” said Elijah White, president of the acute care technology division at Zoll, a leading AED manufacturer. The company has provided location information for all its AEDs to PulsePoint. Still, PulsePoint has registered only a fraction of AEDs in the country. “It’s just a start,” White said.

Other factors may also keep bystanders from stepping in to help. They may lack CPR training or confidence, or fear liability if something goes wrong.

Liability shouldn’t be a concern, in general. All 50 states and Washington, D.C., have “good Samaritan” laws that protect bystanders from legal liability if they intervene in a medical emergency in good faith.

But training can be a serious barrier. One study found that only 18% of people reported that they’d received CPR training within the previous two years, a key time frame for skills maintenance. Two-thirds of people reported having been trained at some point.

One way to boost training is to make it mandatory, and many states require that students receive CPR training to graduate. But even though 86% of high school students reported having received some training, only 58% said they knew how to apply their skills, and a similar proportion said they knew how to use an AED.

“We’ve got some work to do,” said Dianne Atkins, a pediatric cardiologist and longtime AHA volunteer, who said ensuring high school training is a top priority for the AHA.

Other countries have prioritized training their residents in AED use and CPR for many years, with some success.

In Denmark, such training has been required to get a driver’s license since the 2000s, and middle schoolers are also required to be trained. And in a survey, 45% of the population reported having received training through their workplace. In the study, 81% of respondents in the general public reported having been trained in CPR and 54% in how to use an AED.

Norway has provided first-aid training in primary schools since 1961 and mandates CPR training to receive a driver’s license. Ninety percent of the population reported they are trained in CPR.

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In the United States, many training courses are available, online and in person, that take only a few hours to complete. For someone who’s never learned basic life-support skills, the training can be eye-opening. This previously untrained reporter was taken aback to discover how forcefully and rapidly someone must press on a mannequin’s chest to do CPR correctly: 100 to 120 compressions a minute to a depth of at least 2 inches.

The most important thing is for ordinary people to know the basics well enough that “they would feel confident to call 911 and push hard and fast on someone’s chest,” said Audrey Blewer, an assistant professor of family medicine and community health at Duke University School of Medicine who has published numerous studies on bystander CPR and AED use. “That doesn’t require a certification card and recent training.”

During an emergency, 911 dispatchers can also play a crucial role in walking people through doing CPR and operating an AED, said David Hiltz, volunteer program director of the HeartSafe Communities program at the Citizen CPR Foundation, a nonprofit that works to improve cardiac arrest survival through training and education.

Phil Clough has stayed in touch with Rebecca Sada, the woman who collapsed at the Buffalo airport that June day as she was coming home from a trip to visit her daughter. Sada, who had no history of heart trouble before her cardiac arrest, now has an automated defibrillator implanted in her chest to stabilize a previously undiagnosed electrical problem with her heart. She and her husband have had Clough over for dinner, and they are friends for life, she said.

One other change that occurred as a result of Sada’s cardiac arrest: She and her husband got certified in CPR and AED.

“Now, if we needed to help someone down the road, we’d be able to,” Sada said.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Lauren Costantino, Miami Herald

MIAMI — Lucy Lowell, who survived the deadliest Nazi concentration camp to build a full life in New York City and eventually settle in Miami Beach, is among the last of an important and increasingly rare group of people.

At 103, she’s among the oldest living Holocaust survivors in the world.

It’s a population that’s disappearing with each passing year. Just 1,400 survivors are estimated to be alive today over the age of 100, according to a new report. It means that the opportunity to hear firsthand stories of endurance in the face of monstrous evil is quickly passing by.

Within the next six years, half of all Holocaust survivors will pass away. And 70 percent will pass away with in 10 years, according to a population projection report from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference.

The findings are “a stark reminder that our time is almost up,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference. “Our survivors are leaving us and this is the moment to hear their voices,” he said.

Lucy Lowell, 103, a Holocaust survivor, holds a photo of her and her late husband on Thursday, April 30, 2025, in Miami Beach, Florida. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald/TNS)

And Lowell isn’t even the oldest in Florida. Another Florida survivor, Lithuanian-born Malka Schmulovitz, was recently honored by the city of Miami Beach on her 109th birthday. Schmulovitz was not available for an interview but told the Claims Conference that their experiences must never be forgotten.

“To be one of the oldest survivors alive right now at my age tells me we are running our of time,” Schmulovitz told the Claims Conference. “We all have a testimony that needs to be shared.”

Lowell, for her part, admits trying to put the past behind her as she built a new life in the United States. After decades of staying silent about her experience escaping Auschwitz and surviving the Holocaust — she once turned down interviews with Steven Spielberg’s team for his Oscar-winning movie “Schindler’s List” — she has recently decided to share her story.

“At the time, with my husband, we did not talk about it. We wanted a new life, to enjoy each other and [not to] dwell on it,” she said.

That change of heart is due, in part, to a recent gift from researchers: long-lost books from Lowell’s childhood, including a book of biblical pictures she received as an award for good behavior at her religious school in 1930, when she was just eight-years-old.

“I was shocked,” Lowell said, pausing to reflect. “I was shocked.”

Lucy Lowell’s books, taken from her family, are now in her possession. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald/TNS)

A small and stylish woman with a warm smile, Lowell recently sat in her Miami Beach apartment on Collins Avenue to reflect on those relics, which sparked a flood of painful memories.

She thumbed through a book of Jewish philosophy that was given to her older brother Gerhard on the day of his bar mitzvah. Gerhard was later killed in Auschwitz.

“I remember very well — the beautiful party, family… friends. I even remember the dress I wore,” she said, adding that she was just 10 years old at the time.

The family books were found in a private collection of 10,000 stolen Jewish books owned by Julius Streicher, a publisher of an antisemitic Nazi newspaper, according to The Sunday Times, and were returned due to the efforts of a project by JewishGen, a resource for Jewish genealogy at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and the Leo Black Institute.

Now, over 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Lowell looks back on a life that was split into two parts — the before and after. She recalled, in an interview with the Miami Herald, the events that changed the course of her life.

“I’ve always had a good memory. What can I say? I am blessed that I don’t have Alzheimer’s or any of those illnesses,” she said. “It’s still there.”

Lucy Lowell, 103, sits in her Miami Beach condo as she reflects on her time in Auschwitz, on Thursday, April 30, 2025, in Miami Beach, Florida. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald/TNS)

Remembering the ‘before’

Before the Holocaust, Lowell lived a happy life with her parents and older brother in Berlin. She recalls “wonderful” childhood memories — vacationing in the summers with her family and attending the now-famous Olympic Games of 1936, where Jesse Owens made history.

She loved sports, dancing, and admiring the beautiful things in life — her mother’s stylish wardrobe, for example, which sparked an lifelong interest in fashion design.

Then on Nov. 9, 1938, with one violent night, the life Lowell knew and loved began to crumble.

Nazis set fire to synagogues — including the one attended by Lowell and her family — and vandalized thousands of Jewish homes and businesses, igniting a wave of violence that killed nearly 100 Jews and led to the arrests and deportations of thousands more. The night later became known as Kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass,” signaling a turning point in Nazi Germany’s persecution against Jewish people, moving from social discrimination and propaganda to violence and terror.

The next several years would mark one of the darkest times in human history, both for Lowell and millions of other Jewish people around the world. All in all, six million European Jews and people from other minorities were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

As conditions worsened for Jews — Lowell’s parents made arrangements to live with relatives in New York. But, due to travel restrictions, her family never made it to America.

“The consulates had closed, and we did not make it,” she said. “The whole living room was packed with boxes and crates and suitcases to ship to America. And we got stuck.”

Soon after, Lowell’s family received a visit one night from Nazi officers, who deported the Emmerich’s to the Lodz ghetto in Poland.

“We had just finished supper,” she said. She heard “a knock on the door, and two Gestapo officers came. They said, ‘We have to evict you, to deport you to Poland. So pack what you can carry, because there are no bell boys.”

In Lodz, Lowell’s family lived in “primitive” conditions among dozens of other families in the same cramped, cold barrack. Conditions were so unsanitary, that Lowell’s parents both died from illness, possibly typhus, a leading epidemic at the time that killed thousands of Jews living in ghettos.

Lowell recalls laying in the hospital bed for weeks with high fevers, her head shaved bald from a lice infection.

“My parents, at least they passed away in a bed and not in Auschwitz,” she said.

After she reunited with her brother in the ghetto, the two siblings moved out of the barracks and into a small vacancy. Lowell was able to work various jobs while living in the ghetto. She remembers working in a wheat field, planting and sewing, skills that felt foreign to her as someone who grew up in a big city, and another job working in a Nazi-run factory, making household shoes for soldiers.

“When doing the work, I would pick wheat and eat it, and put some in my pocket to bring back for my brother,” she said.

Lucy Lowell, 103, reflects on her time in Auschwitz, sharing her journey of finding hope after escaping the concentration camp and living a life marked by grace and kindness, on Thursday, April 30, 2025, in Miami Beach, Florida. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald/TNS)

Surviving Auschwitz

Then, in 1944, after the ghetto was liquidated, Lowell, her brother and two German-speaking coworkers were forced into crowded cattle cars, bringing with them whatever they could carry with them for the long journey. She didn’t know it at the time, but Lowell was being transported to Auschwitz.

When they arrived at the camp, soldiers separated the men and women, lined them up and ordered them to march in a long line. Lowell became separated from her brother during this time.

“There was a famous doctor … His name was Joseph Mengele, and he would direct people, ‘you go right, you go left.’ There were high fences. They were electric, And we saw one figure there stuck on it, because if you wanted to try to escape … this was Auschwitz.”

Joseph Mengele was one of the most infamous figures of the Holocaust, a ghoul who along with other German researchers, conducted terrible medical experiments on prisoners, and selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers.

The last time Lowell would see her brother, whom she adored, was in the concentration camp.

“We were stunned,” Lowell said, adding that she didn’t know what was happening to her at the time. She remembers being ordered around by Nazis and living in a barrack with 800 other women in bleak conditions. She slept, with other prisoners, on the concrete floor and was given rags to wear as clothing.

Lowell was selected with just 20 other women to go and work in a factory, where the director of the company was kind enough to give her knitting needles to make clothes.

“He gave us burlap yarn and I knitted myself a beautiful dress,” she said. “I had a dress of my mother’s in mind, which was so beautiful on her so I tried to knit something just like her dress.”

She doesn’t know why or how she was selected (her fluent German may have helped), but the assignment may have helped save her life.

Then, the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Lowell was just 23 years old, with no immediate family or home left to return to.

In the aftermath of her time in the camp, Lowell relied on the kindness of strangers to get by and slowly, but surely, she built a new life for herself.

Lucy Lowell, 103, reflects on her time in Auschwitz, sharing her journey of finding hope after escaping the concentration camp and living a life marked by grace and kindness, on Thursday, April 30, 2025, in Miami Beach, Florida. (Carl Juste/Miami Herald/TNS)

Lowell ended up moving to Flushing, Queens to live with her extended family. She worked a job in fashion design at an office near Times Square and soon met her late husband, Frederick Lowell, a businessman in New York City who had also survived a concentration camp. She was married at the age of 26 and went on to live a beautiful life in Manhattan, where she helped her husband build a business. Her days were filled with day trips to the Metropolitan Opera, worldwide travel and fun — she was once a champion water skier.

Now in Miami Beach, Lowell is an avid reader, especially of the news, and she loves to watch television and visit with friends. She recently shared her story at an event at the Jewish Museum of Florida, where she said people were “astonished” and wanted to take pictures with her after the event.

After spending the majority of her life avoiding the topic of her survival, Lowell wants people to hear her simple yet important message:

“You should not hate people. You should not discriminate … Yes, you see what happens,” she said.

This story was produced with financial support from Trish and Dan Bell and from donors comprising the South Florida Jewish and Muslim Communities, including Khalid and Diana Mirza, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.

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