You're watching Southwest Florida in focus coming up.

Concerns from medical professionals over a statewide rollback on vaccine mandates.

We already know that if you cut out vaccinations, if you reduce vaccination rates, you're going to have a consequence and there's going to be, negative outcomes as a result.

A look at why medical experts believe the changes could lead to a health crisis for some children.

A Bonita Springs man shares the story of his three months in multiple immigration detention facilities.

He claims the lack of rights for detainees almost cost him his life, and the heart of the Everglades is home to the Miccosukee people.

We learn about the efforts they're making to safeguard tribal traditions.

Hello, I'm Sandra Victorova.

Thank you for joining us.

Florida is set to become the first state in the nation to remove school vaccine mandates.

By the end of the calendar year, students will no longer be required to have vaccinations for diseases like hepatitis B, chickenpox and other contagious diseases.

State Surgeon General Doctor Joseph Ladipo says the mandate removal gives power back to the individual and allows parents to make informed decisions about what goes into their children's bodies.

He says the state will also push the state legislature to remove laws that require vaccinations for other diseases, including mumps, measles, tetanus and polio.

He called the current requirements an immoral intrusion on rights.

Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and and slavery.

If we want to move toward a perfect world, a better world, you can't do it by enslaving people and terrible philosophies and taking away people's freedoms.

That's not the path.

That's not the path.

We have to find alternative, alternative pathways.

The decision from the Florida Department of Health has been met with criticism, including from President Donald Trump, who said that some vaccines are not controversial and should be used.

Doctor Oladipo later clarified that vaccines would still be available for parents and children, but would no longer be required for children entering public schools.

In 2021, Florida instituted a religion exemption for certain vaccinations, which parents can file for on behalf of their children without proof of religious beliefs.

Still, local health experts like pediatrician Sal Anzalone, who fears the removal of the vaccine mandate will mean illnesses he treated as a young physician will resurface.

So of course, those kids who are in school, if they're fully vaccinated, there's less likely for them to have an opportunity to get sick.

It's the ones that are unvaccinated are going to be most at risk.

And unfortunately, those kids are the underserved areas, the ones that are probably in areas where there's, less affordability for health care and kids who are maybe, not getting to the doctor because of whatever barriers are available to them.

They're the ones that are to be really impacted.

And then they get again, is, I think, vaccinating is nothing more than the best way that we can really minimize the impact to health care, improve the quality of life for our people, and most importantly, our society.

And the children are the greatest resource we have in our country, and this is the greatest resource that we need to protect.

And vaccinations is the best way to do that.

For more on Florida's move to eliminate school mandated vaccines, we're joined by Doctor Scott Rifkin's, a former state Florida surgeon general and current professor of education in the School of Public Health at Brown University.

Doctor Rifkin, thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah.

Thank you.

It's an honor to be here.

So I want to start with your op ed that I read in the Tampa Bay times.

You said that you dread seeing children suffer from illnesses that have been eliminated in the U.S.

through vaccinations.

How concerned are you?

I am very concerned.

You know, when I was a pediatric resident and as I wrote in that piece, the first patient I took care of was a young boy who had a having brain inflammation, several others due to chickenpox.

The 4 million cases of your 4 million cases of chickenpox a year before the vaccine.

Now, we don't see the dramatic complications of this.

So in terms of chickenpox, vaccines, again, some of us have influenza.

Otherwise, there are a lot of vaccine preventable diseases that we just don't see anymore.

And if we roll back these vaccine requirements, we're about to see them again.

So the Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics says this decision puts Florida children at a higher risk of getting sick.

And then it could have a ripple effect across our society.

Do you agree with that assessment?

Absolutely.

You know, so the broad effects, you know, when you start having outbreaks in communities, it affect education, you know, for commerce.

It potentially can affect tourism.

So it goes beyond the schools.

You know children we know spread infections more than adults do.

And if you have outbreaks in schools, it will have an impact on the community, both in terms of infections but also how people perceive how safe it is to go out into the community as well.

So help me to understand the risk to people beyond the child that doesn't get vaccinated.

I'm thinking, okay, I got my child vaccinated.

Why should that still concern me?

If others other children that my child is exposed to are not vaccinated?

That's a really, really critical point here.

So to have, you know, first, we all agree that schools should be places that children go where they're safe, healthy, not risk and, disease spread.

And for vaccine protection, two things have to happen.

First, a parent has to vaccinate their child.

But for your child being protected, you're also dependent on other parents vaccinating their children.

No vaccine is 100% effective.

So we are dependent upon, individuals having sufficient levels of vaccination to get something that we call, herd immunity.

So the decision you have for vaccinating and protecting your child impacts other children as well.

Could the decision not to impact children impact other high risk populations?

I'm thinking seniors.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, so, you know, first within it, within the pediatric population, you have some children who are immuno compromised.

Some children who are on medications.

That was suppressed.

Immune system as well.

Some children being treated for cancer.

So even those children may have been vaccinated.

They can be susceptible again.

So which is why for those children to be able to go to school, you really have to have a sufficient level of protection within the school population.

And then also, you know, children can spread diseases beyond the walls of the classrooms.

Some children will interact with grandparents.

All the other people in the communities, and with some of these diseases, children can actually spread them before they come out with symptoms for which.

So if you're being treated for cancer, again, you suppressed, you actually could be at risk if you start seeing community outbreaks.

So supporters of removing these vaccine mandates say that parents should ultimately be the ones to decide what goes into their child's body.

What is your response to parents who simply have concerns about vaccinations?

Yeah, I mean, this is something that's an important issue.

That's something that society has actually decided that society will do certain things for the benefit of society, that parents autonomy is not absolute.

So, for example, let's suppose you bring your child to the emergency room.

Your child is deemed to have a very serious infection and needs to have antibiotics.

Well, and you want to take that child home?

Well, that physician will actually get a court order saying that's not in the interest of a child.

The Supreme Court has actually ruled on this, as well as saying that for the protection of society, for protection of children, vaccines can be required and that they are neither arbitrary nor are they oppressive.

So these are decisions that society has already made for the greater good that, we can require vaccination for children.

And we also have to realize that giving somebody absolute personal freedom not to vaccinate their child will actually impact the freedom of others.

So if we get to the point now where vaccination rates drop and we start seeing outbreaks of chicken pox, outbreaks of measles, increased outbreaks of whooping cough, other people in the community are going to be afraid to go out for fear of getting infected.

So their rights and liberties are actually being affected as well.

Doctor Scott Rifkin, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Coming up next, understanding the rights of immigrant detainees.

We hear from one Bonita Springs man who says he almost died while in custody.

Earlier this month there were over 58,000 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.

According to data gathering service track.

Over 70% of those detained have no criminal conviction or only committed minor offenses, such as traffic violations.

One Bonita Springs man says that's the situation he faced after he was taken by Ice last February.

During his three months in custody.

He says he was mistreated so badly he nearly died to protect his identity and family.

He asked that we call him undress and spoke through a translator.

WGCUs Cary Barbor reports.

It's doing a book for Cuatro Diaz.

I spent four days in a bus outside the center because there was not enough space inside the center, and my hands and my legs were shackled, and they didn't clean the only toilet in the bus for four days.

And they they gave us no food.

This is Andres, a 48 year old Bonita Springs man and father of four, describing his time in Chrome Detention Center in Miami.

He was arrested in February for leaving the scene of a very minor traffic accident in Collier County, though he previously had temporary protected status or TPS, from his native country of El Salvador.

He had let it lapse, according to Ice records and his immigration attorney.

After 12 days in the Naples jail, Andres was moved to the Chrome Detention Center in Miami.

That's where he came close to losing his life.

So, with, the, sugar level went way up, and, I started to kind of faint.

The other inmates in the bus started to call immigration so that they'd come out for him.

After staff at Krome brought him inside from the bus that day, they measured his blood sugar and got a dangerously high reading of 650.

A healthy level, according to the CDC, is below 180.

Andres was placed in a small room, a space designed for seven but occupied by 75 inmates.

No one could lie down, only stand up or squat.

And he says it was very cold.

He was held another 17 days as he became more and more sick.

He was not able to see his attorney.

One time he came over to try to see me a crow.

Pero Como me, I was so sick.

They didn't allow him to come in.

IRA Kurz Band is an attorney and author of Kurz bands Immigration Law Sourcebook.

The first thing to understand is that immigrants, documented or undocumented, who wind up in detention are in civil detention.

It's not criminal detention.

So civil detention people have many due process rights.

In other words, they haven't been sentenced.

They haven't had a criminal trial.

They're just, you know, put in detention for what amounts to kind of pretrial determination as to what should happen to them.

They have a right to a hearing if they're undocumented, to go before an immigration judge, to have a lawyer, if they can afford to have a lawyer to not be kept in conditions that are so bad as, you know, you've often heard that that's a violation on its face of of due process.

After Chrome, Andre's was moved around to the Broward Transitional Center and then to a county jail near Cleveland, Ohio, in mid-May after paying $7,500 in bail, he was released.

He was left in the middle of Ohio without his driver's license, any money or any way to get home.

He luckily ran into the wife of a friend.

And together they reached a relative who drove to Ohio and brought him back home to Florida.

The type of detention Andre went through, Kirsten says, amounts to incarceration.

And in the U.S., even incarcerated people have a right to have their basic human needs met.

And there are always have been standards and those standards are not the standards that you might see in a Latin American, modern day concentration camp, like in El Salvador.

We have standards in America.

And those standards say you can't put people in a detention center when they exceed the amount of people who are supposed to be there.

You have to feed them properly.

You have to house them properly.

You have to give them medical care.

Andre is home now, back at his job and taking care of his family.

He's working with an immigration attorney to get residency status, and his immigration court appearance is scheduled for four years from now 2029.

Still, nothing can erase the inhumane treatment he received while in detention.

But if I were, I was there.

I was so sick that the official would come to the bed thinking that I was dead.

He would pinch me.

I would pray like I show you now, and I would cry to.

I would pray for my family that.

But then I hear the.

And I thought, the Muslim here is a memory.

The most important thing I was asking was to see my family.

That was it.

For GQ news, I'm Carrie Barber, with help from Andrea melendez in Bonita Springs.

Beside Krome Detention Center, another Florida facility that has gained notoriety is Alligator Alcatraz, located in Big Cypress Preserve.

It sits in an area considered the homeland of the Miccosukee tribe.

They are part of a federal lawsuit opposing the operations of that facility.

An estimated 660 members of the tribe call the Everglades home, and were recognized as a sovereign nation by the U.S.

government back in 1962.

Tribal leaders say preserving their culture is key to their survival.

And as Jennifer Crawford explains, the youngest members of the tribe play a role in maintaining that tradition.

At the Miccosukee Indian School.

More than 160 students from preschool to high school.

Head into classrooms each day for academic instruction.

But here, tribal leaders say some of the most important lessons are learned outside the walls of the school.

In this cooking cookie made of cypress wood and palmetto fronds, we're in the lifeblood of every camp.

This is the cooking.

Tricky.

This is where grandma, aunts, sisters make food for the whole camp.

Keep everybody fed.

Keep everybody alive.

Smoke billows from the top of the thatched roof on the ground.

Fire crackles under the open grill as three and four year olds gather for Culture Day.

You can put your finger like that.

Every grade has at least one day of the month where they just do cultural activities that day.

They're not going to be doing social studies, science or math in the way that you expect.

It might be incorporated in whatever activity it is, but we want them to understand this is just as important as their day to day life as anything else going on in that school.

Preschoolers clamor to the table to cut up fruit, make dough for pan bread, and slice up spam, a staple in their modern day diet.

How old are you?

Oh, 12 so William Popeye Osceola is an elected member of the Miccosukee tribe and has taught at the school.

We want them to be involved from that little childhood age, being a baby all the way to an adult, even when they're an elder.

All stages of life have some impact on what's being done day to day.

Go go go.

Squeeze the heart with honor.

All right.

Man, I we all left the 1972, Indian Education Act.

It's because of that act, we're able to implement our culture into school in the way we are.

And for us, it's the most important thing.

Like everything we have here as a government, as a school, modern operations to keep the culture alive, said Mr.

Mitchell.

So of course, we have that culture embedded into the curriculum.

The McCaskey Indian School Administration building, Police Department and Community Health Center anchor the Miccosukee Reservation, located off Tamiami Trail, just a few miles east of the Collier Dade County line.

The Mississippi tribe was the first federally recognized tribe to assume operations of its police, health, and school.

We basically told the government back in the early 70s, we know how to run this better than you do for our community, so let us do this.

Tribe officials say the majority of the tribe's 670 members live in modern houses with outside cooking chickens, but an estimated 2 to 300 tribal members live in traditional Indian villages or clan camps.

We have lived in the Everglades on a more permanent basis for almost 200 years now.

After the Seminole Wars, when we were pushed out here for survival.

22 villages dot the landscape of Collier and Dade counties just off Tamiami Trail.

Most are in the Big Cypress National Preserve.

Green Indian Village signs mark the locations from the road like this one.

The village sits within about 1000ft of the newly built controversial immigrant detention facility.

Alligator.

Alcatraz.

Popeye says his grandma Peggy, almost 100, has lived here her entire life, and it's where he brings his nephew.

And then chuck it straight down at the water.

That's better.

And other children to teach them the traditional way to fish and the importance of the Everglades environment in their culture.

Whenever we take the kids out gigging so they can get fish, teach them how to do that so they can survive.

That's out in the Big cypress.

You see this firewood?

We get this wood from the land still.

That's from the big cypress.

We got to do medicine.

That's from the Big cypress.

We need to hunt a deer.

A pig that's from the Big cypress.

If I want to go to my grandma's camp.

That's out in the Big Cypress.

If I want to go to Corn Dance, our biggest cultural ceremony that's out in Corn Dance in Big Cypress.

Children from villages in the Big Cypress attend the Miccosukee school with the reservation kids.

Almost all are members of clans.

We're here with my niece, Hailey.

Or June graduated here with her mom at Miccosukee Indian School.

We're both bird clan.

We say fish are that here at Miccosukee, we still have six clans.

We have Bird Clan, Wind Clan, Otter Clan, Panther clan, Big Town clan, and they'll all be clan.

It's just another layer of relations between each other.

Say a blood relations and clan relations.

And they're just as important as the other.

There might be people in the community I'm not related to by blood, but because they're Bird Clan, they're just as connected to me as any other way.

All right.

I think this is really, you know, Poppy says, empowering the youngest tribal members with the knowledge of the Miccosukee language, culture and heritage.

I love you.

A good kiss is imperative to ensuring survival of the Miccosukee for generations to come in the Everglades.

I'm Jennifer Crawford, reporting for GCU news.

After the break, we hit the highway with Florida Road Trip host Scott Feis on what viewers can expect in an all new season.

Scott Face is a master at tracking down the hidden gems scattered across the Sunshine State for his program Florida road trip this week kicked off the 11th season as Scott makes his way from Coral Gables to Pensacola, as well as a few stops in southwest Florida.

It's all part of his mission to turn history lessons into adventures.

As rare as this plane is, you won't find it encased in plexiglass or behind the velvet rope.

That's because the museum wants visitors to reach out and touch and feel history.

You can put your hands on naval aviation history, and we're very, very proud of being able to offer that to our patrons.

I have an exhibit, fabrication and manufacturing staff.

They're small, but almost all of the exhibits that you see on display here were created in-house.

And Scott Feist, the host of Florida Road Trip, is here to share what we can expect this new season.

Scott.

So great to have you here.

Sandra, thanks for having me.

I am so excited to be here.

Well, I have to say you are a very lucky man.

You get to travel our beautiful state and at the same time learn all this great history.

So in traveling so far, what have been some of the neatest, coolest discoveries you've made in our state?

There is so much history here, not only in Southwest Florida, but all over the state of Florida.

And there is all these phenomenal little communities that have written their own history going back decades.

And when you start to scratch the surface, you realize there is so much happening in Florida from a historical standpoint that you really never knew ahead of time before you go into one of these communities and then discover their story.

So this season, you're coming to Southwest Florida.

Tell us all about where you went and what you're going to uncover for us here.

Community.

We're not coming once, but twice.

So we're doing two shows, one on Collier County and then a second show just focusing on all of the historical treasures in Fort Myers.

So one new season, two fantastic episodes.

Okay.

What did you uncover in Fort Myers?

All right, so in Fort Myers, I had to make a list.

What?

The list with me.

That.

Of course, you can't talk history in Fort Myers without a stop at the Ford and Edison winter estate.

Of course.

So we went to Thomas Edison's home this morning.

I'm getting goosebumps.

I was so fortunate to have two grandparents with a lot of love who, like so many different residents here in the Fort Myers area, would vacation.

They were snowbirds.

They would come down in the winter and then we would come down.

My family and I, when I was growing up and visiting, and I have such just warm, wonderful memories of my grandfather, who was a civil engineer, taking us to Thomas Edison's house.

And this is before the two homes came together as the same museum.

So we'd go to Thomas Edison's house.

And I just remember seeing this glow in my grandfather's eye of how much history was here.

So to go back again today and relive some of that, from what I remember literally 30 years ago was absolutely amazing.

Oh that's wonderful.

And I also know you call your county, right?

Yep.

We're also going to Collier County.

One of the things that's so impressive in Collier County is that there are five different museums that are part of the same group, and admission is absolutely free.

So whether you are in the Naples area or up in Immokalee, there are great things to see where you can kind of scratch the surface and find out more about the history in your own backyard.

Scott Feis, lucky man and you do such a great job.

Thank you very much.

And so do you.

And thank you so much for having us.

And thank you for your support of Florida Road Trip.

Oh, we love it.

And you can enjoy new episodes of Florida Road Trip Thursdays at 8 p.m.

right here on WGCU TV Or you can watch on the WGCU app.

Well, there is a new threat coming after Southwest Florida's art scene coming up next week.

How tariffs are creating new obstacles for artists in the creation and selling of their work.

We thank you very much for joining us today.

Don't forget to download the WGCU app where you can find all of our stories and those extended interviews.

Have a great day and we'll see you next week.