More ICE Deaths ‘Inevitable' as Detention Numbers Soar

Miami Herald

a day ago

Deaths in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers look set to surpass the previous year's total, with three months still to go.
With 12 people confirmed to have died while in ICE custody since October 2024, when the current Fiscal Year began, the number has already matched the previous year's total. Human rights groups are warning more are certain.
"These deaths are clearly attributable to the Trump administration's increased and aggressive detention policies, and I have no doubt that when more complete investigations take place, it will likely provide information that these deaths were likely preventable," Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Prison Project, told Newsweek.
The latest death came on June 26, when 75-year-old Cuban national Isidro Perez, in the country for decades, passed away in a hospital after suffering a heart issue while in a Miami ICE facility.
In response to that news, President Donald Trump's border czar Tom Homan told reporters outside the White House: "People die in ICE custody."
To be sure, ICE detention centers are not alone in experiencing deaths of detainees, with the the U.S. prison system — at both federal and state levels — frequently reporting deaths among inmates.
In 2019, the mortality rate across the prison system was 259 per 100,000 inmates, based on Department of Justice figures showing 4,234 deaths in prisons at state and federal level nationwide.
By comparison, the mortality rate of ICE detainees at the current numbers would work out to about 21.3 deaths per 100,000 people. The ICE population also has a far quicker turnaround than the prison system.
In fiscal year 2022, running from the previous October through September 2022, three people died in ICE detention – the lowest number since reporting was mandated by Congress in 2018.
The highest recent yearly death total came in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, with 21 deaths across the agency's various facilities. Those facilities are often run by private companies contracted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
ICE repeatedly says that individuals in its charge receive high-quality medical assessments and care, including 24-hour emergency medicine.
But several independent reports over recent years, including from the ACLU and Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, have given a very different picture of the conditions facing detainees who are awaiting immigration hearings or deportation.
In 2024, the ACLU outlined a lack of oversight when it came to ICE detention deaths, suggesting evidence may have destroyed and highlighting efforts to blame low-level employees for the incidents. The organization, working alongside others, found that many deaths were likely preventable, should medical care have been more readily accessible.
"People are dying preventable deaths in [Homan's] direct custody," Cho said. "People are dying because of the lack of constitutionally required medical care that should be provided to anybody in government custody."
A year later, far more people are being placed in ICE detention. Since January, the Trump administration has been increasing its efforts to arrest and detain illegal immigrants. While Congress has allocated funding for around tens of thousands of more beds in the current tax bill, the number of detainees stood at roughly 56,300 as of mid-June.
"There's never been a time where immigration detention hasn't been deadly, so it's just inevitable that the more people we detain, the more people who are going to die," Anthony Enriquez, the vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at RFK Human Rights, told Newsweek.
ICE is struggling with limited capacity and resources to fulfill its mission of millions of deportations. In addition to the new funds being allocated to the agency by Congress, the White House is trying other novel ways to expand capacity, from repurposing Guantanamo Bay to new detention center contracts issued for private companies GEO Group and CoreCivic, to the new so-called "Alligator Alcatraz" in southern Florida.
Following a tour of the new detention facility on Tuesday, which includes bunkbeds stacked together in wire-fenced cages, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem praised the standards on offer.
"Alligator Alcatraz can be a blueprint for detention facilities across the country. It will provide DHS with the beds and space needed to safely detain the worst of the worst," she posted on social media.
All of this is to deliver on the president's promise of mass deportations. Trump returned to the White House promising upwards of 11 million immigrants without legal status would be deported, targeting the "worst of the worst" first. Records have shown that a large share of those currently in detention do not have a criminal record, but civil immigration offenses instead.
"A lot of people misunderstand the purpose and the nature of immigration detention, and they think that if it's a detention center, then it's a jail, and if it's a jail, then that means this is someone who has already been found guilty of some type of bad act and should be serving a punishment," Enriquez said. "But in fact, many of the people in immigration detention do have lawful status to be here in the United States."
Cho, of the ACLU, told Newsweek that ICE was not exercising discretion with respect to those it was now detaining. Because more people are remaining in detention when they previously would have been released, the situation is leading to a "deterioration of conditions in custody," he said.
"My fear is this trajectory is only going to increase," Cho said. "That is because Congress is on the cusp of passing a new reconciliation bill that is providing $45 billion to the expansion of immigration detention in the country, and I want to compare that to the current $4 billion that ICE already receives every year for its already massive immigration detention system.
"This amount of money is going to provide ICE with the ability to not only double, triple, quadruple the capacity of people who are being held in immigration detention, it is going to allow a system that is larger than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons population put together, under the care of someone like Tom Homan who has expressed total disregard for the fact that people are dying in custody."
Newsweek reached out to ICE via email Tuesday for comment on the increase in deaths and measures being taken to prevent any more. The agency did not reply before publication.
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