ICE detainee deaths are rising to their highest levels in decades, with new research pointing to systemic failures in medical care and oversight inside detention centers.
Physicians said Thursday that new research on deaths in ICE custody showed that “systemic weakness” in medical care at the agency has become more serious in the past two decades. Meanwhile, the number of people in immigration detention has soared and conditions have worsened during the Trump administration, with the death rate during part of this fiscal year reaching a 22-year high based on information starting in 2004.
The research, published Thursday in the medical journal JAMA, looked at the mortality rate of detainees in ICE custody from fiscal year 2004 through Jan. 19 this year. The fiscal year begins on Oct. 1 of each year and ends on Sept. 30 of the following year.
The authors found a total of 18 deaths from last October through Jan. 19, an annualized death rate of 88.9 people per 100,000 using the average daily population in custody for that fiscal year. Ten more people have died in ICE custody this year since then.
The researchers found that after a high of an annualized death rate of 127.7 people per 100,000 using the average daily population in custody for fiscal year 2004, the rates of deaths in ICE custody decreased until 2020, when there was a spike during the first year of the Covid pandemic. The death rate dropped sharply again after that before it climbed increasingly since fiscal year 2024.
As immigrant deaths in custody rise, ICE has scaled back the information it releases to the public about how those deaths happened from about three pages of details to summaries about four paragraphs long.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the investigation. In a previous statement to NBC News, DHS said the death rates were a very small percentage of the overall detained population.
“All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold current U.S. citizens,” it said.
The report authors said the information about ICE detainee deaths it used were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act released for fiscal years 2004 through 2017, through ICE’s Detainee Death Reporting page on its website for fiscal years 2018 through 2025 and through ICE’s death reporting postings and announcements for the part of fiscal year 2026 included in the findings.
Physicians Michele Heisler and Katherine R. Peeler wrote in an editorial accompanying the research that the findings “suggest not isolated lapses but systemic weaknesses in medical care, mental health protection, and mortality review in a population wholly dependent on the state.” Heisler is the medical director at the non-profit Physicians for Human Rights and a professor of internal medicine and public health at the University of Michigan. Peeler is a medical advisor at Physicians for Human Rights and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
They wrote that the death rate for fiscal year 2026 “was the highest in the 22-year study period, exceeding even the COVID-19 era spike.”
They said the most recent spike in deaths took place in a system with “longstanding failures” that were then compounded by Trump administration policies “that rapidly expanded detention to historically high levels, weakened oversight mechanisms, and worsened conditions of confinement.”
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