ICE detention is killing people — and the death toll is rising.
Royer Perez-Jimenez was 19. He died March 17 in a Florida jail used to hold ICE detainees. ICE called it a “presumed suicide.” He is the youngest person to die in ICE custody since Donald Trump returned to the White House. He is also the 46th.
His death barely registered. It was pushed aside by war coverage and disappeared from the news cycle. That silence is part of how this system operates.
At least 23 people died in ICE custody between October 2025 and early March 2026 — more than the previous full year. 2025 had already been the deadliest year in two decades, with December the deadliest month on record.
The Associated Press count, which includes Perez-Jimenez, stands at 46 since January 2025.
The numbers reported never match because ICE controls how deaths are counted and reported. Some deaths are excluded. Reports are delayed. Oversight has been cut back.
These deaths are not accidents. They come from how the system is built.
The detained population has surged from about 40,000 in early 2025 to more than 70,000 today. Congress funded the expansion with tens of billions for enforcement, beds and deportations. It did not fund the medical care needed to keep people alive.
ICE is not just enforcement. It is how the state controls a section of the working class — workers used in the labor market and treated as disposable in detention.
The system that pays for medical care was shut off.
ICE cut off medical payments on Oct. 3, 2025. It terminated the contract that processed payments to hospitals, pharmacies and specialists.
That left ICE without a way to pay for outside care. Internal documents warned of “loss of life.”
The consequences were immediate.
A 56‑year‑old Haitian asylum seeker, Emmanuel Damas, died in an Arizona hospital while in U.S. immigration custody for four months after a tooth infection that was easily treatable progressed into pneumonia and septic shock following delays and failures in his medical and dental care.
This is what it means when care stops. A toothache becomes fatal.
Dialysis stopped. Cancer treatment stopped. Prenatal care stopped.
Hospitals and pharmacies began refusing treatment because they were not being paid.
In a system organized around payment and cost, care stops when payment stops.
More than five months later, the system is still shut down, with no timeline to restore payments.
Under those conditions, people die.
A 2024 report by the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights and American Oversight found that 95% of ICE deaths were preventable with basic medical care — medication, timely treatment, proper referrals. Conditions are now worse: more people detained, less care, less oversight.
On Jan. 3, 2026, Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, died at a large ICE facility at Fort Bliss, Texas. ICE first said he died during a suicide attempt. An autopsy found he had been killed. The cause of death was homicide by asphyxia.
Witnesses said guards pinned him down and choked him as he said he could not breathe.
This is what happens when the state uses force to confine people who have no enforceable rights inside the system holding them.
Oversight has been stripped away as the system expands.
The offices that investigate deaths have been cut or shut down. Congressional access has been blocked or delayed. Public reporting has fallen behind. Fewer constraints allow the system to detain, process and remove people faster.
The Department of Homeland Security denies there is a problem. It claims detainees receive high-quality care.
That claim is contradicted by ICE’s own documents, by Senate investigations and by independent medical reviews.
Health care workers are beginning to push back against ICE in hospitals. In Minnesota and New York, they are organizing to block cooperation and raising demands in union contracts to limit or bar ICE access.
Organized refusal is how the system gets stopped.
These deaths follow directly from a system that locks up large numbers of people while denying them basic rights and care.
This is the domestic side of the same system that wages war abroad — a system that treats entire populations as expendable.
Expanding detention while cutting care and oversight produces death.
Reform will not stop this.
ICE detention must be abolished.
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