ICE Detention Deaths Hit 22-Year High as Oversight Gutted, Medical Study Shows

The death rate in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has reached its highest point in 22 years, climbing to 88.9 deaths per 100,000 person-years in the opening months of this fiscal year — a rate higher than during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research published in the medical journal JAMA.

That translates to 18 deaths between October and mid-January. At least 17 more people have died in ICE custody since then, bringing the total to over 30 deaths this fiscal year. By comparison, three people died in ICE detention during the entire 2022 fiscal year.

The spike comes as the Trump administration has expanded immigration detention from roughly 40,000 people in custody before the President returned to office to over 68,000 in February — a 70% increase — while simultaneously terminating key medical contracts and gutting the federal offices responsible for investigating deaths and monitoring detention conditions.

Among the dead: Parady La, a 46-year-old Cambodian American father and longtime Philadelphia resident who died just three days after his January arrest. ICE’s report says La was “found distressed and stuporous with ongoing vomiting and abnormal vital signs” at a detention center, then later “found unresponsive and pulseless” the same day. He was brought to a hospital with “anoxic brain injury and multi-organ failure” and died there.

“There’s obviously a lot missing, a lot we don’t know, and the uncertainty of it all is really hard,” his daughter, Jazmine La, told TIME. “It makes it hard to move on or grieve properly.” More than seven months later, ICE has provided no further information about what medical attention — if any — La received following his health troubles earlier in the day.

Another case: Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old Chinese national who died by suicide after five days in ICE custody. An autopsy report obtained by TIME notes Ge had a “clinical history of a psychiatric malady,” but ICE’s death report claimed Ge denied “any past medical or mental health conditions” upon transfer between facilities. According to the autopsy, Ge’s hands and feet were bound when he was found, and bedsheet strips were tied around his chest — restraints applied before death, since they caused bruising that requires blood flow.

“How do you let someone wander through a facility unmonitored and provide him the means to do self-harm? It’s unacceptable,” said David Rankin, an attorney representing Ge’s family.

The research, led by Dr. Sanjay Basu and published in JAMA, analyzed mortality in ICE custody from fiscal year 2004 through January 19, 2026. It found the death rate had climbed from 13 per 100,000 person-years in fiscal 2023 to 47.5 per 100,000 in fiscal 2024, then spiked to 88.9 per 100,000 in the opening months of fiscal 2026 — the highest rate in the 22-year study period.

The Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, insisted in a statement that “there has been NO spike in deaths,” maintaining that “death rates in custody under the Trump administration are 0.009% of the detained population.” DHS added: “As bed space has rapidly expanded, we have maintained a higher standard of care than most prisons that hold U.S. citizens — including providing access to proper medical care. For many illegal aliens this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”

But the JAMA study’s authors found cardiovascular causes accounted for 18.5% of deaths between fiscal 2021 and early 2026; infectious causes including COVID-19 for 13.8%; suicide for 10.8%; and “other or undetermined causes” for 49.2% — a figure researchers called “extremely unusual from a medical perspective” and evidence of “something very wrong with the monitoring and the reporting infrastructure itself.”

“We can’t fix what we can’t understand,” Basu told TIME. He noted research showed a concentration of deaths in “facilities that are new and rapidly expanded” and that only about 13% of deaths occurred in hospitals or medical facilities, “suggesting that some detained individuals with life-threatening illness may not have reached a higher level of care in time.”

An Associated Press investigation found ICE detainees are dying by suicide at an increased rate under the Trump administration — at least 10 since January, compared to one reported death by suicide in all of 2024. The increase is outpacing the growth in the detainee population.

The spike in deaths has coincided with what researchers called “major operational changes” in 2025: In October 2025, DHS terminated its contract with the Veterans Health Administration that had provided specialty medical care — oncology, dialysis, prenatal care, tuberculosis screening — to ICE detainees. In March 2025, DHS issued layoff notices to the majority of staff in three oversight offices: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Together those offices had employed more than 300 people whose job was investigating complaints and monitoring conditions. They now operate with skeleton crews — roughly 20 staff at Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, five to seven at each of the other two. The fiscal 2026 spending bill would zero out funding for the Immigration Detention Ombudsman altogether.

“In 2025, no ICE detention facility received more than one inspection,” according to reporting by Dr. Celine Gounder. “The facility network nearly doubled that same year.”

At a Congressional hearing in April, Texas Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar questioned ICE director Todd Lyons about the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos at Camp East Montana in El Paso — a death a local coroner ruled a homicide after ICE initially said it happened during a struggle with security staff when Campos attempted to take his own life. Lyons said the death has been referred to the FBI.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a Freedom of Information Act request for more details on the circumstances of Parady La’s death in February. La’s family’s attorney, Jonathan Feinberg, is filing a wrongful death claim with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project. “Based on what we’ve seen so far, there’s little question in my mind that Parady La’s death could have been prevented,” Feinberg told TIME. “And someone, or some collection of people, made serious mistakes that led to his death.”

Jazmine La remembers her father as “adventurous and full of life.” He was a stay-at-home parent who took her walking along South Street in Philadelphia, taught her tennis and the flute, and loved sneakers so much “he would wash and clean them like once a week with a toothbrush.” She received the call about his detention while at work last January. “I hadn’t seen him for a few months before that,” she said. “And so to get to the hospital and see him completely not there, not responsive, it was really hard. It was heartbreaking.”

DHS’s internal watchdog has launched two reviews to investigate the increase in deaths and whether detention centers are following use-of-force standards.

The Breakdown

• A study published in the medical journal JAMA found the death rate in ICE custody reached 88.9 per 100,000 person-years in the opening months of fiscal 2026 — the highest rate in the 22-year study period, surpassing even the COVID-19 spike.
• The detained population grew 70% between before Trump’s return to office and February 2026 (from roughly 40,000 to over 68,000 people), while the number of facilities expanded 91%.
• In October 2025, DHS terminated its contract with the Veterans Health Administration that provided specialty medical care to detainees. In March 2025, DHS laid off the majority of staff in three oversight offices responsible for investigating deaths and monitoring conditions — cutting from over 300 employees to skeleton crews of roughly 20-30 total.
• Nearly half (49.2%) of deaths between fiscal 2021 and early 2026 were classified as “undetermined” causes — what researchers called evidence of “something very wrong with the monitoring and the reporting infrastructure itself.” Only 13% of deaths occurred in hospitals or medical facilities.
• At least 10 ICE detainees have died by suicide since Trump returned to office in January, compared to one reported suicide death in all of 2024.

What This Means for You

Every person President Trump has appointed to run DHS — the cabinet department responsible for ICE — serves at his direction and can be removed by him. When voters weigh Trump’s immigration enforcement record, the question isn’t only how many people were detained or deported, but what happened to them in federal custody while they were there — and whether the administration built a system designed to keep them alive or one designed to avoid counting when it didn’t.

The facts documented here don’t describe an unfortunate accident of scale. They describe choices: to expand detention capacity by 70% in months while simultaneously terminating the medical contract that provided specialty care and gutting the offices responsible for investigating what goes wrong. Those are policy decisions made by an elected President’s administration, and a voter deciding whether that judgment deserves another term — or whether to support candidates who would restore oversight — has a right to know what those decisions produced.

What to Watch

The DHS inspector general has launched two reviews — one on the increase in deaths, one on whether detention centers are following use-of-force standards. Those reviews will either produce real accountability or they won’t. If they do, watch for whether the findings lead to actual operational changes (restored medical contracts, restored oversight staffing, enforceable standards) or just another round of statements about commitment to humane conditions. If they don’t produce findings at all, that silence is itself an answer about how seriously this administration takes deaths in its custody.

Watch also for what happens to the wrongful-death claims families like the Las and the Ges are pursuing. A legal process that forces ICE to disclose what actually happened in those final hours — not the four-paragraph summary the agency now releases, but a real accounting of who saw what, when, and what they did or didn’t do about it — would be the kind of transparency voters rarely get to see. Whether those families get answers, or whether the government successfully shields itself from having to provide them, will tell you how much accountability this system is actually built to allow.