The devastating human cost of President Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown has only deepened with time.
Deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody surged 140 percent during the first year of Trump’s second term, according to a bombshell report from Human Rights Watch.
Published Thursday, the report found that 52 people died in ICE custody during the first 500 days of Trump’s second term.
The independent global organization analyzed deaths in ICE custody from October 2015 through June of this year, tracking mortality trends over that period.
“People are dying in ICE custody at the highest rate in many years, even after accounting for the surge in detention,” Brian Root, a senior technology and human rights adviser at Human Rights Watch, said.
“DHS and Congress should act immediately to reduce the number of people in detention and to overhaul conditions, including by ensuring access to adequate health care in line with the United States’ human rights obligations.”
Human Rights Watch examined several cases in depth, uncovering harrowing details that were previously unknown to the public.
In one instance, Maksym Chernyak, a 44-year-old man from Ukraine, suffered a stroke while detention staff looked on without providing medical care. The delays in treatment “almost certainly contributed to his death.”
The organization, alongside Physicians for Human Rights, also found that ICE, which has little oversight, fails to disclose key information about how such deaths occur.
Take, for instance, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas. The 32-year-old died in ICE custody in 2025 after receiving a COVID-19 diagnosis and spending 12 days in isolation. As of May 2026, his family still had not received answers to their questions.
“Only a mother who has lost her child knows what I am feeling,” his mother said. “I want my child, and I can’t do anything.”
An ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
The Department of Homeland Security has said it remains committed to maintaining a “safe, secure and humane” environment for detainees.
“Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive,” spokesperson Lauren Bis told Reuters last week.
Experts also told the news agency that DHS, to put it simply, is fueling a “spike in preventable deaths.”
Another example is Mohammad Paktiawal, who was just 41 years old. He served in Afghanistan’s special forces before fleeing the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of the country. He died on March 14, days after agents seized him in a Dallas suburb.
In confirming his death, ICE led with his record, branding him a “criminal illegal alien from Afghanistan with previous arrests for fraud and theft.”
It’s not just deaths running rampant in ICE detention centers.
The torturous methods allegedly used at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” echo one of the most horrific abuses carried out by the CIA at its secret “black site” prisons after the September 11 attacks.
Guards at the immigration detention center in the Everglades punish detainees by confining them in what inmates call “the box,” a 2x2-foot cage-like structure where their hands and feet are shackled to the ground, and they are unable to sit or move, according to a December report from Amnesty International.
The CIA used a similar torture method at its post-9/11 black sites, including on Abu Zubaydah, the longest-held prisoner in the U.S. war on terrorism and the first to be waterboarded by the agency. Zubaydah was held for more than 11 days in a coffin-size confinement box and for 29 hours in a smaller one—still larger than the boxes reportedly used at Alligator Alcatraz—measuring 21 inches wide, 2.5 feet deep, and 2.5 feet high.
“It’s a copy of Guantánamo,” a Cuban man who was detained there for 11 days told Amnesty International. “The conditions are inhuman.”
