The death rate inside U.S. immigration detention centers has more than doubled during Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House.
Fifty people have died in Department of Homeland Security custody since the president began his deportation blitz right after retaking office last January, according to an explosive Reuters analysis of ICE figures, published by Reuters Wednesday.
Immigration facilities, between 2009 and 2024, logged one fatality a year for every 3,848 people held, the news agency reports. That ratio has since jumped to one death per 1,630 detainees, according to provisional figures through early June.
The Deportation Data Project, a UC Berkeley law school data project, gathered the stats via a request for DHS records, with the numbers crunched by the Vera Institute of Justice, a Brooklyn non-profit that pushes to cut incarceration rates across the country.
Three detention-death experts who reviewed the files and autopsy reports for Reuters said the rising toll raised alarms over supervision and care at centers whose populations have ballooned under Trump.
Chanelle Diaz, an assistant medicine professor at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, said the agency is jailing sick people and fueling a “spike in preventable deaths.”
Officers found 21 of the 50 deceased only after the person had already died or stopped responding, the records show. Cardiovascular problems and heart attacks were behind 16 of the deaths.
The Department of Homeland Security has said it remains committed to a “safe, secure and humane” setting for detainees. “Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive,” spokesperson Lauren Bis told Reuters.
Tuan Van Bui, 55, a Vietnamese detainee, collapsed on April 1 at the Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Indiana, the prison that Trump officials nicknamed the “Speedway Slammer.”
Fellow detainees shouted for a guard, but help took about 15 minutes to arrive, three of them told the news agency.
An Iraqi detainee, Ibrahim Ibrahim, started CPR with skills picked up as a wartime translator. “By the time medical came, he was dead,” Ibrahim said. A local coroner blamed cardiovascular disease, and DHS said staff immediately began lifesaving efforts.
Mohammad Paktiawal, 41, who served in Afghanistan’s special forces before fleeing the 2021 Taliban takeover, died March 14 after agents seized him in a Dallas suburb days earlier.
In confirming his death, ICE led with his record, branding him a “criminal illegal alien from Afghanistan with previous arrests for fraud and theft.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the department for further comment on this story.
