ICE locked suicidal and seriously ill detainees in solitary confinement for four times longer than the U.N.’s torture threshold, new figures reveal.
Donald Trump, 80, has promised to jail and deport “the worst of the worst.” But ICE’s official numbers tell a crueler story.
FY2026 detention statistics quietly posted on July 20—the agency’s first release since April 9, ending a three-month blackout that spawned at least three lawsuits—lay bare the Trump administration’s failure to follow international human rights law on solitary confinement, according to an analysis by the Daily Beast’s investigative Substack Punchup
Between 835 and 1,104 people were put in isolation every month this fiscal year, and a GEO Group-run facility topped ICE’s own segregation table every single month, PunchUp’s analysis found.
For the most vulnerable detainees the agency tracks—people with serious mental or medical illness, on hunger strike or on suicide watch—the average unbroken spell in solitary reached 63 days in the winter quarter.
That is more than five times the average of 12 days in early 2022, and more than four times the U.N.’s 15-day threshold for treatment that can amount to torture.
U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk raised exactly that concern on June 26, saying solitary confinement “should be an exceptional measure” and warning that when “prolonged or indefinite” it “could amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” He said conditions in ICE custody “exacerbate vulnerability” and “raise serious concerns” about whether the increased number of deaths in ICE custody could have been prevented.
At the same time, ICE is refusing almost every asylum parole request. In the 2024 fiscal year, the agency received 7,051 parole requests from detainees who had passed a credible-fear screening and granted 4,671 of them.
This fiscal year, it has received 14—and granted just one.
The 1,393 screened asylum seekers still locked up are waiting ever longer for hearings, the figures reviewed by PunchUp show. The average custody stay for single adults with a positive fear finding has climbed at every half-month reading without exception, from 146.5 days in October to 257.6 days by June 30. In 2024, it hovered around 80.
Of those who are released from ICE jails, 84 percent were let out only to be deported. And 38 current detainees are stateless—people ICE holds even though no other country will take them.
The same dataset shows at least 75,755 people were held on January 15, around 7 percent more than the 70,766 in its last release—the highest figure ever made public.
That included 73,945 in adult facilities, 917 in family staging, and 893 asylum seekers who had already passed their fear screenings. The Department of Homeland Security has been asked to explain the near-5,000 gap.
The increased numbers perhaps explain, in part, why people are also dying in greater numbers than at any time in decades. Thirty-two detainees died in ICE custody in 2025, the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades, the Guardian found in its end-of-year tally, while the U.N. put the figure at 33. 2026 is already the deadliest year in detention since DHS was founded, according to government data.
Among the dead was Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, a Cuban man held at Camp East Montana. ICE first said he suffered “medical distress,” then claimed a suicide attempt—before the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide from “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.”
DHS has repeatedly claimed there has been “no spike in deaths” and that detainees receive a “higher standard of care than most prisons that hold U.S. citizens.”
The victims are rarely the monsters of White House press releases. As PunchUp revealed in May, ICE arrested 21 cancer patients, seven organ transplant recipients, at least 24 disabled people, and 130 pregnant women in the first seven months of Trump’s term.
And, as PunchUp reported in June, the agency has rounded up 466 refugees from the Vietnam War era—people with a median of 36 years living in America.
A spokesperson for DHS told PunchUp that ICE was “delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens,” that “nearly 70 percent of ICE arrests” had been “charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S.,” and claimed, “more than 3 million illegal aliens are out of the country and counting.”
Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.
