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Detainee deaths in DHS custody hit record high
Migrant deaths at Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency detention centers have skyrocketed, prompting renewed scrutiny of the White House’s deportation agenda.
Migrant deaths in federal custody hit an all-time high this year, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) executes President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies across the nation. Between October 2025 — when the federal fiscal year begins — and April 2026, at least 29 people died in DHS custody according to government data, “already surpassing 2004’s toll of 28, the previous record,” said NPR.
Suicides in particular have exploded at an “alarming” rate, said The Associated Press. With tens of thousands of migrants still concentrated in DHS camps across the country, mortality rates have become a regular feature of the agency’s current tenure.
‘Something is going profoundly wrong’
The rise in deaths at DHS facilities comes as “detention numbers have skyrocketed during the Trump administration,” said NPR. Trump officials “denied there’s been a spike in deaths” and “attributed the increase to the large number of people in detention” overall. The increase in deaths is “because we do have the highest amount in detention that ICE has ever had since its inception in 2003,” said outgoing ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons at a congressional budget hearing in April.
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That an “unprecedented number” of DHS detainees have taken their own lives is an “indication that authorities are failing to properly oversee the detention” of their tens of thousands of charges, said the AP. “Something is going profoundly wrong from any kind of public health or mental health perspective,” said epidemiologist Dr. Sanjay Basu, co-author of a new study on mortality and suicide rates among ICE detainees, to NPR. “This is one of those alarming, sudden increases.”
Last year saw “more than 1,000 emergency requests” to 911 made from multiple detention centers around the country, 28 of which were prompted by “serious incidents of self-harm,” said NBC News. One detainee “swallowed a razor blade,” another “drank cleaning chemicals” and “at least three cut their own wrists.” Suicides among people in DHS custody are “tragic and rare,” an ICE spokesperson said in a statement to the outlet. On seeing “signs of a detainee being at risk for suicide,” detention center staff follow a “strict prevention and intervention protocol to ensure the detainee’s health and well-being is protected.”
‘Preventable’
More detainees have died in DHS custody last year than in any year in at least two decades, said CNN, with 2026 “on track to be even higher.” But many of the past year’s deaths “appear to have been preventable.” In “more than a dozen cases,” the “deadly outcomes” stemmed in part from “substandard treatment by at-times understaffed medical teams dealing with escalating detainee populations.”
California’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center and the Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, have each seen three migrant deaths in their respective facilities — “the most out of ICE’s sprawling detention operation,” said NPR. ICE has “repeatedly asserted” that all detainees are screened for “medical, dental and mental health conditions” within 12 hours of arrival, said the AP. But reviews of ICE’s own inspection reports and jail records show “three of the nine facilities where ICE detainees died by suicide have struggled to meet that standard.”
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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.
