Opinion: ICE's detention expansion has outpaced its ability to keep people in custody alive

Fiscal year 2026 closes in eight days, and by every independent tally it is on track to end as the deadliest year on record for people held in U.S. immigration detention. That judgment does not rest on advocacy groups alone. It is echoed, almost verbatim, by the watchdog inside the government agency responsible for the custody itself. On June 24, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general opened a formal evaluation of detainee deaths in ICE custody, telling the agency's leadership plainly that the review exists "because of an increase of detainee deaths in ICE custody each year since fiscal year 2022."

That sentence, from Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari, is worth sitting with. It is not phrased as an allegation. It is phrased as an observed trend, four years running, serious enough that a federal watchdog invoked its statutory right of access to records under the Inspector General Act to go find out why.

A system that grew faster than anyone could inspect it

The proximate cause is scale. ICE's daily detained population hit a record 70,766 people in January, a more than 75 percent increase in a single year that the American Immigration Council has called unprecedented in the modern history of U.S. immigration enforcement. That growth was deliberately financed: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, delivered roughly $45 billion in detention-specific funding, enough, by ICE's own description, to sustain an average daily population near 100,000 and to add tens of thousands of new beds through 2029, transforming ICE, as NPR has documented, into the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.

Money for beds arrived faster than the infrastructure to run them safely. Nowhere is that clearer than at Camp East Montana, the sprawling tent facility ICE opened on August 1, 2025, at Fort Bliss in El Paso — built, with a grim irony noted by historians, on the site of a former Japanese American internment camp. It is now the largest immigration detention facility in the country, and in June the Government Accountability Office concluded, in a report titled "Waste and Performance Issues at Camp East Montana," that ICE never inspected the site before moving detainees in, as its own policy requires. Investigators found the camp opened without perimeter security cameras, without outdoor recreation space and without space for attorneys or family to visit. Guards had not been trained to administer tuberculosis screening beyond a symptom questionnaire, and a TB-positive detainee was housed with the general population in November. A contracted guard lost a loaded firearm in January; auditors said it was still unrecovered in March. The facility's flat-rate contract required taxpayers to pay for a 5,000-person capacity even when the population, at one point, was roughly 1,600 — millions of dollars spent on capacity nobody used, at a site nobody checked before opening.

The number that undercuts the easy explanation

The administration's most intuitive defense of the death toll is arithmetic: more people detained necessarily means more deaths, especially among an older and medically vulnerable population swept into a larger dragnet. That defense has real force, and it should not be dismissed. But it does not fully hold up against the data Human Rights Watch compiled in its June report, "Dying in Detention." Between January 2025 and January 2026, the detained population grew roughly 77 percent — but the annualized mortality rate rose 138 percent over the same period, and by mid-2026 stood at roughly 8.4 deaths per 10,000 detainees, nearly three times the average under the Biden administration and close to double the peak recorded during the worst of the pandemic in 2020. Deaths, in other words, are not merely scaling with population. They are outrunning it. Apparent suicides in ICE custody rose from one in 2024 to seven in the twelve months that followed, according to the same analysis. Separately, NPR reported that ICE recorded 33 deaths in fiscal year 2025 alone, the highest annual total in more than two decades, with fiscal 2026 on pace to exceed it.

One death, two accounts

No single case illustrates the stakes of that gap in oversight better than the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban father who died at Camp East Montana on January 3. ICE's initial public statement said staff "witnessed him in distress." An El Paso medical examiner later ruled the death a homicide, with an autopsy citing "asphyxia due to neck and torso compression" and finding hemorrhaging in the neck tissue and eyelids consistent with physical restraint, according to reporting confirmed by NBC News. DHS's account differs sharply: the department says Campos was attempting self-harm, "violently resisted the security staff," and stopped breathing during the struggle to restrain him, and that the matter remains an active investigation.

Both things can be procedurally true at once — a medical examiner's finding of homicide is a classification of manner of death, meaning death at another person's hands, not automatically a finding of unlawful intent or criminal guilt, and DHS is entitled to have its account of a chaotic, contested incident tested rather than assumed. But the fact that the government's own forensic examiner and the government's own department describe the same death in such starkly different terms is itself an argument for exactly the kind of independent, systemic review the inspector general has now opened. It is also not an isolated dispute: Camp East Montana recorded three detainee deaths in its first six weeks of operation, and Lunas Campos's death remains the only one of the three classified as a homicide. Advocates for detainees have been blunter. Haddy Gassama of the American Civil Liberties Union, which renewed its call to close the facility after the death, said:

"The death of Geraldo Lunas Campos is the latest in a string of preventable deaths by ICE and illustrates a broader pattern of unchecked violence and abuse carried out by ICE against members of our communities on the taxpayer's dime."

The case for patience, and why it is not enough

ICE's defenders have a fair rebuttal beyond pure arithmetic. The agency's own inspectors, not outside critics, generated eight discrepancy reports flagging problems at Camp East Montana, and ICE terminated the original contractor, Acquisition Logistics LLC, in March, replacing it with Amentum Services. That is a system correcting itself, not simply denying a problem exists. Detention, its supporters argue, is a policy Congress funded and voters endorsed, and no facility housing tens of thousands of people will ever be entirely free of medical emergencies, natural deaths among an aging population, or contested use-of-force incidents.

All of that is true, and none of it answers the inspector general's own framing. A watchdog does not open a formal evaluation, invoking statutory subpoena-like authority, over a trend it considers statistically unremarkable. Nor does the Government Accountability Office write "waste and performance issues" into a report title over problems it considers merely cosmetic. The government's own auditors and its own inspector general — appointees, not activists — are the ones who concluded that the fastest expansion of immigration detention in American history was not matched by the fastest expansion of the systems meant to keep the people inside it alive.

Congress created this dilemma and Congress can resolve it. Having appropriated tens of billions of dollars to build detention capacity, lawmakers have both the leverage and the obligation to condition further expansion on independently verified medical staffing ratios, mandatory pre-occupancy inspections that are actually completed before a facility opens, and detainee-death reporting that meets the timeliness Congress itself already wrote into appropriations law. By ICE's own account of its detainee-death reporting process, field staff have twelve hours to notify headquarters internally, but the agency is bound only to "strive" for a public release within two business days, and appropriations riders give it up to ninety days to make full reports public — a cushion that looks far less defensible when the pace of deaths itself is the open question. The GAO and the inspector general have done the diagnostic work. What remains is whether the same Congress that funded the expansion is willing to fund, and demand, the oversight that was supposed to come with it.