ICE detention deaths hit record high as 2026 fiscal year closes out

Immigration and Customs Enforcement closed out its 2026 fiscal year on Sept. 30 with the highest number of in-custody deaths in the agency's 23-year history, according to ICE's own detainee death reports and independent tallies by reporters who track them — a grim record set as the detained population swelled past 70,000 and the federal offices built to police detention conditions were stripped of staff and funding.

At least 37 people died in ICE custody between October 2025 and the close of the fiscal year, more than in any prior year since the agency was created in 2003, surpassing the previous high of 28 deaths set in fiscal year 2004. The most recent, 47-year-old Peruvian national Julian Curo-Churata, died Sept. 29 at a hospital in Monroe, Louisiana, after being held at Richwood Correctional Center; ICE disclosed the death on Oct. 1, two days after the fiscal year closed. Eleven days earlier, 36-year-old Carlos Josue Marchena-Marchena, a Costa Rican national held at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, was found unresponsive; his relatives told reporters he had been missing insulin doses for his type 1 diabetes.

The numbers

The death toll has climbed steadily and publicly through the year. By early March, 23 people had already died in ICE custody since October, more than in the entirety of the prior fiscal year, according to NPR's review of government data. By mid-April, the count had reached 29 — already past the 2004 record of 28 — and kept rising through the summer before the fiscal year closed with at least 37 confirmed.

• At least 37 deaths in ICE custody in fiscal year 2026, versus a prior full-year high of 28 (FY2004)
• A peer-reviewed mortality analysis found the in-custody death rate climbed from 13.0 per 100,000 detained person-years in FY2023 to 47.5 in FY2025, then to 88.9 in the early months of FY2026
• More than 70,000 people were held in ICE detention as of this spring, the highest figure in the agency's history
• Congress funneled roughly $70 billion toward ICE hiring and detention capacity last year through the budget-reconciliation law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act

Causes of death span cardiac arrest, suicide, pneumonia and, in several cases, causes still listed as "pending investigation" months after the fact — a pattern that has drawn its own criticism, since ICE is required to make death reports public within 90 days but has in several cases missed that deadline or provided only a terse interim notice.

Oversight hollowed out as detention expanded

The spike in deaths has coincided with a sharp contraction of the federal offices that are supposed to catch problems before they become fatal. The Department of Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which reviewed detention conditions and investigated complaints, has gone from more than 100 employees to fewer than five, according to reporting on internal staffing records. The separate Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman was shut down entirely after Congress eliminated its funding, leaving the DHS Office of Inspector General as the only remaining outside check on ICE's detention system.

That inspector general's office has since opened two reviews — one examining the rise in detainee deaths and a separate one into ICE's use-of-force practices — after sustained pressure from Capitol Hill. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and a group of colleagues pressed the inspector general to move faster, noting that such audits typically take more than a year to complete and asking for interim public findings along the way.

Sens. Alex Padilla and Dick Durbin, who have sent multiple letters to DHS leadership over the course of the year, wrote in June that the death toll "must be understood in the context of this Administration's deliberate policy choices" to expand detention capacity rapidly without a matching expansion of medical staffing or oversight. An earlier letter from the senators, sent in February after a cluster of winter deaths, called each death in ICE custody "a tragedy" and demanded that the agency investigate and improve medical care.

DHS has rejected the framing that the numbers represent a crisis. The department has said death rates remain a small fraction of the total detained population and has pointed to the sheer size of the detention system — now holding more people at any given time than at any point in ICE's history — as the primary driver of a larger raw death count.

Individual deaths, incomplete answers

Behind the aggregate numbers are cases that have drawn scrutiny for how little the government has disclosed. Geraldo Lunas Campos died in January at Camp East Montana, a detention facility in El Paso, Texas, after what DHS initially described as a "struggle" with security staff; the El Paso County Medical Examiner later ruled the death a homicide, citing asphyxia from neck and torso compression, and the FBI opened an investigation. His family's attorney has said they intend to file a wrongful-death claim.

At Delaney Hall, a privately run detention center in Newark, New Jersey, operated for ICE by the GEO Group, 41-year-old Salvadoran national Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died Aug. 1 after what ICE described as a medical emergency; his family and advocates said he had been denied regular medication for diabetes, high blood pressure and seizures. It was the second death at that facility in under a year, prompting renewed calls from New Jersey lawmakers and Newark's mayor to close it.

A joint investigation by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch found a recurring pattern across many of this year's deaths: delayed responses to documented medical complaints, inconsistent record-keeping between facility medical staff and ICE, and limited independent access to investigate once a death occurs.

"No death is what we want. We don't want anyone to die in custody," then-Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told a House hearing in April, attributing the record toll largely to the size of the detained population. He announced his resignation hours after that testimony.

The dead ranged in age from 19 to 85 and came from countries across Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean; several had lived in the United States for years and had no criminal record beyond an immigration violation, while others had pending criminal charges or prior convictions that DHS has cited in public statements defending its enforcement priorities. Their families — many of whom learned of a death only after a phone call went unanswered for days — have had to navigate a patchwork of state medical examiners, private prison operators and ICE's own public-affairs office to get even basic facts about how a relative died.

The burden extends past the families themselves. Rural counties in Georgia, Louisiana and Texas that host large ICE facilities rely on per-diem payments from the agency's private contractors, tying local budgets to a detention system now under federal investigation. Detention-center employees and contracted medical staff, often understaffed relative to the population surge, are also facing more scrutiny over how care was or wasn't delivered in the hours before a detainee's death.

What happens next

The two DHS inspector general reviews remain open, with no public release date. Several wrongful-death suits are moving through state and federal courts, including over the Aurora, Colorado, death of Nicaraguan national Melvin Ariel Calero-Mendoza, filed against the GEO Group and a facility physician, and the anticipated claim over Lunas Campos's death in Texas. Advocacy groups, including Detention Watch Network and the ACLU, are pushing Congress to condition further detention funding on independent medical oversight, while Padilla, Durbin and other Senate Democrats have called on DHS to pause the expansion of new detention capacity until facilities meet existing standards.

None of that has slowed the underlying trend so far. Fiscal year 2027 began Oct. 1 with the detained population still near record levels and the same facilities — many of them newly opened or rapidly expanded over the past 18 months — still in operation. Unless staffing, medical care or oversight changes, families of detainees and the lawmakers pressing DHS for answers say they expect the final tally for this new fiscal year to look much like the last one.