Most immigrant deaths in ICE custody could have been prevented – Mother Jones

Detainees awaiting deportation leave the cafeteria under the supervision of guards. Gerald Herbert/AP

On 15th of June Jhon Javier Benavides-Quintana, an Ecuadorian immigrant, died of unknown causes at the Otero County Processing Center, a detention center in New Mexico. He was 32 years old. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which recently filed a civil rights complaint on behalf of the detainees at Otero alleging “retaliatory use of solitary confinement,” called for an investigation. The detention center is owned by Otero County but operated by the private Prison Operator Management & Training Corporation. Benavides-Quintana’s death occurred less than a month after the deaths of two other immigrants during U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in Georgia and Michigan.

Now, a new report from the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights and the nonprofit watchdog organization American Oversight reveals how “systemic failures in medical and mental health care in ICE detention centers have caused otherwise preventable deaths.” The study, titled Fatal failures, relies on 14,000 pages of documents, including detainee death reports, autopsy reports and emails obtained through public records requests. ICE currently detains an average of 36,000 people per day in about 135 facilities across the country. As in Benavides-Quintana, the vast majority of detained immigrants are held in detention centers run by private companies.

Medical experts interviewed for the analysis concluded that 95 percent of the deaths in custody, or 49 of the 52 incidents reported by ICE from January 2017 to December 2021, were preventable or potentially preventable. The prisoner received adequate medical care. The study does not analyze deaths to date, say the authors, because ICE has failed to provide complete Records in a timely manner.

However, ICE is known to have reported at least 69 deaths in custody between 2017 and May 2024. In 13 of those cases, the agency did not publicly disclose the reasons for the deaths. For 14 of those whose cause of death is known, suicide is the reason for death. The numbers do not include those who were released by ICE at the hospital and subsequently died. “This suggests that the death toll among those detained by ICE is likely higher than officially reported,” the study said.

In 88 percent of the cases studied, medical staff at the prisons made incorrect or incomplete diagnoses. Delays in emergency care and inadequate mental health care also contributed to the deaths. In nearly two-thirds of the cases studied, prison officials “falsified or created false or inadequate documentation” about the treatment of patients. At one Florida prison center, for example, staff lied about examining an inmate hours before the man’s death.

The researchers also found several deficiencies in the agency’s oversight and accountability mechanisms, concluding that they “do little to prevent future deaths.” ICE investigators failed to interview witnesses, allowed evidence to be destroyed, and omitted from their reports facts “that could embarrass detention centers or ICE or suggest detention center or ICE negligence.” ICE’s “investigations, formal analyses, and recommendations in response to deaths in custody are structured to avoid culpability and deny agency responsibility,” the authors concluded.

In one case cited in the report, a Spanish-speaking inmate told staff at the Kay County Detention Center in Newkirk, Oklahoma, that she felt “like she was dying,” but staff dismissed this as suicidal thoughts. The woman was placed in solitary confinement and later died of liver failure. Investigators of that death never disclosed the misinterpretation.

Among the prisons with the highest number of deaths are two facilities of the private prison empire CoreCivic: Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, and Otay Mesa in California. In 2022, ICE contracts were responsible for 552.2 million US dollars or 30 percent of CoreCivic’s total Revenue. (Read my former colleague Shane Bauer’s 2018 CoreCivic investigation here.) In addition, deaths in custody rarely result in consequences for facilities, according to the report. ICE has not terminated contracts with detention centers that failed to meet standards. During the period between 2017 and June 2024, the agency issued fines only three times. In some cases, the agency even expanded its contracts with contractors.

The report’s authors call on ICE to stop relying on mass incarceration and urge the agency to immediately release detainees at risk. “Each of these deaths represents a preventable tragedy and underscores the systemic danger posed by holding people in immigration detention,” Eunice Cho, co-author of the report and senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, said in a statement. “ICE has failed to provide adequate – even basic – medical and mental health care and to ensure that detainees are treated with dignity.”