Deaths in Detention Warn of Horrors Behind ICE’s Prison Walls |
Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.
All eyes are on the Trump administration’s brutal “immigration enforcement” operation in Minnesota, where roving squads of federal agents in Minneapolis are demanding proof of citizenship from people of color on the street and lashing out against residents enraged by the deadly shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer last week.
Far less visible is the rapidly expanding, nationwide network of jails and prisons where ICE and Border Patrol lock people up after they are arrested, and that is almost certainly by design. Four people died in federal immigration jails so far in 2026, and at least 32 people died in ICE jails over the course of 2025 as President Donald Trump ramped up his mass deportation campaign. The death count for 2025 constituted the most deaths in ICE jails ever recorded outside the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If we are seeing that sort of outward extreme violence in broad daylight in the streets of Minneapolis and streets across the country, imagine what people must be facing behind closed doors and behind bars in ICE detention centers,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at the Detention Watch Network, in an interview with Truthout.
“If we are seeing that sort of outward extreme violence in broad daylight in the streets of Minneapolis, imagine what people must be facing behind closed doors and behind bars in ICE detention centers.”
The number of people imprisoned by ICE increased by 75 percent to nearly 66,000 in 2025, and despite repeated claims by administration officials about targeting “the worst of the worst,” nearly 74 percent have no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse immigration database. ICE’s “roving patrols” and “indiscriminate raids” have contributed to a 2,450 percent increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day, according to the American Immigration Council.
Ghandehari told Truthout that ICE has long faced allegations of allowing abuse, medical neglect, inhumane conditions, and solitary confinement in its network of jails and prisons, which are used to incarcerate people facing deportation orders.
ICE’s carceral facilities are