May 1, 2026 · Mark Ramm

The Deadliest Year: What the 2025 ICE Custody Deaths Reveal

Santos Jesús Flores, 47, a Salvadoran man held in the special housing unit at Camp East Montana, watched what happened through the window of his isolation cell. He told the Associated Press what he saw: guards handcuffed Geraldo Lunas Campos, tackled him, and then one guard put an arm around Lunas Campos’s neck and squeezed until the 55-year-old Cuban man was unconscious. At least five guards held him down. Lunas Campos died on January 3, 2026.

ICE’s public account had described him dying from “medical distress.” After the Washington Post reported that a homicide ruling was expected, ICE revised its account to describe a suicide attempt requiring staff intervention. On January 21–22, 2026, the El Paso County Medical Examiner made the official finding: homicide, cause of death asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.

Lunas Campos had lived in the United States since 1996. He had a documented history of bipolar disorder and anxiety. He had been detained by ICE in Rochester, New York in July 2025 and transferred to Camp East Montana in September. He was 55 years old. He is one of 33 people who died in ICE custody in 2025 — the highest annual total since the agency was formed.

The Number

33. ICE’s own count. The deadliest year in the agency’s history, nearly triple the 11 deaths recorded in 2024, and higher than any year since tracking began more than two decades ago. Deaths in ICE detention are now on pace to exceed that record in 2026 as well — per NPR, by early April the 2026 count had already surpassed the full-year 2025 total.

Two of those deaths — in the first quarter of 2026 — were ruled homicides. Both happened at facilities with documented structural failures. Both involved ICE narratives that shifted as reporting progressed. And both happened against a backdrop of congressional oversight access that was systematically blocked.

Camp East Montana is in a category of its own. Three detainees died there within a 44-day span:

Francisco Gaspar-Andres, 48, Guatemalan — December 3, 2025; ICE cited liver and kidney failure
Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, Cuban — January 3, 2026; ruled homicide
Victor Manuel Diaz, 34, Nicaraguan — found unconscious January 14, 2026; circumstances under investigation

Three deaths at a single facility in six weeks drew formal closure demands from Rep. Veronica Escobar and 13 colleagues. ICE’s response was to keep the facility open under new management.

The fourth homicide ruling came from Mississippi. Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, 39, a Nicaraguan national detained at the Adams County Correctional Center operated by CoreCivic, was found unresponsive in his cell on December 4, 2025. He was transferred to Merit Health Natchez hospital, where he died on December 14 — the fourth ICE custody death in four days nationally. His death was ruled a homicide.

ICE’s initial account described Rodriguez as having hanged himself with a sheet. His family directly disputed this. Nurses who treated him told family members that his injuries were inconsistent with hanging — including a forehead wound that the hanging narrative could not explain. Family members said Rodriguez had shown no signs of suicidal ideation, had been in regular contact with relatives about his planned return home, and had been moved from a communal housing unit to an isolated cell before his death. He had agreed to voluntarily self-deport in September 2025 and was reportedly scheduled for removal the day before he was found unresponsive.

The Systemic Finding

The two homicide rulings are the most visible data points in a pattern that an independent investigation documented before either death occurred.

In a 2024 report titled Deadly Failures: Preventable Deaths in U.S. Immigration Detention, the ACLU, American Oversight, and Physicians for Human Rights examined 52 documented deaths in ICE custody between 2017 and 2021, drawing on over 14,500 pages of records obtained through FOIA requests and litigation. Their finding: “Independent medical experts found that 95 percent of deaths in detention were deemed as being preventable or possibly preventable if ICE had provided clinically appropriate medical care.”

These were not deaths from rare or untreatable conditions. They were people with infections, diabetes, and heart problems who were denied care until it was too late. In 88% of the deaths examined, medical staff made incorrect or incomplete diagnoses, or provided delayed, inappropriate, or incomplete treatment. In 61% of cases, documentation was falsified or insufficient.

The pattern holds in the current expansion. ICE’s own inspectors conducted a congressionally mandated review of Camp East Montana in February 2026 and documented 49 deficiencies — violations of federal detention standards covering use-of-force documentation, security protocols, medical care, and protocols to prevent self-harm and suicide. The inspection happened while Acquisition Logistics LLC was still operating the facility. That company — an obscure Virginia entity operating out of a single-family home, with no prior detention experience, awarded a contract worth up to $1.3 billion in July 2025 — had also failed to register with the Texas Secretary of State’s office as required by Texas law. DHS terminated the contract in March 2026, replacing it on a no-bid basis with Amentum Services, Inc. Camp East Montana remained open.

CoreCivic’s Adams County facility presents a different version of the same failure. The company reported nearly $2.2 billion in total revenue in 2025, with revenue growing nearly $200 million year-over-year as ICE detention expanded. Adams County receives approximately $3.9 million per month from the federal contract. When CoreCivic testified before Congress, it reported the facility was fully medically staffed.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS-02), who represents the district, visited Adams County Correctional Center on April 9, 2026 and counted approximately 1,400 detainees. Detainees told him there were two doctors on staff. Thompson himself observed no doctors during the visit.

At Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, operated by GEO Group, advocates documented 800 detainees served by 7 full-time medical staff — a ratio exceeding 100:1. Jean Wilson Brutus, 41, died within 24 hours of entering ICE custody at the facility in December 2025. Civil rights attorneys launched an independent investigation in January 2026.

The Oversight Blockade

The deaths are documented. The gaps between what contractors told Congress and what detainees and visiting lawmakers observed are documented. What is not functioning is the accountability mechanism that is supposed to respond to that documentation.

Rep. Thompson joined a Democratic lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging the systematic blocking of congressional oversight access to ICE detention facilities. The lawsuit exists because what Thompson encountered at Adams County — a facility where CoreCivic’s representations to Congress directly contradicted what detainees and an elected member of Congress observed in person — is the rule, not an exception.

At Delaney Hall, GEO Group barred city fire inspectors from entering the facility in May 2025 and has maintained the legal position that the city of Newark cannot inspect or regulate the facility because it operates under a federal contract. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested attempting an oversight visit with three members of Congress in May 2025. Rep. LaMonica McIver was subsequently indicted on three counts of assaulting federal officials — charges she and civil rights organizations including the ACLU have characterized as vindictive prosecution targeting her for legislative oversight. Her appeal was pending before the Third Circuit as of April 2026.

At the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington state health inspectors have been denied entry ten times, including twice after an appeals court affirmed state inspection authority. The facility has documented two detainee deaths and six suicide attempts since 2024, and more than 3,500 detainee complaints covering medical neglect, contaminated food, unsanitary conditions, and staff assault. On April 28, 2026, Governor Bob Ferguson and Attorney General Nick Brown filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in U.S. District Court to compel inspections. The hearing is set for May 26, 2026.

The congressional oversight lawsuit, the state injunction motion, the Third Circuit appeal — all of these are running simultaneously because each individual oversight mechanism is blocked individually, and each requires its own litigation to unblock.

The one check that has functioned at scale is habeas corpus. Federal judges in the District of Hawaii have granted six or more habeas writs as of April 2026. The anchor case is that of Joaquin David Rico-Tapia, held at the Honolulu Federal Detention Center for six weeks without a bond hearing. The ruling ordered a hearing and has since been cited more than 200 times in federal courts across the country. A federal judge in El Paso separately agreed to delay the deportation of six witnesses to the Lunas Campos death pending their depositions.

Individual federal judges are doing the work that administrative oversight structures cannot. That is not a stable governance arrangement.

Mortality as Policy

There is a coherent interpretation of these facts that is worse than negligence. It is that the conditions producing preventable deaths are an acceptable cost of a detention system that is expanding as fast as possible, under contractors selected partly for their willingness to operate at speed and scale without asking hard questions, under oversight mechanisms that are being actively resisted.

The ACLU’s 95% finding was published in 2024, before the expansion. The structural failures it identified — inadequate medical care, falsified documentation, delayed treatment of treatable conditions — were already documented at facilities that now operate with thousands more detainees and proportionally fewer resources.

Camp East Montana was awarded to a company with no detention experience. It opened in August 2025. Three people died there within four months. The company was terminated. The facility stayed open.

CoreCivic earned $2.2 billion in 2025. Its facility in Adams County was the site of a homicide. A visiting member of Congress found no doctors. The facility stays open.

At Delaney Hall, a man died within 24 hours of arrival. The facility had opened without city permits. It stays open.

The pattern is not that oversight failed to catch problems in time. The pattern is that oversight is being systematically prevented from functioning, and that the consequences — measured in preventable deaths — are being absorbed without triggering the accountability responses that would normally follow.

What to Watch

Several converging threads will clarify the legal and political stakes in the coming weeks:

May 26, 2026: The Washington state injunction hearing against GEO Group at Tacoma NWIPC. If the court grants the injunction and orders inspections, it establishes that states can compel health oversight of federally contracted ICE facilities over operator objection — a precedent with national implications.
May 26, 2026: Also on the same date, the trial at 26 Federal Plaza in New York, connected to ongoing ICE detention litigation.
The Thompson oversight lawsuit: Democratic members’ challenge to systematic congressional access blockages. If it proceeds to discovery, it could force documentation of what ICE and contractors knew about facility conditions.
Criminal prosecution in El Paso: The Texas Tribune reported in January that prosecutors were evaluating whether to pursue criminal charges in the Lunas Campos homicide. No announcement has been made as of this writing.
Amentum at Camp East Montana: The replacement operator took over a facility with 49 documented inspection violations under its predecessor. The facility’s death count and inspection record under new management will be the first real test of whether the contractor swap changes anything.
The DWN framing: Detention Watch Network and other advocates have argued that the record death count reflects the administration’s decision to detain people in conditions that were known to produce preventable deaths, and to block the oversight mechanisms designed to prevent them. That argument is now being tested in multiple federal courts at once.

Lunas Campos had been in this country for 30 years when he was detained in Rochester. His three children petitioned a federal court to prevent the witnesses to his death from being deported before they could give their accounts. A federal judge agreed. That intervention — a judicial order to preserve testimony about a homicide that ICE had first described as medical distress — is the kind of check that is supposed to exist at scale, not only when a detainee’s children can find a lawyer in time.

The legal challenges in Washington, Florida, California, and Hawaii are converging on the same constitutional argument: the government cannot detain people in conditions that produce preventable deaths, block the oversight designed to catch those conditions, and characterize the resulting mortality as administrative rather than legal failure. That argument is going to be resolved in federal courts, one jurisdiction at a time, while the facilities stay open.

Sources

The investigation behind the data

The Detention Pipeline is the data layer for an ongoing investigation by The RAMM.

Read the investigation → Start here

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