Deaths in ICE Custody Draw Scrutiny as Records Reveal Troubling Patterns

When Francisco Gaspar-Andrés arrived at the Krome detention center in Miami in September 2025, medical staff documented a cascade of serious conditions: alcohol withdrawal symptoms including delirium tremens and anemia, dangerously low blood sodium and blood platelets, pneumonia, and a heart chamber that could not close properly. He was 48 years old.

ICE transferred him to Camp East Montana on September 19. His condition began to deteriorate rapidly there, according to an ICE report on his death. Over the following two months, Gaspar-Andrés complained of bleeding gums, body aches, insomnia, rectal bleeding, acid reflux and headaches. Medical staff documented jaundice. An autopsy determined he died of complications of cirrhosis.

His case is one of at least 44 deaths recorded in ICE custody under the current administration, a total cited by Detention Watch Network that includes 13 deaths this calendar year, four of them in March alone. A review of ICE records found that 31 detainees died in ICE custody in 2025, a two-decade high. This year's pace is grimmer still: those 13 deaths represent more than triple the number recorded at the same point the previous year.

Those deaths have unfolded inside a detention system operating at unprecedented scale. As of early February, ICE was holding more than 68,000 people across facilities nationwide, according to agency figures, the highest population on record during the Trump administration's expanded enforcement operations.

The circumstances surrounding several individual deaths raise specific questions about medical screening, mental health services and the use of force.

Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old Chinese national, died on August 5, 2025, at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, 130 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, after five days in ICE custody. ICE and Pennsylvania State Police determined he died by suicide. An autopsy, however, found that Ge was discovered with his hands and feet tied behind his back, prompting his family to demand answers. Ge had previously served a short period in local jail on fraud-related charges and was awaiting deportation to China at the time of his death.

ICE's own death reports document repeated delays in mental health care. Brayan Rayo-Garzon, 27, a Colombian national, died by suicide in April 2025 after his mental health appointment was rescheduled twice. He was found unresponsive in his cell before he ever had that appointment. Leo Cruz Silva, 34, died by suicide two days after ICE medical staff had formally documented he was experiencing a mental health crisis. Rayo-Garzon and Cruz Silva are among at least seven detainees who died of apparent suicides since the start of 2025.

One death in the ICE records was ruled a homicide. ICE agents held 55-year-old Campos Lunas down until he stopped breathing. An ICE report on his death stated that guards had been intervening to prevent him from harming himself.

Among the most recent deaths was Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41, an Afghan asylum seeker who had worked with U.S. special forces during military operations in his home country and was evacuated to the United States during the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. He died in ICE custody in Texas. ICE stated Paktyawal was arrested after local arrests on charges of fraud and theft, cases that had not been adjudicated at the time of his death. The Department of Homeland Security said he had entered the country legally through the humanitarian parole immigration policy, but that his temporary status expired last August. He was the first Afghan national to die in ICE custody since 2008.

Days later, 19-year-old Royer Perez-Jimenez, a Mexican national, died in what ICE described as a presumed suicide at a facility in Florida, becoming the youngest person to die in ICE custody since President Trump returned to the White House.

Carly Pérez Fernández, communications director of Detention Watch Network, responded directly: "We are deeply saddened by the passing of Royer Perez-Jimenez, 19, reported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a 'presumed' death by suicide. We are equally enraged that a shocking 13 people have died in ICE custody this calendar year, four people in March alone, and 44 deaths total under this administration."

Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar described the overlapping network of local jails, federal facilities and private contractors that together constitute the ICE detention system as a "massive problem." "It's a quagmire created by choice," she said. "This is not how things should work."

That structure complicates accountability in concrete ways. Hugo Boror Urla, 39, a Guatemalan national who died at Bronson Battle Creek Hospital on May 22, 2024, was held not in an ICE-operated facility but in the Calhoun County Jail in Battle Creek, Michigan, under an immigration detainer arrangement. Two additional deaths ruled suicides in Missouri last year involved detainees held in local jails under identical arrangements. Regardless of where a detainee is physically confined, the death report is filed with ICE, the legal custody rests with ICE, and the question of who bears responsibility for what happened inside a county lockup, a private contractor's facility or a federal processing center is left for families, lawyers and investigators to untangle on their own.