NBC News finds rising suicides and self-harm in ICE detention centers

The government says the toll rises because more people are locked up. The 911 logs point to something starker: more than 1,000 emergency requests from at least six ICE detention centers over the past year, including 28 calls involving serious self-harm, while five people died by suicide in detention so far in 2026, the highest total in two decades.

The calls spanned detention-center jurisdictions in Washington, California, Georgia, Michigan and Texas. Among the incidents were a pregnant immigrant in Texas banging her head against a wall four days before Christmas, a man who swallowed a razor blade, another who drank cleaning chemicals and at least three people who cut their wrists. Taken together, the calls show how often detention officers are confronting mental-health emergencies that the system is supposed to prevent long before they become life-threatening.

ICE’s Performance-Based National Detention Standards require a comprehensive Significant Self-Harm and Suicide Prevention and Intervention Program, along with annual staff training on suicide prevention and intervention. Yet the agency is facing a sharp rise in deaths even as the detained population grows. NBC News reported that total deaths in custody in 2026 tripled from the previous year as the detainee population doubled, and that the five suicides already recorded this year exceeded the two suicides reported across the previous four years of the prior administration, when ICE held about half as many people.

That pattern has led public-health researchers and civil-rights advocates to argue that the problem is not just scale but conditions inside detention. A 2024 peer-reviewed study found 12 deaths in FY2021 to FY2023, down from 38 in FY2018 to FY2020, but it also found that suicide accounted for 1 of those 12 deaths, compared with 9 of 38 in the earlier period. The same study warned that the reported totals likely undercount deaths tied to detention because some people were released shortly before dying and were not counted by ICE.

The broader detention system is enormous. The Government Accountability Office said ICE had an average daily population of more than 37,000 detained noncitizens in fiscal year 2024 at more than 100 facilities. Physicians for Human Rights says the United States runs the world’s largest immigration detention system, with an average daily detained population of nearly 60,000, and has warned that solitary confinement, defined as isolation for 22 hours or more a day, can raise suicide risk. Dr. Sanjay Basu of the University of California, San Francisco said a spike in self-harm signals a much larger group of detainees facing mental-health crises, and that the deaths are highly preventable if ICE follows its own suicide-prevention standards.