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The deadliest six-month period for immigration detention since 2018 has occurred this year, according to a letter Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock sent to the Department of Homeland Security this week.
Less than 24 hours after that letter was published, the year became deadlier still. A detainee was killed, and two others were seriously injured by a sniper who fired rounds at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Dallas.
The days since the attack have seen political jousting at the highest levels of power, as possible motives for the shooter — who also died in the incident — slowly emerge. Authorities have said the gunman was motivated by anti-ICE sentiment, a reading some family members have dismissed. But whatever his intentions, other deaths in immigration detention this year — from untreated illness, suicide and neglect — have been far more common and far less publicized.
Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old who had lived in California since childhood, died on Sunday, Sept. 21. Uribe, a former recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, was detained during an August raid on the carwash where he had worked for 15 years, and transferred to ICE’s Adelanto detention center near Los Angeles. Shortly after, he became ill with coughing and fevers. Family told the Los Angeles Times that he was given little more than Tylenol as his condition deteriorated, before he died while awaiting surgery on an abscess. Ayala-Uribe’s brother said that Ismael “tried asking for help, but they wouldn’t really do anything.”
Physical conditions aren’t the only medical needs going unmet. El Pais reported this week that suicide attempts in U.S. detention centers are increasing, partly due to a lack of proper mental health treatment. Immigration lawyers and people currently in detention told The New York Times that ICE rarely meets its own standards of care, which require initial screenings on arrival, detailed assessments within two weeks, and access to emergency care. Experts say suicidal ideation is also a function of the miserable conditions in many immigration settings, which have also led to reports of detainees refusing meals in protest in California and Louisiana this week.
In many cases, detainees who express suicidal ideation are placed in solitary confinement or similar isolated settings, which are widely understood to worsen mental illness. That practice is part of a broader increase in the use of solitary confinement in detention that The Marshall Project and Univision reported on earlier this month.
In at least one case, the lack of care has also extended to an expectant mother. This week, The San Francisco Chronicle told the story of Angie Rodriguez, a 26-year-old San Jose, California, woman who discovered she was pregnant, and then miscarried while in ICE custody. Rodriguez said she received no meaningful prenatal care or dietary support, and was placed in medical isolation, which she compared to solitary confinement.
When she started to bleed, Rodriguez was “transported to the hospital in metal restraints around her wrists and ankles and connected by a waist chain,” despite ICE policy that says pregnant individuals should not be transported in restraints, according to the Chronicle. After the miscarriage, Rodriguez’s attorney filed for a temporary restraining order to secure her release. A federal judge granted it, concluding that she had been detained without cause and suffered irreparable harm.
Rodriguez is home now, but for others, a judge’s order is increasingly not enough to actually leave detention.
In early July, the Trump administration issued a new interpretation of key provisions of immigration law, asserting that most people who enter the country undocumented are ineligible for bond hearings in the lead-up to final removal proceedings. In cases where detainees have convinced immigration judges that this interpretation is wrong, the administration has used another maneuver: “automatic stay.”
Adopted in 2001, “automatic stay” allows the government to postpone release on bond for 90 days, and often to extend it even further. Historically, it has been considered a tool for “limited” use in specific circumstances — such as for a flight risk or someone who presented national security concerns. But the Trump administration has dramatically expanded the ways this stay is applied.
The unilateral nature of the move has deeply troubled many legal scholars and judges, Politico reported. “Automatic stay is a violent distortion of proper, legitimate process whereby the Government, as though by talisman, renders itself at once prosecutor and adjudicator,” a Maryland district judge wrote in a recent opinion.
Bond recipients aren’t the only detainees to receive a favorable ruling from a court, only to remain locked up. This week, Mother Jones reported on cases in which people are granted a “withholding of removal” by a judge — essentially a determination that a person’s home country is too dangerous for them — only for the government to keep them in detention in a bid to deport them elsewhere.
In both cases, lawyers and immigrant rights advocates have described the delays as tactics “to wear detainees down and get them to give up their fight to stay in the U.S.,” possibly to get them to attempt self-deportation, Mother Jones reported.
These aggressive tactics have pushed detention to record levels over the past few months. Nearly 60,000 people are in detention as of this week, a roughly 50% increase from before President Donald Trump took office.
That rise is not just a product of detaining more people once they are arrested; it’s also due to finding new ways to make arrests. One key method has been to seize people as they leave court. Most often, that has meant immigration court. Rodriguez, who had a miscarriage in detention, was first detained this way.
Increasingly, federal agents are making arrests at state courthouses as well. In California, state law bans immigration enforcement at courthouses, but ICE has done so anyway, often by waiting just outside the building. There is some debate over whether the language of the law prohibits this. In Oakland, ICE conducted at least one arrest inside the state courthouse last week, drawing fierce condemnation from public defenders.
Federal officials have defended the practice, saying they will arrest undocumented people wherever they can find them, and that courthouse arrests keep agents safe, since arrestees have already been screened by security to go inside.
As reported by CalMatters, critics, like the California Department of Justice, have countered that the chilling effects on court attendance “make our communities less safe by deterring victims or witnesses of crimes from coming forward out of fear of getting caught up in the President’s mass deportation dragnet.”
