Adelanto, Krome, Camp East Montana and Winn Correctional lead a doubling-plus rise in ICE detention deaths in 2025-2026

Summary

Deaths in ICE custody have risen sharply and are on pace to keep rising: 33 deaths in calendar 2025 (the most since ICE began systematically tracking in 2004), and at least 27 more through late September 2026 — already close to matching last year's full-year total with three months left to go. Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights count 52 deaths in the first 500 days of the second Trump administration (Jan 20, 2025–Jun 4, 2026), and a JAMA study puts the current in-custody mortality rate at roughly seven times the FY2023 level. No single facility accounts for a dominant share, but a handful of facilities recur repeatedly in the death toll: Adelanto ICE Processing Center (California) and Krome North Service Processing Center (Miami) each have at least 4 reported deaths since January 2025; Camp East Montana (the Fort Bliss, Texas tent camp that opened in August 2025) and Winn Correctional Center (Louisiana) each have 3, including one death at Camp East Montana ruled a homicide by the El Paso County medical examiner. Investigators (HRW, the California Attorney General, CNN) attribute the trend to a combination of a much larger and sicker detained population, chronic and in some cases worsening medical understaffing, a policy shift away from releasing elderly or seriously ill detainees, and the dismantling of DHS oversight offices — not simply population growth, since the mortality rate rose far faster than the population did.

What AskAmerica's government-data corpus could and could not answer

search_catalog was queried for "ICE immigration detention deaths custody facility" against all ~420 tables in this corpus (SEC, Census, BLS/BEA, FBI UCR/crime, CDC/CMS health, DHS-adjacent transport and lands schemas, etc.). It returned zero table or column matches for the terms "immigration," "detention," or "custody" — this corpus has no ICE, DHS detention, or facility-level custody-death table at all. find_recipe was also checked (topic: immigration detention facility deaths trend) and returned no applicable worked pattern — this is a genuine sourcing gap, not a query failure: DHS/ICE detainee death reporting is not part of any federal statistical release this corpus ingests (it comes from ICE's own case-by-case newsroom disclosures and FOIA'd detention-standards compliance reports, not a structured public dataset). The rest of this report is built entirely from primary ICE disclosures, oversight-body reports, and news investigations that compiled and cross-checked those disclosures, read directly via fetch rather than summarized secondhand.

Which facilities have had the most deaths / serious medical incidents

This is a compiled tally from Wikipedia's sourced chronological list (itself built on ICE's own required disclosures) cross-checked against CNN's and HRW's independent case reporting, not an ICE-published ranking — ICE does not publish a facility-level death or serious-incident league table. Deaths at facilities with only 1 confirmed case (Federal Detention Center Miami, Glades County, Florence Correctional Center AZ, North Lake Processing Center MI, Moshannon Valley PA, Delaney Hall NJ, Prairieland TX, Montgomery Processing Center TX, South Texas ICE Processing Center, Robert A. Deyton GA, Webb County TX, Ste. Genevieve County Jail MO, and others) are omitted from the table but listed in the sources.

Has it gotten worse? Yes, and the rate rose faster than the population

Raw counts: ICE-custody deaths ran roughly 8–11 per year from 2021 through 2024. That jumped to 33 in 2025 (the highest calendar-year total in the more than two decades ICE has tracked this) and at least 27 through September 22, 2026 — already on pace to exceed 2025.

It's not just a bigger population. The detained population did grow substantially, from about 39,000 in December 2024 to over 68,000–71,000 by early 2026 (a 70%+ increase), so some rise in raw deaths would be mechanically expected. But Human Rights Watch found the mortality rate — deaths per detainee — rose about 140% from January 2025 to January 2026 versus the prior year, far outpacing the population increase, and is now roughly 4x the Biden-era rate, 2.5x the first Trump-administration rate, and higher than the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. A JAMA-published study (cited independently by CNN) put the current annualized rate at about 88.9 deaths per 100,000 detained, versus a rate about 7 times lower in FY2023.

Documented drivers, per HRW/PHR, the California Attorney General's 2026 facility inspections, and CNN's medical-examiner-record investigation: (1) rescission of Obama/Biden-era guidance favoring release of elderly or seriously ill detainees, replaced by a July 2025 ICE directive to detain people "for the duration of their removal proceedings" with release now requiring sign-off from the ICE director; (2) medical staffing that in several facilities (Adelanto, Imperial) did not keep pace with population surges — in Adelanto's case, fewer full-time physicians in 2025 at 2,000+ detainees than in 2021 at fewer than 100; (3) an aging, sicker detained population — about 2,500 people 65+ were booked into detention in Trump's first year back versus roughly 800 in Biden's last year, and GEO Group's CEO acknowledged on an earnings call the population is "more sickly" than historically; (4) a lapse in ICE's medical-reimbursement claims processing after the VA ended a longstanding third-party arrangement in October 2025, not expected to be fully restored until April 2026; and (5) the dismantling of DHS's independent oversight offices that previously investigated neglect and mistreatment (later ordered restored by a federal court, but facing further legal challenges over understaffing).

Non-death serious medical incidents are documented but not centrally tallied anywhere ICE publishes: state inspectors (California AG) found "crisis-level health care understaffing" at multiple facilities and routine failures to screen or refer chronically/acutely ill detainees for care; a Senate investigation led by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) documented lack of access to prescribed medications, mistreatment of pregnant detainees, malnutrition/dehydration, and abuse across multiple facilities; and measles outbreaks tied to overcrowding were reported at facilities in Arizona and at Camp East Montana in Texas in early 2026.

Caveats

• Every count in this report undercounts the true total by ICE's own admitted standard: HRW/PHR found ICE's public death reports too sparse in all 39 cases reviewed to fully assess whether care was adequate, and separate ACLU litigation documents a pattern of ICE releasing dying detainees shortly before death specifically to avoid counting them as in-custody deaths.
• DHS disputes the trend characterization: a DHS spokesperson told CNN the death rate is "0.009% of the detained population" and that there has been no spike, calling detention-facility care better than what many detainees "received their entire lives." That figure is a snapshot rate, not adjusted for time-at-risk the way the JAMA/HRW mortality-rate calculations are, so it is not a like-for-like rebuttal of the rate comparisons above.
• Facility names in ICE and news reporting are sometimes inconsistent (e.g., a detainee may be listed as dying at a hospital rather than the detention facility that held them before transfer); the facility tally above attributes each death to the detention facility of custody at onset of the medical emergency, per the cited sources' own attribution, not to the hospital of death.

What This Report Does Not Answer

• Identify which facilities have had the most serious medical incidents (not just deaths) in custody recently: ICE does not publish a structured, facility-level count of non-fatal serious medical incidents. Qualitative evidence of serious medical incidents/understaffing at specific facilities (Adelanto, Imperial, Camp East Montana, and others named in CA AG inspections and the Ossoff report) is reported in the 'Has it gotten worse' section, but no facility-level incident counts exist to rank against each other the way deaths were rankable.