32 People Died in ICE Custody in 2025...and Nothing Happened

Yesterday, the nation saw ICE shoot a woman in the face for no reason, beginning 2026 with more violence. In 2025, at least 32 people died while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, according to a year-end accounting by The Guardian and corroborated by ICE’s own death notices and major news reporting. That total ties the highest annual death toll in modern ICE detention history, last reached in 2004. It is not an estimate. It is not advocacy math. It is the government’s own record, assembled one death notice at a time.

Say their names. Genry Donaldo Ruiz-Guillen. Serawit Gezahegn Dejene. Maksym Chernyak. Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez. Brayan Rayo-Garzon. Nhon Ngoc Nguyen. Marie Ange Blaise. Abelardo Avelleneda-Delgado. Jesus Molina-Veya. Johnny Noviello. Isidro Perez. Tien Xuan Phan. Chaofeng Ge. Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas. Oscar Rascon Duarte. Ismael Ayala-Uribe. Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir. Dalvin Francisco Rodriguez. Nenko Stanev Gantchev. These are not case numbers or policy outcomes. They are people who entered federal custody alive and did not leave it that way. Their deaths were documented in hospital transfers, county jail reports, and short ICE press releases that arrived only after families were already grieving.

Most of those who died in 2025 did not die violently. They died of medical emergencies, untreated or poorly treated chronic conditions, complications worsened by detention, and, in several cases, suicide. Many were transferred to hospitals only after their conditions deteriorated. Others were found unresponsive inside facilities that have been criticized for years for inadequate medical staffing and delayed emergency care.

This is not incidental. It is structural.

ICE detention is civil, not criminal. The people held in these facilities are not serving sentences. Many have never been convicted of a crime. They are detained for administrative purposes while immigration cases proceed. Under U.S. law, that distinction carries an obligation — when the government deprives someone of liberty, it assumes an affirmative duty to provide reasonable care. When people die under that care, responsibility does not vanish simply because the cause of death is listed as “natural” or “medical.”

ICE’s response has been consistent. The agency says every death is reviewed. It points to rising detention numbers. It disputes claims of systemic failure. The Department of Homeland Security has accused critics of “twisting data” to smear the agency.

But data does not twist itself.

What distinguishes 2025 is not only the number of deaths, but how little institutional response followed. Thirty-two people died without emergency congressional hearings, without a moratorium on detention expansion, without meaningful reform. Each death was treated as isolated, even as the cumulative total quietly reached a historic peak. This is how institutional harm becomes durable: not through a single scandal, but through repetition without consequence.

Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025. That is not an abstraction. It is a warning. And the longer it is treated as background noise rather than a demand for accountability, the more likely it is to happen again.