Over 30 percent of the immigrants who have died while in U.S. immigration custody or as a result of enforcement operations under President Donald Trump were Mexican nationals—more than people from any other nationality.
The Latin Times, quoting tracking data published by the Mexican daily La Jornada and provided by the Associated Press, stated that of the 58 people who have died while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or as a result of enforcement operations since the January 2025 inauguration, 18 were Mexican, which amounts to 31 percent. A previous investigation by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, which looked at 39 deaths up to early June, had also found that Mexicans made up the largest national group among the cases it had examined.
The number of deaths has increased during what has been the most deadly year in the history of ICE.
The fiscal year 2026, which concluded on September 30, witnessed 37 deaths among people in the agency’s care, as stated in a Bloomberg Law investigation referred to by the Latin Times. This is an increase over the 33 deaths in fiscal 2025 and more than three times the 11 deaths recorded in fiscal 2024, which was the last full year before Trump’s return. The agency has reported 26 deaths throughout the entire duration of the Biden presidency.
The Latin Times stated that at a congressional hearing in April, then acting Director of ICE, Todd Lyons, attributed the increasing number of deaths to detention figures reaching their highest point since the agency was founded in 2003. However, researchers believe this explanation is invalid since, although the number of people detained increased by 77 percent, the number of deaths each year more than tripled and the mortality rate among those in detention rose by 138 percent between January 2025 and January 2026, a gap which rights organizations refer to as the hallmark of systemic failure rather than simply a result of scale.
The Latin Times reported the case of Heber Sánchez Domínguez, a 34-year-old man, who died by apparent suicide at the Robert A. Deyton Detention Facility in Georgia on January 14, seven days after local deputies had arrested him for driving without a license.
In March, 19-year-old Royer Perez-Jimenez died at the Glades County Detention Center in Florida, with ICE stating that the death was a presumed suicide, making him the youngest person to die in immigration detention during Trump’s second term. A few days later, Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano, who was 36, was found to be unresponsive at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California; his family asked for explanations regarding the care that had been given to him for diabetes and hypertension, illnesses that ICE said he had been treated for every day.
The surge occurred at the same time as the withdrawal of the staff responsible for monitoring it.
As the Latin Times stated, in March 2025 hundreds of employees from the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and the CIS Ombudsman—organizations whose role it was to look into complaints and carry out audits—were suspended. Because of a government funding failure that began in late September 2025, the Office of Detention Oversight sat idle for weeks, with DHS confirming that its oversight officers had stopped working. According to the outlet’s review of ICE’s own Detainee Death Reports, the records frequently failed to include the exact vital signs, did not make clear whether the requested medical visits had taken place, and did not record any treatment that may have been given to a detainee before they died.
The same thing is true of the resources: even though the specialty medical contracts for oncology, dialysis and tuberculosis screening have been reduced, Congress has approved $45 billion for immigration detention up to the fiscal year 2029, which means that facilities are holding record numbers of people while receiving proportionally less medical care than in the past.
After receiving no substantial reply from the United States following 11 formal diplomatic protests, Mexico decided to change its approach. According to the Latin Times, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced that the government would file criminal complaints with the U.S. state prosecutors and take civil action against the private companies that operate ICE detention centers, describing the move as a shift from diplomacy to the criminal justice system. The country also sent cease-and-desist letters to the contractors, asked the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk — who has described the death toll as alarming — to carry out an investigation, and instructed its consulates to visit the facilities every day instead of once a week. “We cannot ignore the Mexicans who have died in detention centers run by private companies,” Sheinbaum stated, promising not to give up on people “whose only crime is to work honestly in the United States.”
The Department of Homeland Security has dismissed the idea of a crisis.
A spokesperson from the department said that “there has been no spike in the number of deaths” and that the death rate under the current administration is 0.008 percent of the detained population. However, as the Latin Times pointed out, that figure is a rate and not an absolute number; since the number of people detained has at various times exceeded 60,000 in fiscal 2026, even a constant rate results in a higher number of deaths than has occurred in any earlier period — a point which rights organizations and Democratic lawmakers refer to as the issue in question.
Mexicans make up the biggest group of immigrants in the country—there are about 10.9 million of them, which is 23 percent of the total number of people born outside the country as of 2023—and therefore are the ones most affected by the consequences of detention.
