At least 20 people have died in Donald Trump’s concentration camp network as of Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced. Sixty-three-year-old Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, a Mexican national, was unconscious when guards found him the night of June 19 at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, Texas, a facility CoreCivic runs. Staff sent him to the Laredo Medical Center, where he died less than an hour later.
ICE listed no cause of death, saying only that an autopsy is pending. The agency also failed to include any other information about Alcorta-Rodriguez beyond its allegation that he skipped a court date for driving drunk in 2018, and was once arrested for improperly disposing of a lead-acid battery. As the agency typically does in death notices, it said that Alcorta-Rodriguez was provided with “safe, secure, and humane environments,” provided “comprehensive” medical care including dental and mental health care, and “at no time during detention” was denied emergency care.
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Family members, elected officials, and multiple organizations say those claims are lies. They say immigrant prisoners in detention camps are routinely denied medical attention, sometimes as retaliation for protesting the deadly conditions, and that the physical environment is so unsanitary that it has touched off outbreaks of tuberculosis and other diseases. Conditions are so inhumane that they have led ten men to kill themselves since Trump retook the White House, according to a recent Associated Press investigation.
A database of ICE-related deaths maintained by staff at the Prospect shows that at least 58 people have now died in immigration detention since January 2025. The actual death toll is likely worse. Many independent organizations are tracking ICE-related deaths; numbers may differ because methodologies differ.
The Trump administration is detaining a record number of people, the vast majority of whom have no criminal record, as part of its mass deportation terror campaign. Led by radical right White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Republicans intend to kick a million people out of the country each year, and have made three massive allocations of tax dollars to ICE and Customs and Border Protection to do so. After their initial $170 billion, which already made the agencies better funded than any military outside of China or America, Republicans then followed up with another $70 billion and a proposal to add $28.4 billion more, as my colleague Ryan Cooper pointed out. For a comparison, that is slightly more than Spain’s entire government budget and twice as much as Thailand’s.
The administration is spending some of the money on an increasing number of immigration agents, who have wreaked havoc in well-publicized so-called “surges” in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, as well as elsewhere, farther away from national media, such as in Tennessee. Agents also continue to detain people at their scheduled immigration court hearings in New York. On Thursday, they detained one immigrant at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza and another at 290 Broadway, court-watchers said. That’s despite a judge’s order specifically barring them from detaining people in New York immigration courts, and a subsequent one on Tuesday that applied nationwide.
There are now more than 71,000 people in immigration detention, 77 percent more than there were in January 2025.
But the increased number of people is only partly responsible for the increased number of deaths, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW). While the number of people in detention increased 77 percent, the number of annual deaths more than tripled, researchers found, “resulting in a 138 percent increase in the annualized mortality rate per 10,000 detainees.”
The deaths suggest violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which obligates states to protect the lives of those in custody, HRW found. Researchers also noted that poor detention conditions and inadequate medical care can also constitute violations of both the international covenant and the Convention Against Torture, which prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment.
Brian Root, senior adviser of HRW’s Digital Investigations Lab and co-author of the report, told the Prospect that it is difficult to say exactly why so many people are dying in Trump’s camp network because ICE is failing to provide consistent and complete information about those who die. One factor could be that there are too few staff members for the increased number of prisoners, which he said qualitative interviews indicated. But it’s impossible to say for sure. Researchers also faced limited and inconsistent information about each person who died, forcing them to gather information from family members and attorneys. As a result, the group can’t say definitively how many deaths could have been preventable.
“But what we are seeing are lots of red flags that indicate that the proper emergency care wasn’t provided, that staff were slow to react, and that there was not the right type of staff on board or that they didn’t escalate quickly enough,” Root said.
Ukrainian national Maksym Chernyak, for example, was 44 when he died at the Krome North Service Processing Center in Florida. He entered on February 2, 2025, and over the next 18 days showed symptoms of a hemorrhagic stroke, which should have prompted staff to call an ambulance immediately. Instead, they waited for hours, and by the time he arrived at the hospital, he was brain-dead.
In another case, 42-year-old Honduran national Santos Banegas Reyes showed clear signs of alcohol withdrawal after he was detained in the Nassau County Correctional Center on September 17, 2025. Guards provided no treatment, and he died of liver failure less than 24 hours after entering custody.
Forty-five-year-old Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, an Ethiopian national, died on January 29, 2025, of full-blown AIDS, Root said, an illness people rarely die from in the U.S. anymore. But at Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, he received no care for the HIV he entered with in August 2024 and was repeatedly misdiagnosed, including with “probable lymphoma,” when what he really had was tuberculosis. He quickly deteriorated, and after he died an autopsy found he died from AIDS, tapeworm, pneumonia, and multiple other untreated diseases. Root said his body had been covered with lesions, a torturous death.
Even after detainees died, staff failed them. When people killed themselves by hanging, for example, “there were some cases where the guards just sometimes left them hanging,” Root said.
“The biggest point I want to get across is the idea that controlling for the change in enforcement doesn’t account for the increase in deaths and that the trend is not getting any better,” Root said. “It’s still peaking. Things have gotten worse in 2026.”
According to NBC yesterday, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would conduct two new reviews related to how ICE handles its immigrant prisoners: one to address the increased deaths and the other to address use-of-force standards. The report said the information was contained in an announcement on the inspector general’s website. The announcement was not on the website’s press release section by midafternoon.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not answer the Prospect’s questions and instead said that for many detainees, the medical care ICE provides in ICE custody is “the best healthcare they have received their entire lives,” and that “being in detention is a choice.” CoreCivic, the company that runs the Laredo site, likewise failed to respond to an email seeking comment.
