Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt is the 17th Reported ICE Detention Death of 2026
Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt, a 27-year-old man from Cuba, died on April 12, one day after the 16th death of the year. The pace of detention deaths holds at an average of 1 every 6 days.
Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt, a 27-year-old man from Cuba, died on April 12, 2026, at the Federal Detention Center in Miami, Florida, according to an ICE press release published yesterday. He is the 17th person to die in ICE custody since January 1, 2026, and the 47th person to die in federal immigration custody during the current Trump administration. He is also the third person from Cuba to die in ICE custody. Unless something changes dramatically, ICE is on predictable track to report 60 detention deaths by the end of the year.
I first read about the latest tragedy when Andrew Free reported this death in his Detention Kills newsletter.
Although ICE didn’t disclose it until several days later, Carbonell-Betancourt’s death came just one day after the 16th death of 2026. Alejandro Cabrera Clemente died at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana on April 11. Carbonell-Betancourt was found in his cell at FDC Miami at approximately 6:30 a.m. the next morning. I wrote earlier this week that the pace of detained deaths had held near one every 6.3 days. With a second death twenty-four hours later, it is now one every 5.9 days—still hovering very close to the every-six-days threshold that I have been tracking since the start of the year.
The facility where he died is not a typical ICE detention center. The Federal Detention Center Miami is a Bureau of Prisons facility, a federal jail used primarily to hold people in federal criminal pretrial custody. ICE contracts with BOP to detain some immigration detainees there. FDC Miami is the same facility where Canadian lawful permanent resident Johnny Noviello died in June 2025, the 10th detained death of the current administration.
Carbonell-Betancourt’s death puts Florida’s share of detention deaths into sharper relief. Nine of the 47 deaths of the current administration—19 percent—have occurred in Florida facilities, tied with Texas for the highest state total. But the geography inside each state is quite different. Texas’s nine deaths are distributed across seven facilities in four distinct regions: El Paso in the west, Karnes County and Pearsall in south Texas, Conroe north of Houston, and Alvarado south of Fort Worth. Florida’s nine deaths are concentrated almost entirely in the Miami metropolitan area. Eight of the nine occurred at facilities in Miami-Dade or Broward counties (Krome, Federal Detention Center Miami, Broward Transitional Center, and Larkin Community Hospital) with the ninth at Glades County Detention Center, roughly 85 miles northwest. Krome alone accounts for four of the nine. Measured by single-metro density, the Miami area has seen more ICE detention deaths than any other region of the country: eight deaths, or 17 percent of the administration total, in one metropolitan area.
For readers who want to go deeper on the systemic violence these numbers reflect, a few recent conversations I’ve hosted may be useful. John Washington and I sat down to discuss what we should actually call these facilities—centers, camps, or jails—and why the language we use matters. I also hosted St. John Barned-Smith and Ko Lyn Cheang of the San Francisco Chronicle for a detailed conversation about their investigation into every death in ICE custody since January 2025, which found that physicians who reviewed the records judged delayed or withheld care to be a likely factor in more than half of reviewable cases. And I joined Emma Vigeland on The Majority Report this week to discuss detention deaths, the for-profit detention pipeline, and deportation numbers more broadly.
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A running table of detained deaths during the current Trump administration is below.
I wonder what they are claiming the cause of death is.
A 27-year-old falling over dead is very suspicious. Why isn't ICE being held accountable for these deaths? Why doesn't Congress hold them accountable?