Denny Adan Gonzalez is the 18th Reported ICE Detention Death of 2026

Denny Adan Gonzalez, a 33-year-old man from Cuba, died on April 28 at the Stewart Detention Center in rural Georgia in a suspected suicide.

Denny Adan Gonzalez, a 33-year-old man from Cuba, died on April 28, 2026, at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, according to an ICE press release published today. He is the 18th person to die in ICE custody since January 1, 2026, and the 48th person to die in federal immigration custody during the current Trump administration. He is also the fourth person from Cuba to die during this administration, and two of those four deaths have come in the last sixteen days.

As with the previous death, I first read about this one when Andrew Free reported it in his Detention Kills newsletter.

Breaking: 18th ICE Detention Death Confirmed

The math on the pace continues to be what it has been, with a small downward shift. January 1 to April 28 is 117 days. Eighteen deaths over 117 days works out to one death every 6.5 days, still close to the every-six-days threshold that has held all year. If 2026 holds this pace through December, ICE will report roughly 56 deaths by year’s end. For context, 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention in more than two decades, with 32 deaths. We are four months into 2026 and already more than halfway there.

All of this is happening as Congress moves to give ICE significantly more money. The House voted yesterday to adopt the Senate-approved budget resolution that would unlock new ICE funding, the first step in a Republican plan to end the DHS shutdown by expanding immigration enforcement without meaningful improvements in oversight.

The facility where Gonzalez died has long been one of the most scrutinized sites in the immigrant detention system, and according to the latest data from Detention Reports, Stewart Detention Center now holds the largest immigrant detention population of any facility in the country. (I wrote recently about the updated Detention Reports website.) Stewart, with an official capacity of 1,752 beds, is operated by CoreCivic, the country’s largest private prison company, in rural Lumpkin, Georgia— roughly 140 miles southwest of Atlanta. Its remoteness from immigration attorneys, family members, and outside observers has been the subject of years of criticism from groups including the Southern Poverty Law Center, Project South, and El Refugio, which runs a hospitality house and visitation program for families traveling to the facility. Gonzalez is the second person to die at Stewart under the current administration; Jesus Molina-Veya, a 45-year-old man from Mexico, died there in June 2025.

Gonzalez’s death also adds to Georgia’s growing share of detention deaths under this administration. Four of the 48 deaths have now occurred in Georgia: Heber Sanchaz Domínguez at Robert A. Deyton in Lovejoy (January 2026), Jesus Molina-Veya at Stewart (June 2025), an in-transit death of a Stewart-bound detainee in May 2025, and now Gonzalez at Stewart. Together with Florida’s nine deaths and Texas’s nine, the three southern states account for nearly half of all in-custody deaths since January 2025.z

Stewart Detention Center. Author’s photo.

Thankfully, some members of Congress are still doing what they can to inspect facilities and surface what they find. I sat down with Rep. Mike Levin recently to discuss what he has seen on his facility visits. Last month, he and Representative Sara Jacobs toured the CoreCivic-run Otay Mesa Detention Center after receiving reports of medication shortages, poor food, and problems accessing medical records. I invited him on to talk about what he saw, what Congress is doing about it, and what he thinks comes next. You can watch the full conversation below.

Other lawmakers are doing the same: Rep. Dan Goldman’s inspection of the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn revealed that half the ICE detainees held there had no criminal record. Where members of Congress can’t get in, journalists and government reviewers are picking up some of the slack. A recent New York Times review of Camp East Montana, the Texas facility where two people have died this year, documented dozens of conditions violations, and NOTUS reporters interviewed detained men at that same facility who said guards denied them laundry and medication. Access isn’t always granted: the Associated Press reported just this week that Geo Group refused to let Washington state health inspectors into one of its detention facilities at all.

There is also a growing body of reporting on what happens to families after a death in ICE custody. Kate Morrissey recently followed the family of an Afghan war ally who died in Dallas ICE custody as they continue to push for answers about what caused his death. Camilo Montoya-Galvez at CBS News covered the funeral of Royer Perez-Jimenez, a 19-year-old Mexican teenager who died in Florida ICE custody in March; his family says the criminal charges that led to his detention were fabricated. And Armando Quesada Webb of El País documented the case of a Costa Rican man held by ICE for ten months before being deported by air ambulance in a vegetative state; he died at home weeks later.

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 recently joined Emma Vigeland on The Majority Report to discuss detention deaths, the for-profit detention pipeline, and deportation numbers more broadly.

Any of the charts or data from this post are free to use with attribution, no need to reach out first. If you reach out with questions or support related to immigration data analysis presented here, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

A running table of detained deaths during the current Trump administration is below.