Haitian Asylum Seeker Dies of Toothache in What ICE Calls "The Best Healthcare of Their Lives"
Detention deaths are a foreseeable outcome of specific policy choices made by people in position of power. This post steps back to think through the broader trends and steps toward accountability.
In my post from barely an hour ago on the reported death of Alberto Gutierrez in ICE custody, I noted the shockingly callous remark at the bottom of that press release which reads: “This [ICE detention] is the best healthcare than [sic] many aliens have received in their entire lives.” No sooner had I sent that announcement than I received reports of yet another detained death—and this time, it was a death that started with a toothache.
Emmanuel Damas, a 56-year-old Haitian asylum seeker held at the Florence Correctional Center in Arizona, died Monday at a hospital in Scottsdale, Arizona. According to reporting by Emily Bregel at the Arizona Daily Star and KTAR News, he had been complaining of a toothache for weeks before he collapsed. According to Chandler City Councilwoman Christine Ellis, a registered nurse who spoke with Damas’ family, Damas first reported his toothache to Florence staff on February 12 and was given ibuprofen. His family says he complained for nearly two weeks before collapsing and developing sepsis from the infection. Family members also told Ellis that another detainee reported hearing Florence staff laughing and saying Damas was faking as he cried for help. He was transferred to a Scottsdale hospital last week and died Monday. ICE had not officially acknowledged the death as of Wednesday morning.
There is no way to reconcile the claim that ICE detention provides the best healthcare many detainees have ever received with what Emmanuel Damas experienced in the weeks before he died. Whatever standard of care the administration believes it is providing, it is not one that saved Emmanuel Damas from dying of a toothache. The gap between the official rhetoric and what is actually happening inside these facilities demands more serious investigation by Congress.
On a day like today, with two back-to-back announcements about detained deaths, it feels appropriate to step back and remind ourselves of what’s at stake and why people are dying. I include data on total detained deaths and data on the recent population spike at Florence, but I want to emphasize the larger issue here first. The gap between this administration’s official rhetoric and the conditions that actually prevail inside ICE detention facilities is a structural feature of how this enforcement regime legitimates itself, and it’s worth interrogating in greater detail.1
When the DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs asserts through official channels that ICE detention provides the best healthcare many detainees have ever received, that claim does not merely describe a policy reality or a policy aspiration. It actively forecloses accountability by reframing systemic neglect as institutional generosity. What Damas experienced in the weeks before his death, as reported by his family and relayed through local elected officials, is not a one-off experience. At this point, it’s a well-documented pattern in which complaints go unaddressed, suffering is dismissed or mocked, and transfer to emergency medical care comes only after immigrants’ bodies have already begun to fail.
What connects cases like Damas’ to the broader trajectory of immigration enforcement under this administration is a logic in which the lives of detained people are rendered administratively expendable, not through explicit policy, but through the cumulative weight of underfunded facilities, inadequate oversight, profit-driven detention contracts, and a public posture that treats any scrutiny of in-custody deaths as political rather than humanitarian.
And it’s not new. I have written about this before, as have many others. The social and political construction of migrants as expendable has deep roots that long predate this administration.
In a 2021 post, To Make Live and Let Die: How Our Immigration System Treats Migrants’ Lives as Expendable, I wrote about Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as a framework for understanding how immigration systems expose certain populations to death not through direct state violence but through the systematic withdrawal of the conditions that sustain life, a dynamic I traced through both border deaths and the quieter, less visible deaths of immigrants waiting for their paperwork to be processed inside the United States. That post was picked up by Mother Jones reporter Isabela Diaz, who turned it into a reported article: Murder, Heart Attacks, Suicide, COVID — Immigrants Are Dying in America's Waiting Room.
In a 2022 post, The Precarious Life of the Migrant, following the deaths of 51 migrants in a truck in Texas and 23 migrants at the border of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Northern Africa, I returned to Judith Butler’s concept of precarious life to argue that migrant death is not an aberration but an epiphenomenon, a logical consequence of how borders are designed and how the lives of people in motion are politically devalued. I also argued that border securitization, which has ramped up globally since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is predicated upon a certain minimal and unavoidable amount of migrant death, and that this is not an unforeseeable consequence but one that governments in both North America and Europe have at times deliberately mobilized as a migration deterrent. The deaths accumulating inside ICE detention facilities in 2026 are the ongoing—if worsening—expression of the same underlying logic.
And in a 2024 post, 15 Years of Data on Migrant Deaths in the El Paso Border Patrol Sector Now Available, examining fifteen years of migrant death data compiled by No More Deaths, I drew on geographer Melissa Wright’s concept of disposability to describe how migrants are rendered invisible twice over, once in life and once in death. Scholars and advocates have long understood that borders are deadly, and that the enforcement infrastructure built up around physical borders exposes migrants to heightened risk of injury, illness, and death. But what the interior expansion of immigration enforcement under this administration is making clear is that the geography of that risk is no longer confined to the desert or the river. As enforcement extends deeper into cities, workplaces, courthouses, and now detention facilities hundreds of miles from any border, the conditions of precarity that were once concentrated at the frontier are being generalized across the entire country. The deaths accumulating in ICE detention in 2026 are not border deaths in the traditional sense. They are what border enforcement looks like when it has been scaled to the interior, and when the populations it targets have no meaningful recourse to basic lifesaving care that the agency is supposed to provide.
The pace of deaths in 2026 is not an accidental statistic, and it is not simply the result of bad luck or unforeseeable medical emergencies. One of the ways that institutional negligence covers its tracks is by ensuring that no single death can be easily traced back to a single decision or a single person. But the inability to identify a direct perpetrator in any given case is not the same as the absence of responsibility. Behind every one of these deaths is a set of policy decisions made by people with names and titles and the power to have chosen differently. The deaths are, in that sense, not unpredictable. They are the predictable outcome of predictable decisions, and the people who made those decisions bear responsibility for what has followed. I don’t understand all of the mechanisms of what true accountability looks like for these people, but Congress needs to do its job and provide real oversight, transparency, and accountability.
As I discussed with Claire Trickler-McNulty just yesterday, it’s not even clear that ICE needs this massive detention system—even on its own terms. The decision to detain everyone everywhere all the time is not supported by data and many viable and effective alternates exist but they go almost entirely ignored and unfunded by Congress and the agency. Listen to that conversation here if you’re interested in a deep-dive into alternatives to mass detention.
As promised, let’s return to the data. The graph below, from DetentionReports.com, shows the recent population trend at Florence Correctional Center, operated by the for-profit company CoreCivic. As of early February, the facility held an average daily population of 606 people, up markedly from the prior two weeks. Did this recent spike contribute to worsening medical services? I would like to know more.
You can find a sortable table of all people who died in ICE custody during the second Trump administration, and additional deaths as a result of ICE activity below.
The following people were killed by federal immigration agents outside of detention during the Trump administration and are not included in the table above.
Jaime Alanis Garcia — Killed July 10, 2025, during a farm raid in Camarillo, California, while fleeing ICE agents. (The Guardian)
Josué Castro Rivera, 25, Honduras — Struck by traffic on Interstate 264 in Norfolk, Virginia, on October 23, 2025, while fleeing ICE agents before being taken into custody. (Associated Press)
Norlan Guzman-Fuentes, 37, El Salvador, and Miguel Ángel García Medina, 31, Mexico — Both killed September 24, 2025, when a civilian gunman opened fire on a government van outside the ICE field office in Dallas, Texas. While in ICE custody at the time, their deaths resulted from an act of targeted violence rather than enforcement actions or conditions of detention. (CBS News)
Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, U.S. citizen — Fatally shot by an ICE officer on South Padre Island, Texas, on March 15, 2025, while agents were assisting local police at a traffic scene. The federal government’s involvement was not initially disclosed. (KUT)
Renée Nicole Macklin Good, 37, U.S. citizen — Fatally shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, while in her vehicle during a large immigration enforcement operation. (CNN)
Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, U.S. citizen — Shot and killed by two Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026, while observing and directing traffic during enforcement operations. (NPR)
I had written much of this in preparing for my post this morning, but decided to “cut it for time”, as they say. But with this second death announcement, I really do feel like we need more than just bad news, we need ways of critically processing these tragedies not just as one-off events, but as part of systemic patterns that—if I may say so—a lot of us have been studying and theorizing about and warning about for a long time, and which many Americans are only now comprehending. So hopefully this longer conceptual post is helpful and also shows that, hey, this is not a surprise; we knew this was coming. Now we need people to use their newfound awareness of this issue to actually change things.
How condescending and presumptuous, not to say inhumane, to believe the ICE healthcare is the best that immigrants, or "aliens [!]," have received in their entire lifetime.
I stared 40 years of work with migrants in south Texas in '86. I still count as friends many of the heroes I met there.