Mapping 41 ICE Detention Deaths During the Second Trump Administration

41 people have died in ICE detention since January 2025. We mapped these deaths using ICE's own press releases. Here's what the data shows and why Congress needs to act.

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 41 people have died in ICE detention. Twelve of those deaths have occurred since January 1, a rate of roughly one every six days. With this alarming pace of ICE detention deaths, it’s crucial that the public is able to see and understand this data in a way that will inform action and accountability. One way to do that is to take free text, in this case press releases, and turn it into structured data that can be mapped, visualized, analyzed, and communicated clearly. That is a core part of the data science research that Adam Sawyer and I do together, and this post is a first step toward making these deaths increasingly visible.

No death should be taken lightly, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Rather than investigating the alarming rate of deaths in its custody, this administration has downplayed and ignored these deaths. The press releases ICE publishes to announce these deaths are written in language that shifts blame onto the people who died, framing them primarily through their immigration violations and criminal histories while avoiding any suggestion of institutional responsibility or accountability.

Accountability begins with awareness, and what we want to share here is a first iteration of an interactive map of detention deaths, with enough information that readers can click into each facility and see the names, ages, nationalities, and dates of death for the people who died there. This is very much a beta version of a map, but, we hope, useful for now. We plan to refine and expand it, and integrate it into DetentionReports.com but we wanted to get this initial view out now given the urgency of the issue. We also have a longer history of detention deaths before this administration, which we’ll include over time.

The data for this map comes directly from ICE’s own press releases. ICE publishes a press release for each death that occurs in its custody. We archived all 44 of these press releases published between January 2025 and March 2026 and used them as the source for the details of each death, including names, nationalities, ages, and the specific facilities where individuals were last detained.

Of the 44 press releases, we excluded three from the final count. Jose Castro-Rivera, a Honduran national, died after fleeing ICE custody and being struck by a vehicle on a highway. Because he was not in detention at the time of his death, we did not include him. We also excluded Norlan Guzman-Fuentes and Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez, who were killed by a sniper who opened fire on the ICE field office in Dallas. Their deaths, while tragic and while they occurred in an ICE facility, were the result of an external act of violence rather than conditions of detention. This leaves 41 deaths that occurred while individuals were fully in ICE custody or in medical facilities to which they had been transferred from detention.

The map shows the last known detention facility for each individual. Of the 41 people in this dataset, only 12 actually died while physically inside of a detention facility. The remaining 29 were transferred to hospitals or other medical facilities before their deaths, which means that from a spatialization perspective, we have a choice of two locations with which to associate each death. For this map, we mapped each death to the facility where the person was last detained, not the hospital where they ultimately died. In a few cases where multiple facilities are located near one another, we grouped them into a single region on the map to avoid overlapping markers at the national scale. South Florida, for example, represents eight deaths across four distinct facilities in the Miami area, including Krome, the Broward Transitional Center, the Federal Detention Center Miami, and Larkin Community Hospital. The same approach applies to El Paso and the NYC region. The individual facility for each death is still noted in the marker details.

An important caveat: this data is drawn directly from ICE press releases, and we have already found examples where the official press releases appear to be inaccurate or incomplete. We are also gathering additional data sources to cross-reference and verify these records. A larger dataset that Adam and I have built from the press releases includes additional information such as the stated cause of death for each individual, the specific medical facilities where people died, and other details. We plan to include this expanded dataset in an upcoming update to DetentionReports.com, where the public can see more information about the detained population at each facility over time as well as a growing list of various types of data, including detention contracts when available.

In the meantime, if you see anything on this map that is clearly inaccurate or incomplete, or if you have additional resources or information that should be included, please share them in the comments.

You can visit the interactive map created on Felt.com below.

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