The Human Cost of Mass Detention: ICE Reports 9th Custodial Death of 2026, 38th of Trump II Administration

ICE press release for the death of Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes debuts a strikingly callous (and ungrammatical) new claim. Full table of all 38 deaths under Trump included in post.

Last Friday on February 27, ICE’s mass detention system logged its ninth detained death so far this year and the 38th¹ of the Trump II administration (see complete table at the bottom of this post). 48-year-old Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes from Mexico was being held at Adelanto ICE Processing Center after being arrested during intense ICE activity in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in early January.

Photo from GoFundMe page.

L.A. Taco News posted about Mr. Gutierrez-Reyes’s death the day after it happened in a viral Instagram post that appeared to be primarily informed by the family’s GoFundMe page. I did not write about it at the time, because I could not confirm the death with any other sources. ICE posted about Mr. Gutierrez’s death this morning. While ICE’s announcement is callously titled “Criminal illegal alien passes away in California hospital,” the family’s GoFundMe page includes a more nuanced description of the impact of Mr. Gutierrez’s death on his family:

“Alberto Gutierrez was a devoted husband, a loving father, and the main source of support for his family. On January 9th he was detained by ICE in Echo Park. On Friday, while in an ICE detention center, Alberto began to feel seriously ill. Despite his repeated requests for medical attention, he was denied the care he desperately needed. Tragically, Alberto passed away at 1 am today, leaving his wife and young son facing an unimaginable loss.

Alberto’s family is now left to navigate this heartbreaking time without the person they depended on most. The sudden loss has brought not only emotional pain but also financial hardship, as Alberto was the sole provider for his wife and son. We are raising funds to help cover his funeral expenses and to support his family as they try to manage the many challenges ahead.”

Edit March 4, 2026, 2:23 PM: The Mexican government has called for an “immediate and exhaustive” investigation.

ICE has repeatedly minimized the deaths of immigrants in detention, both through the misuse of fractional (mis)representation (see Andrew Free’s analysis) or by blaming and criminalizing the dead—which does nothing to solve the problem and surely must add to the sense of loss and indignity the families are experiencing.

ICE’s press releases typically include boilerplate language about the agency’s purported commitment to providing legally-required care, including the closing line that is widely contradicted by fact: “At no time during detention is a detained alien denied emergency care.”

But this press release contains something new. Mr. Gutierrez’s press release includes, for the first time, a statement that ICE has often said in public but has not put into writing until now: “This is the best healthcare than many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

First of all, that’s not grammatical. It should be “better…than” or “best… [no than].” Sadly, this is the quality of copy we’ve come to expect from ICE recently. But more importantly, the line reads less like official government communication and more like a social media retort finding its way into a federal press release—the kind of defensive snark that has become a hallmark of this administration's public posture toward immigrants. That it now appears in an official record about someone’s death marks something worth noting.

The facility where Mr. Gutierrez was being held, Adelanto ICE Processing Center, is a facility that has seen rapid growth since the summer of 2025 according to data from DetentionReports.com. This matters because the rapid scaling up of detention centers has hardly coincided with better care and more transparency. ICE’s own death announcements contain vague and sometimes contradictory statements about the cause of death or the legal history of the deceased. In cases like the death at the tent camp outside El Paso, only a more thorough independent investigation turned up the possibility of homicide.

You can learn more about this and other issues related to the lack of transparency in my conversation with Doug MacMillan.

Investigating ICE's Mass Detention System: A Conversation with Doug MacMillan

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)

1. In the original post, I wrote that this was the 39th death. I believe it was actually the 38th. As the section at the end shows, and as diverse reporting shows, depending on precisely on how you count detained deaths you might get slightly different numbers. I am focusing on only those cases where ICE is required to announce the death publicly for the purposes of detention reporting.