ICE Detains Thousands of Immigrants in Facilities Without Adequate Healthcare, New Study Finds

In September 2022, a 39-year-old man from Nicaragua detained at ICE’s Denver Contract Detention Facility repeatedly complained to medical staff about “stabbing” pain in his right foot and leg. Each time, a nurse licensed to provide basic care took his vitals, then sent him on his way with over-the-counter pain medication and instructions to use ice packs and warm compresses.

On the morning of October 13, the man collapsed in the facility’s dayroom, “frothing from the mouth” and struggling to breathe. Less than two hours later, the man was dead. An autopsy later found that he had  died from a pulmonary embolism caused by deep vein thrombosis, a readily treatable condition that a trained provider would likely have recognized. An investigation after his death found that the facility had failed to comply with ICE’s standards for healthcare and lacked adequately credentialed medical staff onsite.

With a record number of people in immigration detention, preventable deaths in ICE custody have become more common. A recent study published in the Journal of General  Internal Medicine by a research team that included UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project staff finds that many immigration detention facilities do not have enough onsite healthcare staff to meet detained immigrants’ health needs.

The study examined staffing data for 20 ICE detention facilities in which federal government employees, not private contractors, provided healthcare, as well as the Denver Contract Detention Facility, operated by the private prison giant GEO Group. Together, these facilities housed roughly one-third of ICE’s total population during the 2020–2022 study period.

The results were clear: Most ICE facilities in the study operated without enough medical staff to provide adequate care. For the two-year period examined by the authors:

• 57 percent of the facilities went at least one month out of a year without a physician on site.
• Even though many facilities housed people with significant mental health needs, 48 percent had no psychiatrists for at least one month, and 24 percent had no behavioral health providers of any kind for a month or longer

Even when care was available, the study found that physicians working in ICE facilities were much more likely to have been formally sanctioned by state medical boards. More than 10 percent of ICE physicians identified in the study had at least one state sanction, including sanctions for prescribing medications with an expired license, practicing under the influence, and fabricating medical records. (Many states allow doctors with suspended licenses to practice in detention facilities as well as in prisons and jails.)

Unlike most prisons and jails, ICE detention facilities are subject to regular inspection to ensure that they meet high standards for medical care. Nonetheless, many facilities fail to comply with ICE regulations00152-2/fulltext), and a 2024 report by Physicians for Human Rights and American Civil Liberties Union found that as many as 95 percent of deaths in ICE custody between 2018 and 2021 could have been prevented with adequate care.

More than 70,000 people are currently detained in ICE custody, the largest population since the agency’s inception. With new congressional funding, ICE plans to expand its detention capacity this year to as high as 100,000—roughly twice as many people as ICE had in custody during the study period.

As the population balloons, it will be extremely challenging for ICE to hire enough qualified medical staff to meet the influx of new detainees. There’s little evidence that, since 2022, ICE has made progress addressing the problems highlighted in the study. In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General issued a report finding that an ICE facility near Buffalo, New York, had no onsite physician or dentist for a population of more than 700 individuals.

In October, as deaths in ICE custody approached record highs, Politico reported that ICE had posted dozens of job openings for healthcare positions, including physicians, nurses, psychiatrists, pharmacists, and health administrators.

This is not a new problem for ICE, which has long struggled with high vacancy rates for medical positions. A 2021 report by the DHS Inspector General found that more than a third of health positions were vacant. The report blamed lengthy background checks, geographically isolated facilities, and the reluctance of many healthcare workers to practice in detention settings. High vacancies for healthcare positions plague detention facilities beyond the immigration setting as well; last month, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) reported that more than a third of its behavioral health positions remained vacant, even as the agency is conscripting prison psychologists to work guard duty to fill gaps created by the BOP’s longstanding understaffing crisis.

Medical staffing shortages are not typically included in the data publicly reported by ICE detention facilities, or by carceral settings in general. This lack of transparency on a vital health and safety measure has hindered researchers’ and legislators’ ability to understand the impact of staff vacancies on morbidity and mortality in immigration detention as well as the criminal justice system.

Last year, ICE eliminated hundreds of staff from its internal oversight units responsible for enforcing civil rights violations, with DHS leadership calling the congressionally mandated oversight bodies “internal adversaries that slow down operations.” In October, the agency furloughed staff responsible for mandatory facility inspections, creating backlogs that may take months to resolve.

Without adequate oversight and transparency, it’s likely that many preventable deaths will continue to go unnoticed.