UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project Unveils New Category of Data: Deaths in ICE Custody

Today, the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project is launching a comprehensive, searchable database of deaths in ICE custody. This first-of-its-kind database was created in partnership with journalist and attorney Andrew Free.

The dataset provides journalists, lawmakers, researchers, and the public with unprecedented insight into the nearly 300 deaths in ICE custody that have occurred since the agency’s establishment in 2003. Datapoints include the name, age, date, location, and other essential details about each person who died while detained by ICE. Whenever possible, we provide links to official ICE records that offer more background about each case.

The data were collected by Andrew Free and verified, cleaned, and analyzed by the Behind Bars Data Project team. Free gathered information from a variety of sources, including public-records requests, ICE death reports and press releases, and media reports.

Since 2018, Congress has required ICE to provide public notification within 48 hours of each death occurring in its custody, and to follow that notification with a detailed report on the circumstances of the death. However, these reports lack consistent formatting and are not easily searchable, making it difficult to analyze patterns in the data.  BBDP standardized Free’s data collated from ICE reports and other sources so that deaths may be easily analyzed and compared over time.

This data release coincides with a period of rapid growth in the number of people held in ICE detention. Since Donald Trump took office last year, the population in ICE custody on any given day has increased by 75 percent. Over this period, ICE has expanded its detention network to include at least 104 new detention facilities, and plans to further expand its detention capacity,  including by buying up industrial warehouses for conversion to detention centers. ICE’s recent budget increase allocated $45 billion for immigration detention over the next four years, signaling the likelihood of a continued increase in the number of people detained by the agency.

As the number of detentions has risen, so too has the number of deaths. Last year, 31 people died in ICE custody—the highest number since 2004, when 32 people died.  Deaths in ICE custody have been in the single digits almost every year since 2010, except for a brief spike during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The raw numbers in the data set may seem low year-by-year, especially when compared to the numbers of deaths counted in the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project’s dataset of prison deaths. However, at any given time, far fewer people are held in ICE custody than in state and federal prisons, which collectively incarcerate over 1.2 million people. The population in our ICE dataset also skews young—over 100 of the people in the data set died before age 40. And research and reporting on the conditions in ICE facilities strongly suggest that the vast majority of deaths in ICE custody were preventable.

Conditions in ICE detention facilities were the subject of public scrutiny even before the unprecedented increase in ICE detention during the first year of the second Trump administration. Medical staffing at the facilities has long been inadequate. A recent report published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine by a team that included UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project staff found that many immigration detention facilities do not have enough onsite healthcare staff to meet immigrants’ healthcare needs. These medical vacancies appear already to have had dire consequences: a 2024 report by Physicians for Human Rights and the ACLU found that as many as 95 percent of deaths in ICE custody between 2018 and 2021 (a period that included the height of the COVID pandemic)  could have been prevented with adequate medical care.

The deaths recorded in this new dataset represent the minimum number of people to have died in the immigration detention system, but the true number is almost certainly higher. Because of gaps in ICE death reporting requirements, BBDP’s  dataset does not include people who may have died while detained but who were never formally entered into the ICE detention system (for example, because they were held on a detainer in a local jail and had not yet been formally transferred to ICE custody). The data also does not include people who died while in the custody of Customs and Border Protection, nor does it include people who were killed during encounters with ICE but who had not yet been arrested and booked into a locked facility pursuant to ICE authority. Finally, ICE is not required to report when people die shortly after release from ICE custody, including those released for medical concerns, and so those deaths are not included in the dataset.

The full BBDP validated dataset is available for download on GitHub. The UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project will continue its work to bring transparency to deaths in carceral facilities. In a time of increasing government secrecy, our work is more important than ever.