eCornell "Immigration will be a key issue in 2025. Everyone agrees that we have a broken immigration system, but people disagree on the solutions. Congress is paralyzed. Presidents try executive...
Prof. Kevin Shih, Sept. 17, 2024 "This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Trade NAFTA (TN) classification program, which was established in 1994 under the North American Free Trade Agreement...
Fritznel D. Octave, Haitian Times, Oct. 10, 2024 "Ermite Obtenu was delighted to return to the United States on Sept. 30, two months after being unjustly deported to Haiti. The young Haitian woman’s...
Mike Murrell, Michigan Public, Oct. 10, 2024 "Ibrahim Parlak will remain in the United States after two decades of legal battles. The Harbert, Michigan, restaurant owner no longer faces the threat...
Cyrus Mehta, Kaitlyn Box, Oct. 11, 2024 "On September 25, 2024, USCIS announced that it had updated guidance in the USCIS Policy Manual Child Status Protection Act (CSPA) age for noncitizens who...
Eunice Hyunhye Cho, ACLU National Prison Project; Tessa Wilson, Senior Program Officer, PHR Asylum Program, June 25, 2024
"Since January 1, 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reported that 68 people have died in its custody. This number does not include detained people who ICE released immediately prior to their deaths, which ICE has admitted reduces the number of reported deaths, and allows the agency to avoid accountability requirements.[1] These deaths raise serious concern about continued, systemic problems with medical and mental health care provided in immigration detention facilities, and the absence of accountability or consequences faced by facilities where detained people have died. ICE currently detains, on average, approximately 38,000 people each day in a network of approximately 130 detention facilities nationwide. Congress, however, recently increased ICE’s budget to detain 41,500 people on a daily basis for FY 2024, at a cost of $3.4 billion.[2]
This report, a joint project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), and American Oversight, provides a comprehensive examination of the deaths of 52 people whom ICE reported to have died in its custody between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2021. Our analysis is based on a review of over 14,500 pages of documents obtained from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests; from local government agencies through state public record act requests; and from civil litigation. Report analysis also incorporates the review of ICE’s own investigatory reports into deaths in custody by independent medical experts, as well as interviews with two family members of people who died in ICE detention during the studied period.
Deadly Failures exposes the ways in which the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) internal oversight mechanisms have failed to conduct rigorous investigations, impose meaningful consequences, or improve conditions that cause immigrants to die in ICE detention. Based on independent medical expert reviews of deaths, the report further examines the ways in which systemic failures in medical and mental health care in ICE detention have caused otherwise preventable deaths."