THE SYSTEM
Part Three of Three
This is the final installment in ROTWR’s three-part Special Report series examining how American institutions and media respond to violent death, and how that response changes depending on who died. Part One examined the reaction gap between comparably contested deaths. Part Two examined who gets believed when the cause of death is disputed. Part Three moves from individual cases to the system that produces them.
On January 3, 2026, 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos died in custody at Camp East Montana, a detention facility at Fort Bliss, Texas. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initially described his death as a suicide attempt gone wrong. Witnesses told investigators guards had choked him as he said he could not breathe. The El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death a homicide by asphyxia. ICE changed its account after the ruling.
Lunas Campos is one name inside a system that, by multiple independent counts, has killed more people in less time than at any point in at least two decades.
THE NUMBERS AGREE, EVEN WHEN THE METHODS DON’T
Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, in a joint report published in June, counted 52 deaths in ICE custody in the 500 days between the start of the second Trump administration and June 4, 2026. Their analysis found the mortality rate in ICE detention is now nearly four times what it was under the Biden administration and more than two and a half times what it was during the first Trump administration, a rate higher than during the COVID-19 pandemic. KFF, tracking a different window, counted 46 deaths as of mid-March, with 33 recorded in 2025 alone, up from 11 the year before and the highest single-year total since 2004. The National Immigration Project, using its own methodology, counted at least 21 deaths in the first half of 2026 alone, a pace that would exceed the 2025 record if it continues.
None of these three organizations counts deaths the same way. One of them arrived at 52. One arrived at 46. One is on pace for something higher than either. What they agree on, independently, is the direction: more people are dying in ICE custody, faster, than they were before, and the rate of increase is steeper than the rate of growth in the detained population itself. More than 71,000 people were in ICE detention as of early 2026, a record high, but Physicians for Human Rights found that alone does not explain the death toll. Deaths have risen faster than the population that could produce them.
WHAT DYING IN CUSTODY LOOKS LIKE
The people who make up that count come from Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Bulgaria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, and Iran, among other countries, according to ICE’s own detainee death reports. One of them, Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, served more than a decade in the Afghan military alongside American forces before entering the United States on humanitarian parole. He died less than a day after being detained, with no previously known health issues. Another, Royer Perez-Jimenez, 19, died at a Florida detention center; ICE called it a presumed suicide, and his family disputed the finding, saying what officers treated as resisting arrest may have been a misunderstanding rooted in his limited English.
Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights found that seven people died by apparent suicide in ICE custody in the twelve months after the second Trump administration began, compared with one reported suicide in detention the year before. A custodial setting is, by definition, one where the state controls a person’s movement, medical care, and safety. The researchers concluded that the increase suggests the system is failing to adequately monitor and respond to a risk it is legally responsible for preventing.
THE COMPLAINTS THAT DON’T GET INVESTIGATED
Deaths are not the only allegations documented inside ICE detention facilities in the past year.
At the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, run by the private prison company CoreCivic, a CalMatters and KPBS investigation found that San Diego County Sheriff’s officials failed to investigate at least seven reported rapes in 2025. Under a 2020 agreement between the sheriff’s department and CoreCivic, the facility’s own warden holds the authority to decide whether allegations of rape at his own facility get investigated at all.
At the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, run by the GEO Group, the civil rights organizations RFK Human Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana, and the National Immigration Project filed complaints in September 2025 on behalf of four detainees alleging repeated sexual harassment, sexual abuse, physical abuse, coerced labor, and medical neglect. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson called the allegations a hoax.
At the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, also run by the GEO Group, a 911 call in January 2026 documented a separate sexual assault complaint. The following month, three Black male detainees filed a federal lawsuit alleging abuse that included improper touching during a pat-down search.
These are three different facilities, run by two different private contractors, in three different states. The allegations are not identical, and none has been independently adjudicated. What connects them is a structural gap identified by the ACLU and the Government Accountability Office (GAO): the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed in 2003, did not have finalized regulations covering detention facilities until 2014, and even now does not apply to every facility ICE uses. A 2013 GAO review found that officials at immigration detention facilities failed to report 40 percent of sexual abuse allegations to ICE headquarters at all. Of 215 allegations the GAO reviewed from a four-year span, only 7 percent were substantiated, a rate that raises questions less about whether the allegations were true and more about whether they were ever seriously investigated.
THE THROUGH LINE
Across all three parts of this series, the specific facts differ. An ICE agent shooting a driver through a car window is not the same event as a body found hanging from a tree, and neither is the same as a detainee dying in a cell with no camera running. What repeats is the position each of these people occupied afterward: on the far side of an investigation controlled by the same institution accused of causing the harm, with a family or an attorney doing the work of forcing a second look, and with no guarantee that a second look would come.
Ruben Ray Martinez’s family waited nearly a year for the public to learn an ICE agent had killed him. Torrance Medley’s family had to hire a lawyer and organize with the NAACP just to get their case treated as unresolved rather than closed. Geraldo Lunas Campos’s death was called a suicide attempt until a county medical examiner, an office outside ICE’s own chain of command, said otherwise.
The people documented in this series did not choose to become a pattern. The pattern is what happens after.
Sources: American Immigration Council (US — Lunas Campos case, January 2026 death count); Human Rights Watch (US, international human rights organization — joint HRW/Physicians for Human Rights mortality rate analysis, 500-day death count, suicide rate finding); KFF (US, nonpartisan health policy research organization — 46-death count, year-over-year figures); National Immigration Project (US, legal advocacy organization — 2026 death count, individual case details); American Immigration Lawyers Association (US, professional association — individual detainee death records, Paktiawal and Perez-Jimenez cases); CalMatters (US, nonprofit newsroom — Otay Mesa sexual assault investigation); KPBS (US, public broadcaster — Otay Mesa warden authority, sheriff’s department response); Louisiana Illuminator (US, nonprofit newsroom — Basile facility complaints, DHS response); KREM (US — Tacoma facility complaints, federal lawsuit); ACLU (US, civil rights organization — Prison Rape Elimination Act regulatory history, GAO findings context)
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
