Despite roughly 30,000 fewer people currently being held in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement compared to last year’s average, the number of deaths in ICE detention centers has nearly doubled.
As of Wednesday, the last day of fiscal year 2020, there were 21 deaths reported in ICE custody. The number of deaths in ICE detention centers hasn’t broken 20 since 2005. Last year, ICE reported a total of eight deaths.
Both the dramatic reduction in the number of people currently being detained and the dramatic increase in deaths can be explained in part by the coronavirus. After evaluating its detained population based on guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ICE “released over 900 individuals after evaluating their immigration history, criminal record, potential threat to public safety, flight risk, and national security concerns.” ICE also cited a “decrease in book-ins” and “continued repatriations of illegal aliens” as causes for the reduction in detainment numbers.
However, those explanations do not completely explain the phenomenon — this year’s 13 noncoronavirus-related deaths still represent more deaths in ICE custody than 13 of the last 14 years. ICE said that despite the numbers, deaths in its custody are “exceedingly rare.”
“Statistically, fatalities in ICE custody occur at a small fraction of the national average for detained populations in federal or state custody — less than 1% of the rate at which fatalities occur in federal and state custody nationwide,” ICE said.
Silky Shah, the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national advocacy coalition that aims to “abolish immigration detention in the United States,” said: “We’re seeing the pandemic is playing a role, but also the conditions of detention and what it does both to your mental health and the really poor medical care that exists inside. … It’s a system that shouldn’t exist.”
ICE currently has 200 detention centers across the U.S. Of those locations, three deaths occurred in Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Stewart is one of the largest detention centers in the U.S., with an official maximum capacity of 1,752 detainees.
Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, a private prison company that operates the Stewart detention center, said that the size of the facility needs to be taken into consideration.
“While we take any loss of life in our facilities very seriously, it’s important for context to understand that our Stewart facility cares for a higher number of people than most other immigration facilities in the country,” Gustin said.
Stewart is not the only ICE detention center in Georgia facing increased scrutiny. Earlier this month, a whistleblower at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, filed a complaint alleging “mass hysterectomies” and “medical neglect.” The New York Times said in a Tuesday report that women at the Irwin detention center were “pressured into unneeded surgeries.” The report said that complaints about such referrals have been brought to the center’s officials since at least 2018.
