Adapted by Joshua Scheer
By Mike Ludwig
This article was originally published by Truthout
Immigrants are jailed in unsanitary, overcrowded jails and camps as part of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Mamuka Artmeladze, a 43-year-old Georgian national, was found dead on June 4, 2026, in federal immigration custody. Though his name did not appear in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) online death records by the time this article was published, Artmeladze was reported as the 50th person to die in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office. One of two recent deaths at a notorious immigration prison in Louisiana, Artmeladze’s death is one of the latest signs that the president’s mass deportation campaign has predictably created a human rights crisis inside a sprawling system of immigration jails and camps.
At least 51 people have died while in ICE custody since Trump began his second term, federal records show. At least 19 deaths occurred between January 1 and June 4, 2026, an average of about one death every eight days over the first six months of this year.
Additionally, at least two disabled people died this year from exposure shortly after being released by immigration officials in freezing winter weather, including a 31-year-old Haitian woman who died after being left at a Pittsburgh bus stop for 30 hours in early March. While medical examiners determined both deaths to be homicides, ICE does not include them in its official tally, and experts say the 51 deaths reported since January 2025 could be an undercount.
For months, protesters, federal inspectors, and Democrats in Congress have sounded the alarm about the dangerous conditions of confinement faced by more than 68,000 adults and children swept up in Trump’s crackdown. While ICE claims to provide proper care for detainees, oversight data shows a clear pattern of abuse, medical neglect, and preventable deaths inside its jails and camps. Critics say the unprecedented number of deaths is the predictable result of Trump administration policy, including fighting in court to incarcerate immigrants for as long as possible while aggressively expanding privately run jails and prison camps.
“Using the windfall in funding from Congressional Republicans, they are inflicting as much pain as possible no matter the cost,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigrant rights group America’s Voice, in a statement on June 22.
In a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) and Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) said the number of deaths in federal custody is unacceptable and demanded the administration stop jailing undocumented people until officials address lawmakers’ concerns about conditions inside ICE jails.
“With more people in detention for longer periods of time, this has predictably placed more pressure on a system already plagued by medical neglect and dangerous conditions,” the senators wrote on June 18. “Your Administration either failed to account for this predictable result or proceeded despite it.”
Deaths Spike After Trump Orders “Mandatory Detention”
On April 12, Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt’s lifeless body was found hanging from a bedsheet in his cell at the Miami Federal Detention Center in Florida and his death was presumed to be a suicide. The third Cuban national to die in ICE custody under Trump, Carbonell-Betancourt had been diagnosed with anxiety and prescribed medication by a doctor at the federal jail in March but denied any history of suicidal ideation, according to an ICE press release.
As immigration researcher Andrew Free points out, Carbonell-Betancourt entered the country under parole in 2024 and was not charged with or convicted of any crime. Immigration violations are civil offenses, not criminal, but Carbonell-Betancourt was held in a federal jail under Trump’s mandatory detention policies instead of being allowed to pursue his immigration case at home. Carbonell-Betancourt is among at least 10 men whose deaths in ICE custody were ruled suicides since Trump returned to the White House, according to the Associated Press.
On June 4, Mamuka Artmeladze was found dead at the notorious Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana after four months of incarceration, according to reports. Little is known about Artmeladze or his death; ICE sent a legally required notice to lawmakers, but a press release does not appear on its website. The death was the second at Winn in 2026 after 49-year-old Alejandro Cabrera Clemente died on April 11.
Artmeladze’s death came two days after the DHS Office of Inspector General published a damning report on Winn Correctional Center. After a surprise visit to the facility in so-called “detention alley,” a rural region of Louisiana where thousands of undocumented people are transferred to be isolated from communities nationwide, federal watchdogs found that staff failed to maintain sanitary conditions, provide medical services, ensure detainees had access to legal materials, and violated the use-of-force policy. In one instance, a guard used a banned chokehold to “gain control” of a person.
Winn Correctional Center is only one of dozens of ICE facilities across the country that are under fire for needlessly incarcerating immigrants. In New Jersey, protesters have held vigil for weeks despite attacks by police as people inside the Delaney Hall immigration prison wage a hunger and labor strike over inedible food and lack of access to the outside world. Entire families are incarcerated at Delaney Hall, including pregnant women and families with young children.
“Children are the latest target of the cruel and hate-filled, anti-immigrant obsession of this administration,” Cárdenas said, pointing to reports about disabled children losing access to lifesaving health care, and toddlers being forced to appear in court.
Shortly after returning to office, Trump directed ICE to enforce an unprecedented “mandatory detention” policy — any immigrant who entered the U.S. without inspection is subject to being jailed without a bond hearing while waiting to see a judge and challenge a deportation order. This has forced defense attorneys to file more than 15,000 petitions arguing that mandatory detention violates the habeas corpus clause of the Constitution in order to have their client released, according to Politico’s litigation tracker.
Judges have ruled against ICE in the vast majority of cases. Although federal courts have largely rejected the mandatory detention policy as a violation of due process, appeals courts remain split on the question of whether the Constitution guarantees noncitizens the right to a bond hearing for release from “detention centers” that function as jails for undocumented people. Observers say the issue is almost certainly headed for the Supreme Court.
“All of These Deaths in Custody Are Preventable”
Immigrant rights activists say the intention is clear: Make the process of defending against deportation orders so difficult — if not virtually impossible from a jail cell — so that people choose to “self-deport” on their own. However, this intentionally painful policy appears to be deadly.
In April, the San Francisco Chronicle published an investigation of 32 deaths in ICE custody since Trump took office. Reporters sent the death reports, autopsy records, and patient medical records to 14 physicians for independent review. In at least 17 of the 32 cases, the physicians concluded the person might have survived without delays for failures of medical care. The investigation echoed a 2024 report that found 95 percent of deaths recorded in ICE prisons from 2017 to 2021 were likely preventable. Such data was public record when Trump took office and mandated “detention.”
“The cruelty is not incidental; it is the point,” Cárdenas said.
On June 5, ICE officials confirmed that the agency would no longer report the deaths of detainees who were recently in custody, a move DHS called “common sense.” The change reversed a policy put in place under President Joe Biden that required that deaths occurring within 30 days of release from federal immigration custody should be investigated and reported to Congress. Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer of the New York City jail system, told the Associated Press that tracking deaths after release is a standard approach for identifying health care gaps.
“Eliminating reporting of these deaths represents a willful act of ignoring the most serious health outcome that can reflect inadequacies in care or help track outbreaks,” Venters said.
Writing on his #DetentionKills Substack, Free argued that every death in ICE custody should be considered preventable because “mandatory detention” is nothing more than a legally dubious policy choice.
“All of these deaths in custody were preventable because civilly detained people should not be confined in prisons,” Free wrote on April 17. “It’s really not any more complicated than that.”
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