A federal investigation has uncovered at least ten suicides among detainees in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since January 2025, marking an unprecedented surge that far outpaces historical patterns and pointing to widespread breakdowns in oversight and mental health care.
The deaths represent a dramatic acceleration. Since October, seven suicides have been classified in ICE facilities, already the highest count for any fiscal year in the agency's recorded history. Typically, ICE records one or zero such deaths annually.
Brayan Rayo Garzón was one of them. In April 2025, the 26-year-old Colombian veteran and street vendor was in his fourth day of isolation at a Missouri jail, struggling with Covid while being held by ICE. He had requested mental health treatment. He had asked repeatedly to call his mother. A guard took his handwritten plea, walked away, and within an hour Rayo was found dead. An autopsy confirmed he had taken his own life.
The nine other victims were predominantly Hispanic men in their early thirties, arriving from Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, and China. Seven of the ten had no violent criminal records in the United States, despite Trump administration characterizations of deportees as society's worst offenders.
These ten suicides account for nearly a fifth of the 51 total deaths in ICE custody since Trump returned to office. While most other deaths resulted from natural causes, experts say many would have been preventable with adequate medical attention.
The AP's examination of ICE inspection reports, autopsy records, and death files found that detention facilities repeatedly violated the agency's own standards. Staff ignored clear distress signals, postponed mental health evaluations, and failed to monitor detainees already flagged as high-risk. In several cases, vulnerable individuals were placed in isolation, a practice experts say compounds psychological harm and despair.
At least three facilities where detainees took their own lives failed to meet ICE's requirement to screen arrivals for medical and mental health issues within twelve hours of detention, according to inspection records.
Dr. Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist at the University of California-San Francisco who has studied mortality patterns in ICE detention, called the spike alarming. "Something is going profoundly wrong from any kind of public health or mental health perspective," Basu said. "This is one of those alarming, sudden increases."
Dr. Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer of New York City jails who has advised ICE on preventing detainee deaths, described the rise as terrifying. He attributed it to systemic failures in how people are processed upon arrival and how warning signs are handled once identified. "If that receiving screening picks up red flags, they're not acted on in a way that reduces the risk of them having preventable death," Venters said.
The Department of Homeland Security contested these findings. Lauren Bis, acting assistant secretary, stated that suicide deaths in ICE custody remain "extremely rare" and maintained that detention staff follow established protocols while receiving annual suicide prevention training. She said detainees have access to comprehensive healthcare, including mental services.
Five of the ten suicides occurred in facilities operated by CoreCivic and the GEO Group, two of the largest private prison contractors working with ICE. CoreCivic said in a statement it is "deeply saddened" by deaths in its care and takes them seriously. GEO Group said it trains staff on suicide prevention and maintains safe environments in compliance with federal standards. Sheriffs' departments operating three other facilities where suicides occurred either declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries.
The deaths have drawn international attention. Colombian President Gustavo Petro called for his foreign ministry to lodge a formal protest over Rayo's death and urged the US government to reconsider how its immigration policies are affecting lives.
Among the other victims was a nineteen-year-old from Mexico detained after a traffic stop involving a scooter, a thirty-six-year-old restaurant worker from Nicaragua who lost contact with relatives after being transferred to a crowded Texas camp, and a forty-five-year-old with a history of crossing the border illegally.
Rayo's case exemplified the pattern. After his family crossed the California border in 2023, he spent three months in detention before being allowed to join relatives in St. Louis. In March 2025 he was arrested on suspicion of a crime and transferred to Phelps County Jail in Rolla, Missouri. Isolated and sick with Covid, barred from calling his mother, he died within days.
Author James Rodriguez: "The surge is not abstract statistical failure,it is a cascade of preventable deaths driven by neglect at every checkpoint in the system."
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