ICE Detention Center Deaths Climb While Corporations Make Millions in Profits. States Must Intervene, Now!

Another person has died in ICE custody, this time apparently from an infection that guards ignored for two weeks until the man contracted sepsis. Emmanuel Damas was an asylum seeker, yet he was held in detention anyway. This follows reports showing that 2025 became the deadliest year for detainees at ICE camps.

In fact, over the course of six weeks, spanning December 2025 and January 2026, an average of one person per week died in ICE detention centers. For the first time, the U.S. government is actually admitting that ICE directly killed one of the detainees. After this admission, it began refusing to let county medical examiners investigate the bodies, and is now relying exclusively on its own military coroners for autopsies.

Sign the petition to demand that states band together and pass laws to keep ICE out of their states and off their lands!

Half of these six deaths were located at "Camp East Montana," the largest detention camp in the U.S., which was quickly assembled near the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso, Texas. After one detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, died at the camp, both the county medical examiner as well as six detainees confirmed that an ICE guard had killed him. All six witnesses have since mysteriously disappeared, with lawyers unable to track their whereabouts. When the next death occurred - this time claiming Victor Manuel Diaz - the U.S. government clamped down and kept all information tightly guarded. The detainee's body was examined at a U.S. Army hospital, with the military refusing to publicly reveal autopsy details.

ICE guards have also been accused of assaulting minors. One teenager kept locked up at the Camp East Montana detention center says staff threw him on the ground, beat him, and "grabbed my testicles and firmly crushed them." The child says that ICE guards blocked the security cameras during their brutality, to prevent recording any evidence.

Outside of detention centers, we already know how ICE shot and killed two civilians in Minnesota. But other horrific stories are emerging, too. Recently, in Buffalo, New York, Customs and Border Patrol officers detained a nearly-blind refugee from Myanmar. When they finally released him, they left him outside a closed coffee shop around 8pm at night, without notifying his family or lawyers. The only thing on his feet were 'orange booties' given to detainees - not proper shoes - and it was close to freezing cold outside, with snow still on the ground. Several days later, a stranger found him dead outside.

All these deaths, all this abuse - and meanwhile, companies owning ICE detention centers are raking in the profits. In fact, one company alone reported profits of $254 million just from last year.

But luckily, state and local leaders have been fighting back. Recently, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City signed an executive order to keep ICE out of city properties unless they have signed judicial warrants - a high bar. New Jersey's Governor Mikie Sherrill signed a similar executive order for her state. In New Mexico, a new law will ban the use of public land for ICE detention centers. And lawmakers in nine states - California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington - have passed bills to ban partnerships between ICE and local police. We must build on these successes!

More than 73,000 people are currently held in ICE detention facilities across the country. We must speak out to protect them and anyone else whom ICE could try to target. Sign the petition to demand that every U.S. state ban the use of their land for ICE detention centers, prohibit collaboration between ICE and local police, and keep residents safe from this terror!