Disturbing Pictures of Neglect in ICE Mortality Reviews

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Carlos Josué Marchena Marchena was just 36 years old when he died in the Winn Correctional Center immigration prison in Winnfield, Louisiana, earlier this month. He had repeatedly told his family and another detainee that he wasn’t receiving the insulin shots he needed to manage his Type 1 diabetes; he was missing meals and lacked enough water, too.

Another immigrant inside the camp reportedly said that the day before Marchena died, he had been in pain, vomiting, and “pale purple and wet with sweat.”

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Marchena is the third person to die in Winn Correctional Center this year and among the at least 65 people who have died in immigration detention since Donald Trump retook the White House, according to a nonscientific tally the Prospect maintains based on death notices, news coverage, and federal databases for ICE and Customs and Border Protection, among other sources.

He’s also among the numerous immigrants inside detention who have reported widespread medical neglect that in some cases turns fatal.

According to the boilerplate language Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) included in a press release about his death, Marchena “received proper medical care and was seen by medical professionals.” The agency, it said, provides comprehensive medical care “from the moment individuals arrive,” including medical, dental, and mental health care. “At no time during detention is a detained noncitizen denied emergency care.”

But immigrants, their families and friends, elected officials, attorneys, and advocates say that is a lie. And even data provided by the federal government itself shows ICE is failing to provide adequate medical care.

Last Friday, the federal government released 33 mortality reviews of immigrants who have died in federal detention since 2019. Nearly all found significant failures and together show a pattern of neglect.

Among other failures, ICE and private detention staff refused to give detainees routine medication for ongoing medical conditions; confiscated medicine they arrived with and refused to administer it; failed to provide follow-up care to serious conditions; misread X-rays and other diagnostic tests; lacked the ability to administer CPR properly; gave people the wrong medication; and did not send people experiencing health crises to the emergency room in time. Staff routinely ignored requests for care and failed to communicate with one another about immigrants’ conditions.

Even in four instances where a review found that detention staff provided medical care “within safe limits of practice,” reviewers still noted serious failures. When Ernesto Rocha-Cuadra, a 42-year-old Nicaraguan man, died in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in 2023, staff who responded to his medical emergency “had a limited sense of urgency,” despite the fact that he was suffering a heart attack. The report also noted that he had access to and used illicit drugs inside the facility.

“No matter how many times we hear this same horrendous information, it doesn’t get better and it keeps getting worse,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network. “Even if there are standards, even if there are requirements, when those standards aren’t met there is no consequence.”

MEDICAL NEGLECT IS A FEATURE in immigration detention, Ghandehari and other advocates say, and it has been since ICE was established in 2003. The difference now is that there is a record number of people in immigration prisons, as Trump and Stephen Miller seek to round up and expel one million immigrants annually. In a surge this summer, ICE snatched nearly 150,000 immigrants between June and August.

“I’m not saying anything different than what I have said in years prior,” Ghandehari said. As an organization, much of what we’re seeing and trying to convey is the same stuff. We’re repeating ourselves. The food is rotten. The water is undrinkable.”

The mortality reviews released by the government document immigrants’ rapidly deteriorating health as they endure symptoms of conditions that are otherwise treatable, including diabetes and alcohol withdrawal. Seven of the reports list suicide as the cause of death, including 32-year-old Chinese national Chaofeng Ge, who reviewers said hanged himself on August 5, 2025, at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, though the report also says that when he was found hanging in the handicap shower stall in C-Unit, pod 4, he was “bound at the hands and feet.” In that instance, the report said that medical staff failed to provide care in multiple ways, including that they did not know how to properly administer CPR.

Detention camp staff also repeatedly failed to provide mental health care, including for Geraldo Lunas-Campos, a 55-year-old man from Cuba who was imprisoned in Camp East Montana in July 2025 when his mental health collapsed. He had already attempted to kill himself two years before with a medication overdose that had put him in the hospital for 15 days.

Staff confirmed that he had taken a psychotropic medication for the last decade, along with medicine for asthma and back pain. But about a month after he entered Camp East Montana, staff adjusted his drug regimen. A few weeks later, on September 29, 2025, staff observed he had a black eye “from striking his head against the wall.” A week later, he attempted to hang himself with a sheet. For the next two months, Lunas-Campos requested a higher level of help, reported he had missed doses of his medication, and reported symptoms of anxiety and depression. But the care he received was “counseling with coping techniques.”

On January 3, 2026, he tried again to kill himself by wrapping a sweatshirt around his neck. Custody officers entered his cell “in an attempt to de-escalate the situation.” But instead of doing that, they “proceeded with spontaneous use of force.” When medical staff arrived less than ten minutes later, they found Lunas-Campos “unresponsive and pulseless.” They attempted CPR and failed. Shortly after that, he was pronounced dead.

Other mortality reviews describe unnecessarily gruesome and excruciating deaths because detention staff failed to act, were incompetent, or both.

For example, when 39-year-old Mexican national Ismael Ayala-Uribe sought care for an anal abscess on September 17, 2025, while detained at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in Los Angeles, he told staff he ranked his pain level at 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. But instead of providing proper care, the staff prescribed him over-the-counter pain medication, a laxative, hemorrhoidal ointment, and a short-term pain relief injection. Staff failed to follow up or conduct wellness checks, Ayala-Uribe’s pain persisted, he vomited at least once, and four days later staff sent him by ambulance to a hospital. By then, the abscess had worsened, his kidneys had failed, and he developed sepsis. Ayala-Uribe suffered respiratory arrest and a heart attack, and died on September 22, just five days after he first sought care.

The review found that staff ignored his initial request for medical attention, then failed to provide the proper medical care, give him his medications, document his condition, perform wellness checks, and communicate abnormal vital signs to higher-level staff.

“It’s hard to make sense how or why our government persistently treats people this way,” Ghandehari said. The inhumanity reflects “the philosophy around immigration, around criminalization that this country is so entrenched in, when we view immigration from a lens of ‘we don’t want these people here, we want to deter them,’ it’s all a policy around deterrence and then punishing people as a form of deterrence.” It also reflects a multibillion-dollar grift on the part of private prison corporations and contractors who provide staffing and services.

“Nobody should be in ICE detention at all to begin with,” she said. “It makes healthy people unhealthy.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a request for comment.

The post appeared first on The American Prospect.