20

Two More Deaths in ICE Custody and Radical Anti-Transparency as FY25 Nears an End

ICE acknowledged two more in-custody deaths today, officially cementing Fiscal Year 2025 as the deadliest non-COVID year in two decades. Six of these deaths occurred in the past two months alone, suggesting an accelerating increase in the mortality rate.

39 year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe, who entered the U.S. as a child and received DACA before convictions for DUI prevented him from renewing it, passed away in a hospital in Victorville, California yesterday. GEO and ICE transported him there from Adelanto on Sunday to receive evaluation and surgery for an abscess on his buttock, according to ICE’s death notification. He had hypertension and suffered tachycardia while there, ultimately passing away.

On the opposite coast, 42 year-old Honduran Santos Reyes-Banegas died in his cell inside the Nassau County Correctional Center in East Meadow, New York, on September 18. ICE suggests he may have died due to “liver failure complicated by alcoholism.” ICE’s Long Island Fugitive Operations team “and federal partners” arrested him one day before, ICE reports. His family is raising funds to help his two children defray the costs of repatriating him.

Georgia Senators Demand Answers

Before ICE published these two additional death notifications, Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock wrote to DHS Secretary Noem seeking information on the deaths in custody that have occurred since Trump’s inauguration, according to a report by NPR. As their letter notes, the rate of people dying in ICE custody is rising at an alarming rate:

As the NPR report points out, Ossoff and Warnock fault ICE for failing to follow its own guidance requiring the agency to notify the public within 48 hours of an in-custody death.

I don’t imagine the senators will be receiving responses to their very helpful questions from DHS or ICE anytime soon, if the agency’s prior practice provides any guide about their future conduct.

World’s Largest Secret Police Force Stonewalling Journalists, Ignoring FOIA

Amidst the rapidly rising mortality rates caused by its detention operations, the nation’s largest and most amply-funded police force — compromised almost exclusively of masked men these days — is giving most reporters the finger, according to a new analysis by David Levinthal published yesterday in the Columbia Journalism Review. According to two dozen reporters interviewed by CJR, ICE has taken to blowing off affirmative transparency in response to questions from reporters who aren’t in the tank for the current regime, and then ignoring the Freedom of Information Act requests the agency’s lack of radical transparency beget. American Oversight, for instance, got a substantive response in only 1 of 137 requests it’s filed this year. Sue Long with the Transactional Records and Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), who’s spent years suing ICE, reports the number of timely responses she’s received as being “close to zero.”

“ICE has long had an official policy not to comply with FOIA” - Sue Long, TRAC

When Levinthal sought comment from ICE, he got a response very similar to the one I did when I reached out on regarding unreported deaths in custody:

I presented ICE Public Affairs with the Deportation Data Project data I reported here and asked about the people released under the “Died” code who’ve not been reported as deaths in custody. Here is Alvarez’s response, in full:

I pointed out on September 9 that the data I provided originally came from ICE and contains unique identifiers allowing ICE to immediately obtain the information he asked me for — information ICE redacted and has withheld from the public (potentially in violation of the law and its own policy). I have heard nothing in response since then.

Similarly, as I gaze upon the hundreds of pending and fully exhausted FOIA requests I have pending before ICE, stretching back more than six years, I get the distinct impression that the only means of obtaining compliance with the statute from the world’s largest and richest secret police force is to take them to court and demand it. Yet, for all the times I’ve done that and helped clients do the same, and for all the times we’ve won, the agency’s behavior does not seem to meaningfully change. The stonewalling continues and the secrecy persists.

This situation robs the public of the most finite, irreplaceable resource we have: time. Applied to journalists seeking to tell true, non-insider-sourced stories about the inner workings of this massively expanding, increasingly lethal system of people-hunting and human caging, ICE’s choice not to respond and uphold its FOIA obligations looks more like a First Amendment violation with each passing day. This is particularly true in light of the endless resources the agency dedicates toward spewing false and thinly veiled white-supremacist propaganda using its social media feeds.

We’ll soon see whether courts agree. In the meantime, the piece I was planning on writing today about how relatively good ICE is compared to other detention systems about reporting and investigating deaths in custody, and how all the things ICE does relatively well (which are the products of organizing, oversight, and political pressure—not bureaucratic grace) after a person dies in custody probably contributes to a comparatively lower mortality rate, will stay in the Drafts folder for another day.