ICE FOIA Updates & the Latest *Reported* Death in Custody
ICE claims the U.S. public doesn't care about deaths in custody. Maybe it's right.
ICE’s FOIA Appeals office upheld the agency’s decision to deny expedited processing of my request for Charles Leo Daniel’s IHSC Mortality Review this week. They concluded my request was conclusory in nature, and that the expansion of people in ICE custody and attendant increase in deaths by detention wasn’t enough to justify expedited treatment. According to Marie Brown and Sara Jazayeri in ICE’s Government Information Law Division, deaths in custody aren’t an issue of current exigency to the American public, and these records won’t protect a recognized, significant interest. They also concluded there wasn’t widespread media interest in Charles Leo Daniel’s death at GEO’s Tacoma facility.
ICE FOIA finally provided responsive records to my November 2022 request for Contract Discrepancy Reports involving CoreCivic from 2017 - 2022. By way of context, I made this request after Brazilian asylum-seeker Kesley Vial died at CoreCivic’s Torrance County Detention Facility. The DHS Inspector General’s Office conducted an unannounced inspection of Torrance before Kesley died. OIG issued a management alert advising ICE it needed to remove detained people from the facility in order to ensure their health and safety. ICE ignored the warning. Kesley’s death followed. ICE temporarily halted transfers into the facility, but then repopulated it in December after engineering what the ACLU of New Mexico and others have alleged in court was a fraudulent inspection.
The ICE FOIA Office’s response says it’s enclosing 28 pages, but I received only 12. Those 12 pages were a Contract Discrepancy Report involving Torrance. It seems CoreCivic failed to meet its medical staffing obligations at the facility. Specifically, during COVID, CoreCivic had an actual medical staffing level of 44.92% — “far less than 95% staffing levels indicated in the response.”
ICE’s Contracting Officer noted CoreCivic was having several senior medical officials - the Chief Medical Officer, another Doctor, and a Nurse Practitioner - moonlight at its other facilities, including Cibola, even though those positions were fully funded for TCDF. CoreCivic also pocketed the guaranteed minimum ICE was paying it at Torrance and providing no on-site mental health positions, then failed to disclose this in its response to ICE’s initial Contract Discrepancy notice. Kesley died by suicide after allegedly being denied adequate mental healthcare on multiple occasions.
This record would have been really useful to communities and to me as a journalist back in 2022 / early 2023. I could’ve shown it to Torrance Commissioner Sam Schropp - was was visiting the facility and conducting inquiries into allegations of wrongdoing - and asked him to check into medical staffing there. But ICE broke the law and failed to make a determination within the time provided by law. Now it is archival material. Another set of records to add to the pile of demonstrably death-making failures in the administration of Joe Biden.
Incidentally, here’s a link to 911 calls in Torrance since 2023. There sure do seem to be a lot of rape/battery/sexual assault/narcotics calls in this facility . . .
Finally, ICE’s Public Affairs Office announced the latest death of an immigrant in the agency’s custody: Colombian national Brayan Rayo-Garzon “passed away after being found unresponsive at the Phelps County Jail in Rolla, Missouri on April 8, 2025.” This brings the tally to 8 reported deaths of human beings in ICE custody this fiscal year. Based on the populations in ICE detention centers - which have now topped 48,000 - I strongly suspect the number is much higher, and the agency is patient-dumping.
Indeed, there is zero assurance that the administration did not fly corpses of migrant decedents in U.S. custody to El Salvador for disposal, or that they won’t do so in the future. Once you have a place to disappear bodies, it really doesn’t matter if they’re alive when you do it.