ICE's Death Budget
New Contracting Document Offers Rare Window Into Expected Number of Detention Deaths. We've Already Blown Past It.
January 26, 2026
Good morning. Hoping everyone’s staying warm, empowered, and out of the deadly ice storms sweeping across the land.
“18 Annually”
How many people does ICE believe will die in agency custody each year?
Over the past two decades of the agency’s existence, that number has been as low as three (3) in Fiscal Year 2022 and as high as thirty-two (32) in FY04. If we average out numbers we have from 04-25, it comes to around 12.5 people a year. Last fiscal year, it was 23—Nearly twice the historical average.
Now, thanks to the magic of federal contracting law, we have a better sense of the agency’s budgeted number of deaths in custody. A recently published federal notice from ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility seeking bids for contract inspections for ICE detention facilities and contract death review teams for when the inspections fail to reduce deaths provides the first and clearest answer for ICE’s expected annual death toll. The two records — a Request for Information and accompanying Statement of Work — spell out the number of people whose deaths in detention ICE thinks it will need to pay the contractor to investigate.
The number? Eighteen (18) annually.
“DDR” is the government’s abbreviation for “Detainee Death Review”.
The problem? It’s January 26—less than five months into the 2026 Fiscal Year—and WE’VE ALREADY SEEN 18 DEATHS IN DETENTION. Sure, that number was only 12 when these records went online January 1. But, like, that number was already 12 when these records went online January 1.
The Statement of Work also budgets for far fewer inspections than there are active detention facilities, signaling a drastic contraction of oversight by ICE, despite a massive increase in detention funding. Whoever ends up doing these inspections (right now it’s Beaumont, Texas-based Creative Corrections) they’ll be structurally constrained by the mechanics of their contract to inspect facilities from pointing out to ICE that the inspections themselves failed to meaningfully prevent the deaths in custody they’re reviewing. It is a built-in Conflict of Interest that prevents the stated objective of the contract— an outside, objective analysis — from being fulfilled. Basically a giveaway.
It’s unclear if Creative Corrections is on the outs, or if they’re just in the middle of renegotiating a longer-term agreement with ICE.
Pablo Manriquez at Migrant Insider has a great look at the mechanics behind ICE and DHS funding in the Senate today.
The Counterinsurgent Call for “Answers”
As we’re processing reports from the Sunday call with Senate Democrats laying out the playbook for challenging more DHS funding, and as a raft of former Biden and Obama deportation-in-chiefmakers furiously rush to rehabilitate the loyal opposition so that it can meet the moment of popular outrage and ride it to electoral capture, I am compelled to point fair-minded readers toward some recent history.
In short, my personal observation is that whenever something really bad occurs in immigration enforcement, and law enforcement more broadly—however predictable it was and however many times they ignored those predictions on the way to funding it—the first and ONLY call by the party purportedly objecting to the bad thing is to investigate. They’re going to send a letter that demands answers. They’re going to get to the bottom of what’s going on. They’re going to make document requests. They might even send (but not enforce) the occasional subpoena. They might hold a staff briefing, maybe a member briefing, maybe even a committee hearing. They might visit the site of the bad thing. And in exceptionally rare cases where the bad is just too bad to ignore and keep any semblance of political legitimacy, they will (clutches pearls and gasps dramatically) CALL FOR SOMEONE TO RESIGN!!!!!!!!.
This is all, of course, performative opposition. It accomplishes nothing real, defuses the political tension of the moment, and buys time for cooler heads to prevail and return to funding the death machine.
Who performs the investigations? DHS-OIG? GAO? DOJ? Staff?
What outcomes do they ever have? At best, appropriations riders designed to create more information when the same harms are replicated in the future.
Some illustrative examples from the immigration space:
July 15, 2020 - Children in CBP Custody: Examining Deaths, Medical Care Procedures, and Improper Spending Committee on Homeland Security
September 2020 - The Trump Administration’s Treatment of Detained Immigrants: Deaths and Deficient Medical Care by For-Profit Detention Contractors, House Oversight Majority Staff Report (later taken down from the committee’s page when they lost the majority).
November 2022 - Medical Mistreatment of Women in ICE Detention, Staff Report, Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
The people performatively “demanding answers” and pushing investigations already know the truth about the system they vote to fund. How could they not? After all, time and again, they have “demanded answers” in response to previous crises of legitimacy. Are they simply suffering from selective amnesia?
If you truly must “demand answers” at this point, you are simply not paying attention, and don’t deserve the position you hold.
What Democrats never do, unless it’s in compromise with and at the initiative of Republicans, is meaningfully legislate. They’ll offer up a predictable panoply of explanations for why doing that is so hard (wah-wah) in the same breath that they’ll refuse to make it easier, lest they undermine institutions.
There wasn’t an Irwin Survivors’ Justice Act, because no Democrat introduced one; but there was a Laken Riley Act, because Republicans are simply better at their jobs and more accountable to their base than Democrats.
Democrats want answers, but they refuse to legislate based on them, leaving the country with a ratchet effect that’s produced what we see on the streets and in the camps.
Perhaps there are federal elected officials who disagree with party leadership. To date, they’ve proven unable or unwilling to remove the feckless and install the courageous. Always with shifting excuses and rationalizations that grow more sour and rancid over time like milk on the counter.
I know what Stephen Miller is for, and I know what he is against. He says it clearly and does it, wherever he can. It is one of the few things his opposition should aspire to emulate about him. A singular purpose and vision, reorienting the nation and the world to his will.
When AOC runs on “Abolish ICE” and then congratulates her party on its principled stand to allow 7 defections—assuring passage of a bill to expand the agency—and not whip votes against it, I know I cannot rely on her words to ascertain what she is for and against, and instead, have to look at her actions. Everyone else who’s paying attention does, too.
The tragedy of current leadership is that there is not a single person opposing him willing to match that energy, or, better yet, the energy of everyday people on the street. If there were, fewer Americans would be executed by masked men on the streets, and fewer migrants would be choked to death at the camps.
There is not. So here we are. As always with analysis like this, I truly hope I’m wrong.
I'm reading this (and you're quoted!) and it's... just ugh.
https://systemicjustice.org/article/the-profitability-of-inhumanity/
Investigations are maybe going to find some specific causes for individual deaths but when they leave in place this system that commodifies the living bodies of human beings and then rewards huge amounts of federal money to for-profit corporations with zero oversight...it's offensive to any thinking person for them to act surprised by what's happening. It's a meat grinder. It was designed to be.