NYT Suddenly Discovers Deaths Happen in ICE Custody
(but only after a Canadian passes away)
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As I shared earlier this week, my story for the Atlanta Community Press Collective (reprinted in The Appeal) on Lalo Avellaneda’s death in transit en route to Stewart Detention Center was recently picked up by The Guardian, leading to some very interesting conversations with stakeholders that I hope will soon yield positive, tangible results.
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The Canada Exception to NYT’s Death-in-Custody Blackout
Turning our attention away from Substack and toward corporate media, ICE’s announcement on Wednesday that 49 year-old Johnny Noviello died in the agency’s custody marked the tenth time the agency admitted an immigrant died this year. The New York Times published a story about it effectively stenographing the agency’s press release, adding only derogatory information about the decedent’s criminal history.
It’s the first story the Times has written about a death in ICE custody since Trump took office.
I wonder why this was news and all the other deaths weren’t.
This public-facing tracker (tinyurl.com/ICEdeaths) shows the breakdown of where the decedents during the Trump regime were allegedly born:
Canada (1), Colombia (1), Dominican Republic (1) Ethiopia (1), Haiti (1), Honduras (1), Mexico (2), Ukraine (1), Vietnam (1).
Weird, huh?
NYT’s choice to cover Noviello’s death is as telling as its choices about what to include and omit from its coverage. (A helpful primer on the Times copaganda can be found in Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter, and his book of the same title).
For instance, this is the first publicly acknowledged death of a person in ICE custody at a U.S. Bureau of Prisons facility in 15 years, since 54 year-old Jamaican national John Sterling died of sepsis after his incarceration for ICE at the Oakdale Federal Detention Center in 2010 (where I used to practice immigration law). The death is directly attributable to the Trump regime’s February 2025 Memorandum of Agreement between ICE and BOP. The Times determined it was really important to cover Noviello’s prior drug conviction, but not at all necessary to explain why he was imprisoned for ICE at a BOP facility.
The Times also neglects to report on the fact that the Miami Field Office now accounts for five of the thirteen deaths in ICE custody this fiscal year. A single Field Office with only a small fraction of ICE’s detention capacity producing almost 2 in 5 of all deaths in the system seems notable.
The Old Gray Lady further neglects to tie Noviello’s death in ICE custody to the agency’s historic high Average Daily Population figures of 59,000+ souls—roughly 140% of the beds Congress funded.
The Times couldn’t be bothered to note last year that a panel of expert physicians concluded 95% of deaths in ICE custody from 2017-2021 were likely preventable, so it’s unsurprising that it treated this man’s death as the logical consequence of his arrest, rather than a natural product of the ICE carceral death machine.
Perhaps most notably, the Times, like every other major media outlet, does not acknowledge the discrepancy between the number of deaths in ICE custody ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons testified to in Congress earlier this year and the number the agency has announced. There’s one death missing, and virtually nobody’s talking about why.
As the Nashville Banner wrote about and I previously covered, the solution to that mystery may be the stillbirth of a U.S. citizen in ICE custody to a woman from Tennessee who’s since been deported.
In sum, the piece inexplicably neglects to connect Noviello’s death to ICE and the BOP’s deadly track record of neglect and abuse. It fails to explain why this Canadian national’s death is news when the deaths of 8 other men from non-majority white countries (plus Ukraine) is not. And it fails to place this death within the context of ICE’s expansion of detentions throughout the U.S., which puts human lives at risk.
If the Times printed any of these verifiable facts, it would make it harder to justify what Congress will do soon: Add $50 billion in multi-year funding to create a nationwide system of concentration and death camps. That system is nominally targeted towards migrants but it will ultimately be agnostic as to who’s filling them so long as they’re full. Domestic enemies and protestors, journalists, judges, maybe a few federal and state legislators. All of us will soon face the prospect of disappearance and rendition to these sites of death-making. The imminent threat this poses to everyone could be addressed if it were acknowledged. But it’s not.
I am fully aware how much of a hater I sound like when I level these critiques. I should be glad they’ve taken interest, and encourage them to do a deeper dive. Any port in a storm, right? I’m sorry, but I cannot accept that invitation, because stenographing the government’s story while posthumously criminalizing the person who died to imply that he deserved it is exactly how we got where we are.
The bottom line, from my perspective at least, is that big, national, corporate media outlets are not going to provide the information immigrant communities and their allies need to survive. They’re going to amplify the narratives of the state in order to preserve its legitimacy.
And that, dear readers, is exactly why you matter. Why we matter. Telling these stories with care and compassion and courage takes time, money, and commitment. The world we currently struggle to survive does its best to strip us of these resources. By connecting with each other and strategically sharing our resources, we push back on the system that produced the stenography. I am grateful to all of you for being intentional about where you put your attention and your resources, and deeply hopeful that our connections will be our greatest tool for liberation.