The Mystery of the Missing 9th Death . . . Solved?
Does a Tennessee Mom's Stillbirth in ICE Custody Explain Why ICE Has Only Disclosed 8 Deaths Since January 20 when its Director Told Congress There've Been 9?
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The Missing 9th Death
Appearing before a U.S. House of Representatives oversight committee earlier this month, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said 9 people have died in his agency’s custody since January 20, 2025.
ICE has only posted information regarding 8 in-custody deaths to its website. This leaves observers like me confused and appears to violate Lyons’ pledge to Congress.
When and where did the undisclosed ninth death happen? And under what circumstances?
The lack of official answers more than two weeks after Lyons’ public pledge only begets more questions.
Perhaps Lyons just got the numbers wrong. That would be unfortunate, but not unexpected for the head of an agency that takes the value of each human life so un-seriously.
Or perhaps the death was of a child, and the agency is testing out the limits of its power to cover up deaths first on those of children in custody by claiming some perverse privacy rationale? We know, for instance, that the Biden administration was forced to reveal multiple undisclosed deaths in ORR custody after news broke of one child’s death in a Florida ORR shelter.
Or perhaps the death in custody wasn’t in a detention center, and instead, occurred in the field during an enforcement operation. That wouldn’t trigger the normal death in custody reporting workflows represented in ICE Policy No. 11003.5.
Death In-Custody In Utero?
A stunning piece out today by Areceli Crescencio with the fantastic Nashville Banner raises the possibility that the ninth death in custody Lyons referred to during his testimony was the stillborn son of Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus, a Guatemalan mother from Tennessee who ICE arrested, transported, and imprisoned at the LaSalle Corrections Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana.
“I begged the doctors,” she said. “I told them, ‘Please, take me to the hospital. I don’t feel well. I’m having contractions.’”
But she said they dismissed her concerns, telling her the pain was normal because the baby was growing.
“I told them it wasn’t normal,” she said. As a mother of six, she is intimately familiar with the pains of pregnancy.
On April 29, she was admitted to Ochsner LSU Health - Monroe Medical Center, where medical professionals documented LaSalle Corrections’ and ICE’s denial of prenatal care. As she delivered her child, Monterroso-Lemus recounted during an interview following her deportation to Guatemala, “[a guard] was sitting right there, watching me day and night. One time, they even shackled my feet because they thought I might escape.”
“I told them, ‘What you’re doing to me isn’t right.’”
Gary Bivens, Monterroso-Lemus’s partner who lives in Knoxville suburb Lenoir City, recalls being kept in the dark until it was too late:
I had a social worker call me and [say], ‘Well, what do you want to do with the baby’s remains?’” he said.
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“I said, ‘Excuse me? I just found out, like 20 minutes ago, that the baby’s deceased and you’re already calling me?’ That is so disrespectful in my opinion … like they were trying to rush it.”
Bivens told the Banner he felt pressured into cremating the remains and was then forced to pay for the shipment of the cremains to Tennessee.
He did not mince words in the aftermath:
“It’s unbelievable. It’s disgusting. I’m beside myself, I really am,” he said. “I’m ashamed to even call myself an American citizen. With what is going on in these facilities? … It’s costing people’s lives. It’s breaking families apart. It’s so inhumane. … It’s un-American. That’s what’s happening.”
He plans to “sell the house and everything [he’s] got,” saying he’s “coming down to Guatemala.”
A GoFundMe aimed at supporting the transition is here.
Monterroso-Lemus’s experiences will be all-too familiar for those with prior knowledge of LaSalle Corrections (which ran the now-cancelled Irwin Detention Center ICE Contract), the ICE New Orleans Field Office, and the agency’s recent abandonment of its prior approach to pregnancy, memorialized in a July 2021 Directive, 11032.4. But the fact that they’re familiar makes them no less egregious.
Louisiana’s fetal personhood statute recognizes “an unborn child” as “a natural person for whatever relates to its interests from the moment of conception.” And although the law specifies “[i]f the child is born dead, it shall be considered never to have existed as a person, except for the purposes of actions resulting from its wrongful death” (emphasis added).
So, is this missing 9th death? Or has ICE chosen to not even acknowledge that it occurred?
The agency did not respond to the Banner. I suspect they never will.
I strongly suspect this is not the only miscarriage in custody that’s occurred since January 20.
Migrant justice and mass incarceration are inextricably linked with reproductive justice.