The federal agency responsible for detaining tens of thousands of immigrants has quietly eliminated its requirement to report deaths that occur within 30 days of a person being released from custody. The change means that when a detainee dies of an illness contracted inside, or from injuries sustained while locked up, or from medical neglect that began behind bars, the government will no longer have to tell the public about it.
In a memo sent to agency employees Thursday and reviewed by The Washington Post, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director David Venturella announced that ICE is “returning to the standard practice of reporting deaths that occur while an individual is in agency custody.” The 30-day post-release reporting requirement, adopted in 2021 under the Biden administration, is gone.
The timing is not accidental. ICE reported 18 deaths of detainees in the first five months of this year. That pace puts 2026 on track to surpass last year’s toll of at least 30 deaths, which was the highest in two decades. The detained population has exploded under President Donald Trump’s second term, from about 39,700 people in mid-January 2025 to more than 68,000 at one point this year.
And here, at Delaney Hall in Newark, the crisis has a face and a name. The federal concentration camp, owned by the private prison company GEO Group, currently holds about 1,000 people, most without charges and without trial.
Six hundred of them are on a hunger strike that has now lasted 11 days. They are protesting conditions that human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who spoke at a rally outside the facility on Tuesday, described as functioning less like a jail and more like a torture chamber.
“The food is rancid and infested with bugs,” Donziger told the crowd. “People are being denied medical care. One full-time doctor serves the medical needs of all 900 detainees.”
He called on New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill to force the facility closed and demanded that state police stop coordinating with ICE to attack peaceful protesters with tear gas and batons.
The GEO Group, which runs Delaney Hall, is no stranger to allegations of cruelty. The company donates heavily to Trump and has built a business model that profits from human rights abuses.
Donziger knows the company well. After he won a landmark $10 billion pollution case against Chevron in Ecuador, GEO employees subjected him to harassing round-the-clock check-in calls during his 993-day house arrest. There were nights, he said, that he could not sleep more than two hours straight.
The 30-day reporting requirement that ICE just eliminated was not some bureaucratic nicety. It was adopted precisely because the agency had learned how to game the system.
In 2021, a man named Martin Vargas Arellano contracted the coronavirus while detained at the Adelanto detention center in California. He lay in a hospital bed, brain-dead and comatose, for a week before ICE released him from custody. He died three days later. Because he was no longer an ICE detainee, the agency did not report his death to Congress.
“The policy changed to make clear that ICE should not release people simply to avoid deaths in custody,” said Deborah Fleischaker, who was acting chief of staff at the time.
Now that policy is gone. And the message from the Trump administration could not be clearer: If you die on our watch, we will try to make sure no one counts it.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security defended the change as “common sense,” arguing that ICE should not be responsible for monitoring deaths that occur “weeks after leaving their custody.” But the math does not work. A person who leaves custody after weeks or months of neglect does not suddenly become healthy. A person who was denied medication, denied a doctor, denied the basic conditions of human dignity inside a detention center does not stop being that person the moment the door closes behind them.
Laboni Hoq, a Los Angeles-based civil rights lawyer who has gathered evidence through public records requests, said the 30-day requirement led to several government investigations into the deaths of former detainees who died shortly after release.
“Now to have that policy rescinded is devastating, in terms of ensuring proper standards are being met in detention facilities,” she said.
The nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight has now sued ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security, seeking autopsy reports, toxicology reports, incident reports and internal reviews related to deaths in federal immigration custody.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, says the agencies failed to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests filed in April. Under federal law, agencies generally have 20 business days to respond.
“Behind every death in immigration custody is a human being, and a family and community left searching for answers,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight. “At a moment when deaths in detention are rising, the administration has chosen to provide less information to the public while minimizing serious concerns about the growing death toll. That is precisely when transparency matters most.”
Until late last year, ICE routinely published detailed reports on deaths in its custody, including timelines and information about medical care. In December, the agency replaced those reports with summaries that omit many of those details.
Now it has eliminated the 30-day reporting window altogether. The pattern is unmistakable. The numbers are rising. The walls are closing in. And the agency is doing everything in its power to make sure the public does not see what is happening.
At the rally outside Delaney Hall, Donziger stood before dozens of community leaders and put it plainly. “The infliction of gratuitous cruelty appears to be official policy,” he said. He called on New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport to open a criminal investigation of the GEO Group and to prosecute company officials.
“Why the wait?” he asked. “The evidence just from (the) testimonies of those inside is overwhelming. Police should arrest the for-profit brutes running the place, not the courageous protesters trying to hold them accountable.”
New Jersey has become ground zero in the fight against what Donziger and others have called the neo-fascist policies of Trump Republicans.
The protesters outside Delaney Hall are exercising their constitutionally protected rights. They are being met with tear gas and batons deployed by state police acting in coordination with ICE.
Sherrill, the governor, has the power to change that. She has the power to close Delaney Hall. She has the power to order state police to stop attacking citizens who are demanding that their government stop killing people in its custody.
The clock is ticking. The bodies are piling up. And the agency responsible has decided that the best way to reduce complaints is to stop reporting the deaths. That is not transparency. That is not accountability. That is the behavior of an institution that knows exactly what it is doing and does not want anyone to see it.
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