Seven people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this month — four of them within a four-day span — making it the deadliest month for detainees in President Donald Trump’s second term.
This year had the most deaths in immigrant detention since 2004. The uptick in deaths comes as ICE wraps up the year with a record high of more than 68,000 people in detention, according to the agency’s detention statistics.
In notifications of detainees’ deaths, ICE stated two of the men — Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, a 46-year-old from Eritrea who had been detained for 215 days, and Nenko Stanev Gantchev, a 56-year-old from Bulgaria — died in processing centers. An additional five died in hospitals. One of them, 39-year-old Dalvin Francisco Rodriguez from Nicaragua, was found without a pulse at a Pennsylvania detention center on Dec. 4 and was pronounced dead 10 days later.