Ice Kills Thirty In Custody

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Newark, NJ, USA - May 10, 2025: Delaney Hall is a secure detention facility near Newark Airport used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to hold illegal aliens accused of criminal activity. Editorial credit: George Wirt / Shutterstock.com

Four people died in ICE custody this week, proving the cruelty isn’t the arrest itself — it’s the neglect, indifference, and silence that follow once the doors lock.

I’ve been out of federal custody for a while now, but the memories don’t fade. They linger. They itch. They wake you up at night like a phantom pain from a limb you didn’t even know the government could amputate. Since my release from FCI Otisville, I’ve been very clear — borderline annoying, if you ask my former captors — about what it means to be human warehoused by the United States government.

Fifty-one days in solitary confinement. Three days without food. A sink and toilet that didn’t work, which is a polite way of saying I lived with my own waste. A broken window that let rain soak my bed like I was camping, minus the fun and marshmallows. Gnats. No ventilation. Temperatures pushing 100 degrees. And this wasn’t some secret black site in a failed state. This was a federal facility in the United States of America.

And here’s the part that matters: I am a U.S. citizen. I was the former personal attorney to the sitting President of the United States. I had a megaphone — family, friends, journalists, celebrities, members of Congress — people who noticed when I coughed, sneezed, or didn’t get fed. If that’s how the system treated someone with visibility, resources, and a last name people recognize, let me ask you something uncomfortable: what do you think happens to the people nobody is watching?

Now imagine you’re in ICE detention.

This month alone, four people died in immigration detention over the span of four days. December 12. December 14 — twice. December 15. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern. Or, as the ACLU’s Eunice Cho accurately put it, a “red-hot crisis.” When four human beings die in government custody in less than a workweek, the problem isn’t bad luck. It’s bad conditions.

The names matter. Jean Wilson Brutus, 41, Haitian, dead one day after entering ICE custody in Newark. Nenko Stanev Gantchev, 56, Bulgarian, died in Michigan. Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, 39, Nicaraguan, died in Mississippi. Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, 46, Eritrean, died in Pennsylvania. ICE says two died of “natural causes” and two from “medical complications,” which is bureaucratic shorthand for “please don’t ask follow-up questions.”

Thirty people — THIRTY — have died in ICE custody in 2025 alone; the highest number since 2004. That tally includes two people killed in a shooting at a Dallas ICE facility, because apparently even detention centers now need active-shooter disclaimers. Nearly 66,000 people are currently detained, a record high, while the Trump administration is asking Congress for $45 billion to expand immigration detention. More beds. More bodies. More risk. More death.

At the same time, oversight has been quietly strangled. Watchdog agencies closed, then half-reopened after public backlash. Lawyers and advocates say conditions are deteriorating unchecked. ICE, meanwhile, insists deaths are “less than 1%,” a statistic offered without math, methodology, or shame. Detention, they remind us, isn’t supposed to be punitive. Funny — because the people inside keep dying like it is.

Several of these deaths occurred within days of people being taken into custody, raising serious concerns about trauma, medical neglect, and the shock of arrest itself. If you’ve never experienced the moment when the state decides it owns your body, let me assure you — it’s not calming. It’s violent, even without bruises.

Members of Congress like Pramila Jayapal and Patty Murray are calling for oversight and accountability, describing the deaths as “appalling and unacceptable.” Lawsuits allege overcrowding, lack of beds, inadequate food, nonexistent medical care. ICE officials respond with press releases and confidence bordering on satire, claiming they maintain “higher standards of care than most prisons that hold U.S. citizens.”

Let me translate that for you: Don’t believe your lying eyes.

Here’s the truth they don’t want to say out loud. Immigration detention has become a business model built on volume, speed, and indifference. People are processed, parked, and ignored until something goes catastrophically wrong; and then it’s labeled unavoidable. Natural. Complicated.

I survived my time in custody only because people were watching. ICE detainees don’t get that luxury. No book deals. No TV hits. No army of reporters asking why the sink doesn’t work or why my medication didn’t arrive.

If this is how America treats the most vulnerable people in its care, then the problem isn’t immigration. It’s us. Because silence isn’t neutral; it’s permission. And history has never been kind to societies that confuse detention with justice and cruelty with control.

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