The spiritual well-being of the men and women detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become a well-documented concern among church leaders in recent weeks—from Pope Leo XIV in Rome to Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, a member of the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission. All to the good.

But as reports of overcrowded conditions, poor sanitation and supervision and rotten food at ICE detention facilities continue to circulate in the media and among immigrant advocates, the physical well-being of detainees has also come under scrutiny. An emergency class action lawsuit alleging inhumane conditions and violations of civil rights at ICE’s Broadview Processing Center near Chicago’s Midway Airport was filed on Oct. 31.

According to the suit, the Broadview facility is meant to serve as a short-term “holding facility” with a 12-hour limit on how long people can be detained there. “However, [ICE and the Department of Homeland Security] are holding detainees at the overcrowded facility for multiple days and even weeks while denying them access to sufficient food, water, showers, hygiene products, and medical care. There are no beds or blankets, and detainees are forced to sleep on the cold and dirty floor.”

“Everyone, no matter their legal status, has the right to access counsel and to not be subject to horrific and inhumane conditions,” Alexa Van Brunt, the director of the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. The center is among the group of advocates representing immigrant plaintiffs.

“Community members are being kidnapped off the streets, packed in [holding] cells, denied food, medical care and basic necessities, and forced to sign away their legal rights,” Ms. Van Brunt said. “This is a vicious abuse of power and gross violation of basic human rights by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. It must end now.”

A federal judge ordered ICE and D.H.S. officials to improve conditions at Broadview on Nov. 5.

Detentions—and deaths—are up sharply

Adding to alarm about conditions in detention facilities has been a spike in the number of detainee deaths reported for the 2025 fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30. ICE officials reported 18 deaths among detainees, but advocates at the American Immigration Council reached a count of 23 after reviewing ICE press releases and believe the actual loss of life could be higher.

“The way that ICE defines a death in detention is pretty narrow,” Rebekah Wolf, a staff attorney for the council, explained. Detainees who become seriously ill may be removed from detention and die at a medical facility off-site. “ICE sometimes does not report those as someone who has died in detention,” she said.

Huabing Xie, a Chinese national, became the last detainee to die this fiscal year while under ICE custody after suffering a seizure at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, Calif., on Sept. 29. He is not included in the agency’s official tally.

Whatever the final F.Y. 2025 tally of deaths proves to be, the current official number is still substantially higher than the 12 deaths reported in F.Y. 2024 and far higher than the typical loss of life under detention reported during the Biden administration. In F.Y. 2023, just four deaths at ICE detention sites were recorded; three deaths were reported in F.Y. 2022 and five in F.Y. 2021.

In fact, the last time deaths under ICE custody were this high was F.Y. 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when 21 deaths were recorded. In F.Y. 2019, eight deaths were reported, and six were recorded in F.Y. 2018, the first year ICE was compelled by Congress to publicly track deaths in detention. According to the A.I.C., deaths in detention this year are the highest since 2004, when 32 people died.

Kevin Appleby, the senior fellow for policy and communications at the Center for Migration Studies of New York, sees the spike in detention deaths as the inevitable outcome of a process of dehumanization begun by the Trump White House. “This administration has dehumanized immigrants and, accordingly, they are treating them inhumanely,” he said. “I think respect for human rights and human dignity has been lost.”

“This deportation campaign is driven by numbers and not by respect for basic human life, and you’re seeing the result of that,” he said.

Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso has been among the strongest voices in the U.S. church speaking on behalf of immigrant communities as the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts began in earnest in recent months. “Twenty-three people,” Bishop Seitz marveled, pondering the number of ICE detainees who died last year. “My God.”

Bishop Seitz said he has heard many stories this year of drug-addicted people incarcerated by ICE struggling to receive treatment and of detained pregnant women being denied appropriate care.

“So some [detainees] might have been dealing with drug addiction,” Bishop Seitz said. “We have a lot of drug addicted people in our country, right? Why aren’t they being treated? Isn’t that our responsibility?”

Officials from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to multiple requests for comment about detention deaths for this report. It is unclear how much the ongoing government shutdown may have proved an obstacle to an official response.

Speaking on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in a statement emailed to America, spokesperson Chieko Noguchi said U.S. bishops “are of course concerned with any deaths in detention facilities and disturbed by the recent reports of the increase in the rates of death.”

“The USCCB has repeatedly discouraged unnecessary detention in favor of more humane, community-based alternatives for nonviolent detainees,” she wrote. “At the very least, the USCCB insists that detainees are consistently provided with their basic needs including regular access to medical care, as well as pastoral and spiritual care, and religious services.”

A policy of ‘near-universal detention’

Detainees have died after seizures and cardiac arrest, tuberculosis or after health crises related to chronic illness like diabetes or drug or alcohol addiction. At least three died because of apparent suicide while in custody.

So why are so many deaths in ICE custody happening now? Part of the answer is related to the sharp increase in the number of detainees, which in 2025 averaged about 60,000 detainees each month. That figure is vastly higher than the 18,000 to 30,000 per month typically held in detention in recent years. According to Ms. Wolf, the higher monthly detention tallies are the result of an ICE policy “of near-universal detention.”

She explained that ICE agents previously had been allowed discretion over what to do with apprehended immigrants, particularly minors, pregnant women and people suffering from acute medical conditions. Agents could make judgment calls that could mean allowing apprehended immigrants to remain in their homes with ankle monitors, placed in alternative forms of confinement or released on parole while their immigration cases continued.

But in recent months, “the statistics of people being released from detention on parole by ICE are really stark,” she said. According to Ms. Wolf, in December 2024, the last full month of the Biden administration, about 5,000 people were released from detention under parole. She has seen monthly numbers consistently as low as 70 released parolees this year.

“The regulation and the statute that governs release from detention hasn’t changed,” she said. “What’s changed is the directive from the executive, whether that’s from the president directly or from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They have made a political decision not to release people.”

Ms. Wolf is certain the quota pressure that ICE agents are currently experiencing is part of the reason so many apprehended immigrants in poor health or suffering from alcoholism or drug addiction are being consigned to detention.

“People with medical conditions are not being released when our regulations suggest that in many cases they should,” Ms. Wolf said. “We’re just detaining sicker people.”

And when in custody, detainees have the right to petition for release because of medical problems. Those kinds of appeals are just not being heard now, Ms. Wolf said, at the same time oversight of ICE practices has been severely diminished.

She described the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liabilities, intended as an internal watchdog, as essentially nonfunctioning. The office had been completely closed by D.H.S. Secretary Kristi Noem in March, but that decision was reversed in May after immigration advocates and civil society groups filed suits seeking to restore the office. The C.R.C.L. office is mandated by Congress to respond to possible abuses within ICE and the Border Patrol.

Higher detainee numbers have also strained medical and supervisory resources, and in the end, medical conditions are being left untreated, medications are not being properly administered, and medical and mental health crises are going unnoticed, the A.I.C. report charges.

Retaining competent medical staff has been a long-standing problem at ICE facilities, Ms. Wolf said, but that deficit has been exacerbated by higher detention rates now. And diminished overall supervision because of overcrowding has meant some detainees have been able to take their own lives, while others have experienced fatal medical crises without being observed or properly treated.

According to Ms. Wolf, the risk of suicide is high at immigrant detention facilities. Many detainees have already suffered a great deal of psychological trauma in their lives and are facing new degrees of hopelessness as they confront deportation orders or find that ICE officials are appealing orders that they be released—conditions that warrant higher degrees of supervision that many facilities may not be able to maintain.

“It’s 23 human lives”

“It’s not happenstance that these deaths have increased,” Mr. Appleby said. “It’s not just circumstances. It’s a direct result of the policy of mass deportations.”

Mr. Appleby believes that Congress must recover its oversight role before conditions can improve and deaths in custody begin to decline. That will remain a difficult challenge “because many of the Republicans in the House are afraid to call the administration out on these matters.”

“It goes back to the environment that [the Trump administration] created against immigrants,” he said, “how they speak about them, how they treat them”—an atmosphere where immigrants are “looked at as less than human.”

“There’s not an incentive there for ICE to comply with basic standards that treat people as human beings,” Mr. Appleby said. “They’re not rewarded for that. They’re rewarded for the number of people that they can detain and deport.”

“Twenty-three deaths is not a statistic—it’s 23 human lives,” Anna Marie Gallagher, the executive director of Clinic, the U.S. church’s legal ministry for immigrants, said in a statement emailed to America.

“Catholic social teaching calls us to protect life and care for the vulnerable,” Ms. Gallagher wrote. “Detention should never be the default when humane, community-based alternatives exist and are proven to work.”

Bishop Seitz pointed out that under U.S. law, crossing the border without the proper paperwork is a misdemeanor, but “even for people who feel that crossing a border without authorization is a serious crime…are they really willing to say it’s worth [risking people’s lives]? People who have not committed a crime, people who have lived here peaceably and contributed to their community for years?”

“If they look at those statistics, can they be satisfied with that?”

“Where’s the value of life here?” Bishop Seitz asked, “especially for us Catholics who are so convicted about the life of a person from conception to natural death? Do we just take a pause on that here because they’re immigrants?”

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For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week, read about how church leaders in Brazil responded to a devastating police raid in Rio de Janeiro and learn how the U.S. church prepares to respond to a mass deportation regime.

This article appears in January 2026.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).