The Annual Death Rate in Immigration Detention Rose in 2017 and Fell in 2018

Since the Trump Administrationannounced a punitive immigration detention policy in 2018 that separated families,reportshavesurfacedofimmigrantswhohavediedwhileindetention or shortly after being released tomedical facilities for treatment.   It’s understandable why news consumers and suppliers are interested in deaths in detention facilities given the Trump Administration’s actions on this issue, but the distinct impression from reading all of these stories is that being detained is more dangerous than ever. To check whether this was true or if this impression was just an artifact of  cognitivebias, I decided to estimate the annual death rate in immigration detention in the United States.   There are two primary pieces of data required to calculate this rate: The number of people in detention each year and the number of deaths.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) runs all of the detention facilities and they provide the numberofdeaths andadmissions.  The American Immigration Law Association provides some more recent numbers of deaths in detention, but I only include those that ICE also counts.   The admissions into ICE detention facilities variable is the proper one to use as it is closer to the number of unique individuals who were present in a detention facility in each year.  The numbers for both variables run through the end of Fiscal Year (FY) 2018.The FY2018 death rate in ICE immigration detention was 2.3 per 100,000 detainees, a 39 percent drop relati...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs