8 People Died in Immigration Detention in 2019, 193 Since 2004

Alex NowrastehAn important portion of President Trump ’s immigration enforcement policy is immigrant detention. Immigrants who are apprehended at the border or in the interior of the United States are detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities until they are removed from the United States. In recent months, manyreportshavesurfacedofimmigrantswhohavediedwhileindetention or shortly after being released tomedical facilities for treatment. The rate of death in ICE detention facilities is an important metric of how humane those facilities are.There are two primary pieces of data required to calculate the death rate in immigration detention: 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 thenumberofdeaths 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 closest 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) 2019.Eight people died in immigration detention in FY2019, down from 10 in FY2018. During the same time, the number of admissions into ICE detention facilities increased from396,488 to510,854 (Table 1). The FY2019 death rate in ICE immigration detention was 1.6...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs