21 People Died in Immigration Detention in 2020

Alex NowrastehThe detention of illegal immigrants is an important part of immigration enforcement. 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 years, manyreportshavesurfacedofimmigrantswhohavediedwhileindetention or shortly after being released tomedical facilities for treatment. This problem has worsened during theCOVID-19 pandemic. 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 providethenumberofdeathsandadmissions.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, so I use that number. Both variables run through the end of Fiscal Year (FY) 2020.Twenty ‐​one people died in immigration detention in FY2020, up from 8 in FY2019. During the same time, the number of admissions into ICE detention facilities fell from510,854 to177,391 (Table 1). The num...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs