What is unfolding inside the United States’ immigration enforcement system should concern anyone who still believes that democracies are defined as much by restraint as by power. The fatal shooting of protester Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7 has once again thrown the spotlight on the aggressive posture adopted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the more disturbing story lies beyond the protests, inside detention centres that rarely command sustained public attention. In just the first ten days of 2026, at least four people died while in ICE custody. These deaths followed a year in which fatalities in immigration detention hit their highest level in two decades, even as the detained population surged past 68,000. Together, they point to a system under strain, expanding rapidly, shedding safeguards, and showing worrying signs of institutional indifference to human life.
The early 2026 deaths are not anomalies; they are symptoms of a larger issue. All four detainees who died this January were men between 42 and 68 years of age, drawn from Honduras, Cuba and Cambodia. Two deaths were attributed to heart-related conditions, while the causes of the remaining deaths were either vaguely explained or still under investigation. Such official language has become familiar over the years, often offering procedural closure without moral clarity. What makes the numbers more alarming is their context. In 2025, at least 30 people died in ICE custody, making it the deadliest year for detainees since 2004, shortly after the agency’s creation. That single year’s toll exceeded the combined deaths recorded over the previous four years. This is not the mark of an enforcement system simply enforcing the law; it is evidence of a detention apparatus growing faster than its capacity for care, oversight, and accountability.
Much of this crisis is driven by scale. According to a recent report by the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the average daily population in ICE detention rose by nearly 75 per cent in 2025, from about 40,000 at the start of the year to over 66,000 by early December. Congress has authorised $45 billion in funding for immigration detention through fiscal year 2029, opening the door for a system that could more than triple in size within four years. Expansion, in theory, need not be cruel. But when growth is paired with policy choices that prioritise speed, visibility and deterrence over due process, the results are predictable. The infrastructure has ballooned, with more than 100 additional detention facilities coming online by the end of 2025, including hastily erected tent camps within the United States. Reports describe harsh conditions, overcrowding and inadequate medical care. Unsurprisingly, more people died in detention last year than in the previous four years combined.
Equally troubling is who is now being detained. The rhetoric of targeting hardened criminals has not matched reality. Arrests of individuals with no criminal record increased by an astonishing 2,450 per cent during Donald Trump’s first year back in office. As a result, the share of detainees without criminal histories jumped from just 6 per cent in January 2025 to 41 per cent by December. This shift did not occur by accident. It was driven by enforcement strategies that rely on at-large arrests, workplace raids, roving patrols, and the re-arrest of people who show up for immigration court hearings or routine check-ins. Detention, once framed as a last resort, has become the default. Release has become the exception. By November 2025, ICE was deporting more than 14 people directly from custody for every one person released, a stark reversal from the year before, when releases outnumbered deportations.
The human consequences of this approach are magnified by the hollowing out of oversight. Staffing at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties has fallen from 150 to just 22. The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman has been cut from 110 staff members to 10. Fewer eyes mean fewer questions asked, fewer interventions made, and fewer lives saved. Civil rights groups argue, with growing evidence, that many of the deaths in ICE custody were preventable. A 2024 report by the American Civil Liberties Union concluded that up to 95 per cent of deaths in detention could have been avoided with timely and adequate medical care. When medical neglect becomes routine, and oversight is treated as expendable, detention shifts from administrative custody to something far more punitive and dangerous.
For an Indian reader, this moment in American immigration policy offers an uncomfortable lesson. It shows how quickly a democracy’s enforcement machinery can slip from regulation to coercion, from order to excess, when fear and political signalling take precedence over institutional balance. The United States often presents itself as a global benchmark for the rule of law and human rights. Yet the trajectory of ICE detention today raises questions about whether enforcement goals have eclipsed foundational principles of proportionality, dignity and accountability. Systems built to manage migration are now producing avoidable deaths, prolonged confinement and quiet suffering far from public view. Immigration control is a legitimate state function; turning detention into an instrument of pressure and attrition is not. When a government measures success by how many people it detains and deports rather than how fairly it adjudicates, the damage extends beyond migrants. It corrodes the credibility of institutions themselves. What is unfolding in America’s detention centres is not merely a policy failure. It is a warning about what happens when power expands unchecked and humanity is treated as collateral.