Twenty people have died in ICE custody so far in 2025—making this the deadliest year for immigration detention since 2004.

And as the Trump administration ramps up its mass detention machine, experts say next year could be even worse.

WHAT’S GOING ON: ICE is currently holding nearly 60,000 people in immigration detention—the highest number in years. According to NPR’s review, the death toll has climbed steadily as the agency expands its capacity and pushes to detain more people. Twenty deaths in less than a year.

Twenty people who entered government custody alive and didn’t leave that way.

THE DETAILS: The surge in deaths tracks directly with the surge in detentions. This isn’t complicated math. More people crammed into a system that has long been criticized for inadequate medical care, mental health services, and basic oversight means more people dying.

The detention system relies heavily on private prison contractors whose profit motive doesn’t exactly align with “keeping people alive and healthy.”

OF COURSE: ICE is actively hiring and expanding operations, because apparently the response to a deadly system is to make it bigger.

The agency shows no signs of slowing down its enforcement push, which means detention numbers will likely keep climbing—and so will the body count.

THE MONEY: ICE isn’t just growing—it’s raking in historic levels of funding to do it. Congress approved nearly $9 billion for ICE in the latest spending bill, the highest ever. That includes billions earmarked for detention and deportation.

That money isn’t going toward safer conditions—it’s fueling a system that’s already killing people. Oversight and accountability? Not part of the budget.

WHY IT MATTERS: These aren’t statistics. These are people—many of them asylum seekers, many with families, all of them human beings who died in the custody of the U.S. government. Immigration detention isn’t prison for convicted criminals; it’s civil detention, often for people whose only “crime” is seeking a better life or fleeing danger. And yet they’re dying at rates we haven’t seen in two decades.

ZOOM OUT: The Trump administration has made mass deportation and detention central to its agenda, treating cruelty as a feature rather than a bug. When you build a system designed to warehouse as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible, with as little oversight as possible—this is what happens. Deaths aren’t an accident; they’re the predictable outcome of policy choices.

BOTTOM LINE: Twenty people are dead. The government knows the system is deadly. And they’re expanding it anyway. That’s not enforcement—that’s indifference to human life dressed up as border security.