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Reports emerged this week of the death of two more immigrants in the custody of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Emmanuel Damas, 56, a Haitian asylum seeker, reportedly died from an infection linked to a toothache that his family said went untreated for two weeks while Damas was incarcerated at the Florence Correctional Center in Arizona.
Damas appears to be the tenth person to die while in ICE custody in 2026, which would bring the total number of people to die while incarcerated by the agency under President Donald Trump to at least 39. Damas’s death was first reported by the Arizona Daily Star on March 4. That day, ICE announced that 48-year-old Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes had died in a California hospital on February 27 after falling ill at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where the population has skyrocketed in recent months.
Chandler City Councilwoman Christine Ellis, a Haitian American and registered nurse representing the Arizona community near the prison where Damas was incarcerated, spoke to his family and relayed information to local journalists. ICE has not released a statement on Damas and did not immediately respond to a request from Truthout.
“Nobody should die from a toothache,” Ellis told the Arizona Daily Star. “Something has to be done.”
According to Ellis’s account in the Daily Star, Damas first reported a toothache to staff at the prison on February 12 and was given ibuprofen. Family members say he complained for nearly two weeks before collapsing after developing a dangerous infection. He was transferred to a hospital and died on March 2. The family also told Ellis that another detainee reported hearing prison staff laughing and saying Damas was faking as he cried for help.
While ICE has not yet made an official announcement of Damas’s death, the agency did release a statement on the death of Gutierrez-Reyes, who died last month.
Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University who analyzes ICE data, noted that the statement made a startling and easily debunked claim: “This is the best health care that many aliens have received in their entire lives.”
“When the [Department of Homeland Security] Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs asserts through official channels that ICE detention provides the best healthcare many detainees have ever received, that claim does not merely describe a policy reality or a policy aspiration,” Kocher wrote on March 4. “It actively forecloses accountability by reframing systemic neglect as institutional generosity.”
According to Kocher, there is no way to reconcile the claim that ICE detention provides “the best healthcare” many detainees have ever received with what Damas experienced at Florence Correctional Center, a state prison that contracts with ICE.
“What Damas experienced in the weeks before his death … is not a one-off experience,” Kocher wrote. “At this point, it’s a well-documented pattern in which complaints go unaddressed, suffering is dismissed or mocked, and transfer to emergency medical care comes only after immigrants’ bodies have already begun to fail.”
The families of both Damas and Gutierrez-Reyes say the men were denied medical care despite repeated requests, following a disturbing pattern that has emerged across the country. As Truthout has reported, people are dying preventable deaths in ICE’s rapidly expanding network of immigration prisons and tent camps, despite the agency’s repeated claims that adequate medical care is provided.
Disease spreads rapidly in confinement, and children are falling ill at a massive prison for families in Texas. At least two cases of measles were reported in early February at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, and an 18-month-old girl was recently hospitalized with a lung infection.
Both COVID-19 and tuberculosis have been reported at the notorious Camp East Montana facility at the Fort Bliss military base in Texas, where multiple people have died this year, including one man whose death after a struggle with guards was determined by the county medical examiner to be a homicide. ICE claims Geraldo Lunas Campos attempted suicide, but an eyewitness said guards beat him while he yelled “I can’t breathe.”
The reality of what goes on inside ICE jails and prisons often only slowly leaks out through families, victims, lawsuits, and independent investigations. Researchers found that 95 percent of deaths recorded during Trump’s first term were preventable.
In an online post, the family of Gutierrez-Reyes said he was the sole financial provider for his wife and son.
“Alberto’s family is now left to navigate this heartbreaking time without the person they depended on most,” the family wrote on GoFundMe. The government of Mexico is reportedly demanding the U.S. government investigate the death of one of its citizens.
News of the deaths came as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for an explosive hearing that capped off a tenure that Republicans increasingly see as a public relations disaster. Trump on March 5 announced he would be removing Noem from her position as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.
Noem fought in court to prevent Democrats in Congress from inspecting ICE prisons in their districts in a timely manner, but was ultimately forced by federal judges to allow oversight. Lawmakers warned Noem and other officials about reports of inedible food, medical neglect, and other abuses.
While Trump and others in the GOP seem most concerned about Noem’s many other scandals — which include luxury travel expenses, allegations of internal corruption, and speculation about her relationship with powerful “special advisor” and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — Noem is leaving a trail of death and constitutional destruction behind her.
Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, an immigration hawk known as Trump’s “Senate whisperer,” is reportedly the president’s pick for Noem’s replacement. Mullin must be confirmed by his colleagues in the Senate, and it remains to be seen how, if at all, he would handle the agency differently.
ICE’s rapidly expanding network of jails and prisons for immigrants has a long record of medical neglect, solitary confinement, and preventable deaths that predate Trump’s current term and crackdown on immigration. But now, the average number of people in ICE custody on any given day has exploded from under 40,000 to more than 70,000. Flush with an additional $45 billion from the GOP budget bill last year to expand incarceration of immigrants, ICE has the funding to hold up to 135,000 people at a time by the end of Trump’s term, according to the American Immigration Council.
Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which advocates for the rights of refugees, said nobody seeking safety in the U.S. should die in government custody. The Alliance is calling for federal authorities to launch independent investigations into all deaths in ICE custody and expand alternatives to detention for people pursuing legal status.
“The death of Emmanuel Damas is a devastating reminder that our immigration detention system is failing the most basic standard of human dignity,” Jozef said in a statement this week. “People seeking safety should not die from untreated medical conditions while in government custody.”
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