IRTF News

Between July 2025 and January 28, 2026, 35 people have died in immigration detention centers. But those are the ones we know about. So now there is a new independent tracker. Our (Portside.org) information comes from a variety of sources, primarily news reports, government data, and other sources such as immigration legal advocates. The agency involved is also included. About those agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are both active, though most people call all agents “ICE.” Border Patrol is an agency housed under Customs and Border Protection (CBP); all these agencies are within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Fields are left blank when those details are absent from reports. We will update this tracker as more information becomes available.

Adam Isacson from the Washington Office on Latin America examines the accountability gap in federal immigration enforcement. While DHS has written standards requiring deadly force only when "necessary" and when there's "imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury," these policies are rarely enforced. International standards require both necessity and proportionality—but U.S. agencies don't apply them.

This article by Geopolitical Economy portrays the discrepancy between propaganda agenda promoted by the US president, declaring himself a peace president and his actual actions, which have led to the bombing of 10 countries (more than any other president in US history has ever bombed), a staggering  $1.5 trillion in military expenditures and the fostering of countless trade conflicts that ultimately inflict themselves on the lower class US-American.

For every $1 that immigration deportation and prison contractors donated to GOP campaigns in 2024, these private companies stand to reap more than $11,000 in increased annual revenue.

As detention rates soar, there are more reports of inhumane and inadequate treatment inside migrant detention facilities. Sen. John Ossoff (D-GA) released a report on January 27, 2026 compiling “human rights abuses in U.S. immigration detention.” The report highlighted how immigration detention officials separated a breastfeeding mother from her infant child for months and that a newly postpartum detainee was unable to shower for weeks, among other findings.

Medical services are lacking. The majority are in the hands of local officials (e.g., county jails) and private contractors. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, as of October, has reportedly paused paying providers for migrant health care costs altogether.

Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Canadian activist and writer Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism and Undoing Border Imperialism, about the current moment. She articulates the correlations between law enforcement agencies fostering domestic militarization and the broader imperialist nature of settler colonialist states such as the US and Israel. 

Says Walia: 

...it’s critical to understand that ICE emerges from the post-9/11 so-called “War on Terror “context. The post-9/11 policies were a continuation of the war at home and the war abroad.

So in the 90s and the 80s, we kind of saw that the war on migrants was deeply connected to U.S. foreign policy and coups and interventions in South and Central America. In the post-9/11 climate, we saw that the war at home was a war on migrants through “anti-terror” arrests, security detentions, and Guantanamo Bay.

All of that was completely connected to imperialism in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia. the expansion of AFRICOM [United States Africa Command], etc. The war at home and the war abroad were completely merged together.

ICE was, in fact, the domestic arm of this imperial warfare. I think, as we look at ICE’s expansion over the past 20-plus years, it’s important to note similar reverberations. Right now, we see U.S. imperialism in Gaza, in Palestine, in support of the Zionist entity. Also, in the recent U.S. interventions in Venezuela.

The hardline approach to violence, a model used by President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, is gaining increasing support in Central America, a region that has been historically plagued by insecurity, whether related to gangs or drug trafficking.

Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras are three countries that have adopted measures similar to those implemented by the Salvadoran leader, despite the criticism he receives from human rights organizations.

This is the third investigative report released by the office of Senator Jon Ossoff (Georgia), identifying more than 1,000 credible reports of human rights abuses within US immigration detention since January 2025. There are undeniable patterns.

Through interviews, analysis of public reports, and site visits, the senator’s office, between January 20, 2025, and January 12, 2026, has received or identified 1037 credible reports of human rights abuses against individuals held in DHS-, HHS- and BOP-administrated facilities, county jails, and federal buildings across 28 U.S. states and Puerto Rico; at U.S. military bases, including Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, and Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas; and on chartered deportation flights.

Credible reports describe the following abuses:  Family Separation;  Medical Neglect;  Mistreatment of Pregnant Women;  Mistreatment of Children;  Physical and Sexual Abuse;  Denial of Adequate Food or Water;  Denial of Access to Attorneys;  Overcrowding and Unsanitary Living Conditions;  Exposure to Extreme Temperatures in Facilities; and  Imposed Sleep Deprivation.

Additionally, ICE has reported and confirmed 36 deaths in custody between January 20, 2025 and January 12, 2026, and two more deaths since January 12, 2026.  For the list, see https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/04/ice-2025-deaths-timeline

The article examines Honduras’s fragile political transition after a narrowly contested and widely questioned election, assessing the mixed legacy of the recent president (Castro), the deep crisis of the electoral system, and the enduring power of corruption and impunity. It analyzes the fragmented National Congress, the human rights risks tied to a private sector-driven economic agenda, and the renewed alignment with the United States under Trump, warning that without structural reforms and accountability, governance will rely on transactional politics rather than democratic legitimacy—_at high cost to civic space, Indigenous and Garifuna communities, and long-term stability.

The Lemkin Institute is gravely alarmed that the normalization of extremist rhetoric has reached the point where U.S. government agencies are now posting thinly veiled Nazi slogans. Nazi allusions have appeared with disturbing frequency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees both Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). DHS has openly engaged in messaging designed to resonate with men aligned with supremacist ideology. It has referenced a neo-Nazi anthem in a recruitment advertisement, circulated imagery invoking exclusionary white nationalist slogans, and repeatedly employed language long embedded in extremist propaganda.

The institute warns: "When societies allow violent and dehumanizing discourse to masquerade as legitimate political expression, they create the conditions for persecution, exclusion, and ultimately mass atrocity. "

There were 40,000 people in immigration detention in January 2025. Now that number is 73,000. ICE is now using more than 500 detention centers. Changes in arrest practices have led to a 2,450% increase in the number of people with no criminal record being held in ICE detention on any given day. Once people have been arrested, changes in policy have kept them locked up in detention centers for longer or indefinitely, including the establishment of an official no-release policy and the expanded use of “mandatory detention” laws to deny the right to seek bond.

Read a related article, "Immigration Detention Expansion in Trump's Second Term," here: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/immigration-detention/