Where can I download ICE’s official detainee death reports and fiscal-year tallies to build a year-by-year table?
Executive summary
The official ICE detainee death reports are published on ICE’s Detainee Death Reporting page and individual PDF reports are provided beginning with Fiscal Year 2018 [1]. Fiscal-year tallies and annual detention statistics are published on ICE’s Detention Management / statistics pages and are also used by independent researchers and projects that assemble multi-year datasets [2] [3].
1. Where to download ICE’s official detainee death reports
ICE posts individual detainee death reports on its Detainee Death Reporting page; that page states congressional requirements from the DHS Appropriations Bill obligate ICE to make public all reports regarding in‑custody deaths within 90 days and provides a dropdown of deaths beginning in FY2018 [1]. The notification-and-reporting policy that governs those reports is also publicly available as a PDF on ICE’s site, which explains the internal reporting timeline and procedures for detainee deaths [4]. Lawyers’ groups and professional associations mirror or annotate those reports — for example, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) republishes ICE’s table of death reports beginning in FY2018 while noting the same statutory reporting requirement [5].
2. Where to download fiscal-year tallies and annual detention statistics
ICE’s Detention Management / statistics section publishes fiscal-year statistics including annual worksheets and year‑end reports; the site hosts searchable, sortable data tables and year-end summaries for FY2025, FY2026 and prior years that can be downloaded for analysis [2]. Those ICE statistics pages are the primary source for annual counts such as average daily population and other metrics that researchers use to compute death rates per person-years [2] [6]. Independent projects and data aggregators like the Deportation Data Project also republish historical ICE data and packaged releases that can simplify building multi-year tables [3].
3. Practical steps to assemble a year‑by‑year table
Download individual death-report PDFs from ICE’s detainee death reporting page [1] and download the corresponding fiscal-year data worksheets from the Detention Management statistics pages to capture counts, average daily population and year-end totals [2]; combine those files in a spreadsheet keyed by fiscal year to produce counts and rates. Use the ICE fiscal year convention (October–September) when aligning deaths to annual tallies, since ICE reports by fiscal year rather than calendar year [7]. For rate calculations and methodological precedents, peer-reviewed analyses of ICE detention deaths cite ICE’s posted counts and statistics as their source material and provide formulas and examples that can guide computations [6].
4. Important caveats, known reporting issues and timeliness
ICE warns that data tables may fluctuate during the fiscal year and are locked only at the fiscal‑year end, so monthly or interim downloads can change until the year is finalized [2]. Advocacy groups and reporting note occasional lags and that some deaths are announced through press releases before or instead of being immediately reflected on the central death-report page, meaning the official web list may not always include the latest incidents at first [8] [5]. Researchers should therefore cross-check ICE’s death-report page, the ICE newsroom and third‑party trackers to ensure completeness and should document whether an assembled table uses the ICE-locked year-end files or interim snapshots [1] [8] [2].
5. Alternate sources, verification and further reading
Independent data projects and watchdogs such as the Deportation Data Project republish ICE releases and have packaged historical datasets useful for longitudinal work [3], while academic studies that analyze FY2018–2023 deaths explicitly rely on ICE’s posted death counts and statistics as primary data [6]. Commercial charts and summaries (e.g., Statista) can be a quick visual reference but are derived from ICE’s fiscal-year reporting conventions and independent compilations, so they should be treated as secondary sources to be verified against ICE’s primary downloads [7].
6. Bottom line and next steps for a researcher
Start by downloading the death-report PDFs from ICE’s Detainee Death Reporting page and the fiscal-year worksheets from ICE’s Detention Management statistics pages, lock your workflow to ICE’s fiscal-year convention (Oct–Sep), and corroborate with the Deportation Data Project or academic datasets where helpful; track whether files are interim or year‑end locked to avoid shifting totals when a fiscal year is finalized [1] [2] [3] [6]. If any required detail is not available in the cited sources, recognize that this reporting reflects only what ICE and the noted third parties publish and that further FOIA or direct inquiries would be needed for additional internal records [1] [3].