What were the official causes of death in ICE custody by year from 2018–2025 and how many were ruled preventable?
Executive summary
The public record assembled by reporters, advocacy groups and ICE itself does not contain a complete, year-by-year table of official causes of death in ICE custody for 2018–2025 or a definitive count of how many were formally ruled “preventable”; independent investigations and reporting, however, identify patterns—medical deterioration, inadequate care, suicide and trauma-related deaths—and document that a large share of examined deaths were judged preventable by outside experts [1] [2] [3]. Available government summaries are partial and sometimes inconsistent with independent tallies, meaning any definitive year-by-year accounting is not reliably reconstructable from the sources at hand [4] [5].
1. What the official sources publish — incomplete and inconsistent
ICE maintains a Detainee Death Reporting page that outlines its notification and review process and provides individual death reports, but the page as captured in reporting does not present a consolidated, verified table covering every death from 2018–2025, and in late 2025 the agency’s online list lagged independent tallies (ICE’s policy and reporting framework described on its site; observers noted ICE’s 2025 list showed far fewer deaths than outside trackers) [4] [5]. Journalists at The Guardian and Reuters compiled counts showing 32 deaths in 2025 — the highest since 2004 — and multiple contemporaneous pieces emphasize ICE statements about procedure without supplying a neat cause-by-year breakdown [2] [6].
2. What independent investigations say about causes and preventability
Independent reviews and investigations paint a consistent picture of causes: many deaths involved failures of medical and mental health care (including untreated chronic illness, delayed emergency response and suicides), and some involved violence (including shootings) while people remained under ICE custody or supervision [1] [7]. The ACLU/American Oversight/Physicians for Human Rights “Deadly Failures” review of 52 deaths from 2017–2021 concluded that persistent medical and mental-health failings contributed to deaths and judged roughly 95 percent of those examined to have been preventable or possibly preventable with clinically appropriate care [1]. That finding is external to ICE’s own determinations and covers a defined sample rather than the full 2018–2025 period [1].
3. The 2025 spike: counts, causes and contested accounting
Reporting shows 2025 as an extreme year: multiple outlets and trackers reported 32 deaths in ICE custody in 2025, with December the deadliest month, and descriptions of causes in the year’s cases include apparent suicides, seizures, untreated medical conditions and deaths after shootings in custody [2] [6] [7]. Advocacy groups and congressional offices pressed the agency for details and tied the spike to rising detention populations and reduced oversight, while watchdogs documented plunging inspection rates that they say could exacerbate preventable harms [8] [3]. However, ICE’s public detainee-death web page was not in agreement with independent counts at year‑end 2025, illustrating the reporting gap between agency notices and third‑party tallies [5].
4. How many deaths were officially ruled “preventable”? — evidence gap
None of the supplied sources provides a comprehensive, official tally from ICE that lists, by year from 2018 through 2025, each decedent’s cause of death alongside a formal “preventable” or “not preventable” ruling; instead, the strongest claim about preventability comes from external expert review: the 2017–2021 review that found 95 percent of its 52 cases were preventable or possibly preventable [1]. Advocacy organizations and watchdog reporting describe many 2025 cases as plausibly preventable and link them to systemic failures, but those are not the same as agency-issued preventability determinations and the ICE public reporting does not appear to publish such summarized rulings across 2018–2025 in the sources provided [1] [3] [2].
5. What this means for readers and investigators
The evidence establishes clear patterns—medical neglect, mental‑health failures and, in some instances, violence or suicide are major drivers of deaths in custody—and independent experts have judged the majority of examined cases avoidable when clinically appropriate care was provided [1] [7]. At the same time, there is an absence of a single authoritative public dataset from ICE in the provided materials that itemizes causes and formal preventability rulings for every year 2018–2025; reconstructing that exact year-by-year official accounting would require ICE’s full death reports, coroner findings and any internal preventability determinations or releasing of consolidated statistics not present in the materials reviewed [4] [5].