Which ICE detention facilities have had the most reported deaths since 2003, according to ICE’s official lists?
Executive summary
ICE’s own public reporting has documented dozens of deaths in custody since 2003, and independent trackers point to a small number of detention sites that appear repeatedly in those records; advocates’ analyses identify Eloy Detention Center (Eloy, AZ) and the Houston Contract Detention Facility (Houston, TX) as the facilities with the most reported deaths on ICE’s lists (Freedom for Immigrants) [1]. However, watchdog reports and FOIA findings show ICE’s official lists undercount some deaths through practices such as releasing detainees immediately prior to death, meaning facility tallies drawn from ICE lists likely understate the true human toll [2] [3].
1. What ICE’s lists explicitly provide and what they don’t
ICE publishes postmortem notices and a detainee-death reporting page that describe the agency’s notification, review and reporting procedures, but the official pages emphasize policy and case notices rather than producing a simple ranked table of facilities by death count; the ICE site explains standards for medical care and the reporting policy instituted in 2021 but does not itself present a definitive facility-by-facility mortality ranking in the materials cited here [4].
2. Which facilities show up most often in independent tallies of ICE’s lists
Freedom for Immigrants’ interactive map and reporting, which is built off ICE’s public death notices, finds that Eloy Detention Center in Arizona and the Houston Contract Detention Facility in Texas have recorded more deaths than other sites in the agency’s published lists, with Eloy repeatedly highlighted across reporting as one of the deadliest facilities in ICE custody records [1]. Independent advocacy work compiled by ACLU/DWN has likewise documented multiple deaths at Eloy — noting that, at one point, Eloy had become the site of the 10th death since October 2003 referenced in their review — reinforcing Eloy’s prominence in public death tallies derived from ICE records [5].
3. Why tallies drawn from ICE’s lists may undercount or misrepresent facility totals
Investigations and FOIA-driven reporting have found that ICE’s public lists do not necessarily capture every death of a person who was recently detained — the agency has acknowledged that releasing people shortly before they die reduces the number of deaths placed on its official list, and a 2009 FOIA lawsuit and later reporting found omissions and adjustments in the agency’s submissions to Congress and the public [2] [3]. American Oversight and ACLU analysis documents that historical lists counted roughly a hundred-plus deaths but that internal records, releases, and reporting practices mean facility-level totals based solely on ICE’s public notices are likely conservative [2] [3].
4. The recent surge in annual deaths and how that affects facility rankings
ICE’s death notices and media compilations show a sharp increase in reported deaths in 2025 — independent reporting counted 32 deaths in ICE custody that year, the highest annual figure since the agency began publishing comparable records, and multiple recent deaths clustered in specific facilities and states, including Texas and parts of the Southwest [6] [7]. That surge can change which facilities appear to have the most deaths in any given multi‑year tally, but the sources here that analyze historical facility counts still point to Eloy and Houston as persistent outliers in ICE’s public reporting [1] [6].
5. What the sources do and do not allow this analysis to conclude
Based on the available advocacy and investigative sources, Eloy Detention Center and the Houston Contract Detention Facility are the facilities most frequently identified as having the most reported deaths on ICE’s public lists [1] [5]. The record compiled here cannot definitively supply an absolute, ICE-certified ranking table for every facility from 2003 to the present because ICE’s own public pages cited emphasize policy and case-by-case notices rather than producing an exhaustive, easily sortable facility-by-facility aggregate in the materials provided, and independent analyses warn that ICE’s lists materially undercount deaths in some instances [4] [2] [3]. Readers should treat facility tallies derived from ICE notices as credible but potentially incomplete and consult ICE’s posted death notices and the datasets underpinning independent trackers for a line‑by‑line accounting where available [4] [1].