What are the year-by-year death counts in ICE custody 2009–2016 as listed in the ICE FOIA PDF (download and parse the document)?

1. What the official FOIA document is and where it lives

ICE’s FOIA library includes a document titled “List of Deaths in ICE Custody Data from: 10/01/2003 to 06/05/2017,” which is the primary source the user refers to and appears to contain individual entries (date, facility, cause) across years including 2009–2016 ^[1]; ICE’s FOIA/reports pages also catalog detainee death review reports and related releases ^[3]. The PDF itself is the authoritative listing that would allow unambiguous year-by-year counts, but the copy and individual records must be opened and parsed to generate those counts; the search results here reference the file but do not supply an extracted tally ^{[1] [3]}.

2. What secondary reporting says (and the discrepancies)

Advocacy and research groups that used ICE FOIA releases report differing totals and emphasize undercounting and missing death reviews: Human Rights Watch and partners reviewed ICE death reviews released in mid-2016 and noted ICE had acknowledged a set of deaths but did not release reviews for all incidents (HRW notes 18 reviews covering 31 deaths since May 2012 in documents released June 2016) ^[4], while other nonprofit reports compiled from FOIA materials concluded that ICE reported 24 deaths but released only 17 reviews in an earlier period ^[5]. The American Immigration Council and allied groups give summary numbers for longer spans (e.g., 165 deaths since 2003 as of 2025 and ten deaths in FY2016) but those figures are aggregate and sometimes fiscal-year–based rather than calendar-year counts ^[6].

3. Why a clear year-by-year table is not presented here

The specific request asks for the year-by-year counts “as listed in the ICE FOIA PDF (download and parse the document).” The search results provided show the PDF’s existence ^{[1] [2]} but the record set delivered to this analysis does not include a parsed extraction of dates-to-counts from that PDF. Secondary summaries cite different bases (calendar year vs. fiscal year) and report partial FOIA releases, so relying on them would risk reproducing inconsistent or incomparable counts unless the actual FOIA PDF is parsed directly ^{[4] [6] [5]}.

4. How to get a definitive answer and the likely outcome

To provide the exact year-by-year counts requested, the FOIA PDF hosted at ICE’s FOIA library (document “detaineedeaths-2003-2017.pdf”) must be downloaded and parsed to count entries dated within each calendar year 2009–2016; that file is identified in ICE’s FOIA listings ^{[1] [3]}. Secondary sources corroborate that deaths are recorded in those FOIA materials and that advocacy groups have used them to compile tallies, but those groups also flag missing reviews and differing reporting conventions that can produce discrepancies if one mixes fiscal-year and calendar-year counts ^{[4] [5] [6]}.

5. Bottom line and recommendation

This analysis cannot, from the provided search snippets alone, produce an authoritative, citation-backed year-by-year table for 2009–2016 because the underlying ICE FOIA PDF (the explicit source the user named) was referenced but not parsed here ^[1]. The correct next step to answer the question definitively is to download ICE’s “List of Deaths in ICE Custody” PDF from the FOIA library ^[1], extract each record’s date field, and tally deaths per calendar year 2009–2016; until that direct parse is performed, any year-by-year numbers assembled from secondary reporting risk conflating fiscal vs. calendar years and repeating incomplete FOIA releases highlighted by Human Rights Watch and other groups ^{[4] [5] [6]}.