How many deaths were there in the deportation process when Obama was in office
Executive summary
The count depends on what is being measured: 56 people died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody during the Obama administration according to a FOIA-based NGO report, while independent reporting has identified dozens of deportees who were murdered after being returned to Central America during the last years of that presidency, with one study flagging as many as 83 such killings since January 2014 [1] [2] [3]. NGOs and watchdogs also point to a broader, harder-to-pin-down set of deaths tied to detention-system failures and post-removal violence that no single official tally in the provided reporting fully reconciles [4] [5].
1. What the most-cited tally counts — deaths in ICE custody
A detailed FOIA-driven analysis assembled by advocacy groups and summarized in the report Fatal Neglect counted 56 deaths in ICE custody during President Obama’s time in office, a figure repeatedly cited by the ACLU, Detention Watch Network and the National Immigrant Justice Center and picked up by other outlets [1] [2] [4]. That 56-person figure includes deaths from medical neglect, suicides (the report identifies six suicides among them) and other causes while people were detained by ICE, and is presented by NGOs as a conservative total drawn from internal documents and death reviews [1] [2].
2. A different tragedy — deportees murdered after return
Separately, investigative reporting has documented killings of people after formal removal from the United States; The Guardian’s investigation and an accompanying academic study identified as many as 83 deportees murdered on return to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras since January 2014, a period that falls within the Obama administration’s later years and highlights post-removal lethal risk [3]. That 83-number does not overlap directly with ICE in-custody deaths: it reflects victims killed in their countries of origin after deportation, and it stems from local newspaper and human-rights research rather than a single U.S. government dataset [3].
3. Why counts diverge — definitions, sources, and agendas
The divergence between the “56 in custody” figure and the “83 murdered after return” figure is methodological: one measures in-custody deaths inside U.S. facilities, the other tallies murders abroad after removal, and neither is a comprehensive accounting of all fatalities tangentially related to deportation proceedings [1] [3]. NGO reports, Human Rights Watch reviews and mainstream investigations rely on different document sets — FOIA releases, medical death reviews, local press — and each carries implicit perspectives and advocacy goals that shape what is emphasized and how gaps are characterized [4] [5] [3].
4. What watchdogs say about systemic causes
Human Rights Watch and NGOs argue that many of the in-custody deaths were linked to inadequate medical care, mental-health failures and inspection systems that overlooked violations; HRW’s review found medical failures that probably contributed to seven of eighteen reviewed deaths and flagged broader systemic risks [5]. The ACLU and partner organizations contend that ICE inspections repeatedly failed to identify or act on substandard medical care even when reviews showed it had contributed to fatalities, a central claim of Fatal Neglect [4] [2].
5. Limits of the public record and remaining questions
The sources provided do not present a single, official government tally that aggregates in-custody deaths, post-deportation killings, and deaths during removal operations across the entire Obama presidency; reporting therefore must piece together NGO FOIA counts, investigative journalism and human-rights reviews, each with coverage limits and potential biases [1] [3] [5]. Migration Policy Institute and DHS publications focus on removals and enforcement metrics rather than compiling a comprehensive death count tied to deportation processes, leaving gaps that the available reporting cannot fully close [6] [7].
6. Bottom line
Based on the reporting available here, the most defensible specific figures are: 56 people died in ICE custody during the Obama administration as counted by FOIA-based NGO research, and separate investigations identified up to 83 deportees murdered after return to three Central American countries since January 2014 — two overlapping but distinct kinds of fatalities that together underscore systemic risks in both detention and removal policy [1] [2] [3]. The lack of a single reconciled public dataset means further clarification requires access to consolidated government death records and cross-border mortality research, which the cited sources either partially provide or seek to compel through litigation and FOIA [4] [8].