How many people died in ICE custody each year from 2009–2016 and how were those causes officially recorded?
Executive summary
The federal records ICE published under FOIA list every death in its custody and include a "final cause of death" entry, but the materials provided here contain only partial year-by-year totals for 2009–2016; the clearest explicitly cited figure in the provided reporting is that 12 people died in ICE custody in 2016 [1] [2]. ICE’s publicly posted lists (covering October 2003–June 2017) and subsequent reporting show causes recorded on those death reports range from natural disease and cardiac events to suicide and acute intoxication, while advocates and independent autopsies have challenged some official narratives and the completeness of ICE’s accounting [3] [4] [5] [6].
1. Official counts and where they live: ICE’s FOIA lists
The primary official source for in-custody deaths is the ICE “List of Deaths in ICE Custody” compiled under FOIA and published by ICE, which covers October 2003 through June 5, 2017 and includes, for each case, date of death, facility, and a “final cause of death” field [3]. Reporting assembled from those ICE lists — reproduced by nongovernmental compilations such as Prison Legal News — shows annual tallies can be pulled from the ICE dataset; the materials provided here explicitly cite that 12 deaths occurred in 2016 [2] and Wikipedia’s summary of those public records likewise lists 12 deaths for 2016 while giving summary counts for neighboring years [1].
2. How causes were officially recorded: categories on ICE death reports
ICE death-report entries supply a “final cause of death” that officials record in varied language — examples in the public lists include cardiac arrest/heart failure, cancer and other chronic disease, suicide (including hanging), acute intoxication or drug-related deaths, multi-system organ failure and asphyxia — reflecting conventional medicolegal categories rather than a single classification system [2] [4]. Academic and public-health analysis of ICE reports notes that ICE’s death reports include demographic, medical and custody-history detail alongside the stated cause, and that the agency’s reporting practice counts people as an ICE in-custody death even if the death occurs in a hospital after transfer while still under ICE custody [5] [3].
3. Disputes over accuracy, omissions and later revisions
Civil-rights groups and researchers warn the official counts and causes may understate or mischaracterize deaths: advocates have documented cases where detainees were released or transferred shortly before death and therefore not counted in some public tallies, and FOIA-driven research has alleged systemic inspection and medical-care failures that could make reported causes incomplete or misleading [1] [7] [8]. Independent autopsies and news reporting have also sometimes contradicted ICE’s initial accounts — for example, recent autopsy reporting in 2026 ruled a death a homicide due to asphyxia after ICE’s initial description attributed the case to an attempted suicide, illustrating how official cause determinations can be revised or contested [6] [9].
4. ICE’s stated reporting rules and congressional reforms
ICE’s own policy requires timely notification and publication of reports after detainee deaths and the agency says it uses a multilayered review process for each death; Congress further mandated public reporting of in-custody death reports beginning in FY2018 [10] [5]. Nevertheless, watchdogs and researchers point to gaps between policy and practice — citing delayed or redacted documents, differing counts across compilations, and concerns that ICE’s inspection regime has failed to root out systemic medical and custodial problems linked to fatalities [8] [7].
5. What can be known now and what remains unresolved
Based on the provided reporting, the ICE FOIA lists are the authoritative repository for deaths and recorded causes [3] [4], and the explicit, sourced figure available here is that 12 people died in ICE custody in 2016 [1] [2]. The full, year-by-year tallies for 2009–2015 are recorded in the ICE FOIA documents but those specific annual counts and the individual case entries were not fully excerpted in the materials supplied for this query; therefore it is not possible from the provided snippets alone to enumerate every 2009–2015 annual death total with complete citation without consulting the ICE FOIA PDF or aggregated datasets directly [3] [4]. Independent scrutiny — FOIA pulls, watchdog reports and medical-autopsy follow-ups — remains essential because advocates and investigative reporting have shown official cause listings are sometimes contested or revised after independent review [8] [7] [6].