Since taking office, President Donald Trump has put up some truly big numbers, increasing the number of immigrant detainees from 39,000 to 60,000. But with great power comes great responsibility, which is why the administration is now also increasing health care staffing at detention facilities.
What level of additional staffing might one expect when a detainee population has jumped by 50% in a matter of months? Well, according to the Department of Homeland Security, they need a whopping 40 new health care professionals, total. That includes doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, pharmacists and administrators, so … eight of each?
That seems like a downright paltry amount, one that won’t fix the fact that almost as many detainees have died in custody since Trump took office in January as those who died during the entirety of President Joe Biden’s term.
The administration’s official numbers show that 20 people have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this year. Under Biden, there were 24 deaths total. Trump is managing to put up numbers that are even worse than deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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This isn’t surprising when the administration is putting people in places like Alligator Alcatraz, the hastily-constructed tent city where detainees went days without showering and toilets didn’t flush. Or the Massachusetts ICE office that packed 35 men into one room with one toilet. Or the notorious Krome Detention Center in Miami, Florida, where detainees were only given a glass of water and a cup of rice per day. Multiple facilities have detainees with tuberculosis.
Twenty deaths in custody is the official number—but we know that may bear no relation whatsoever to actual numbers, because the administration is making a comprehensive effort to hide ICE’s actions. The agency’s online database tracking where detainees are located is a mess, at times so much so that attorneys can’t even find their clients.
The administration has also restricted congressional oversight of the facilities, which is super against the law, but no one is stopping them as they continue to block elected officials from visiting the Broadview detention center in Illinois.
meanwhile, at least one-quarter of detention facilities are above their contractual capacity.
These are just the official detention centers, of course, as ICE is also holding people at hotels, military bases, and short-term holding centers that have been magically repurposed as regular detention centers.
DHS also shut down its oversight office back in March, kicking over 500 civil rights complaints to the curb and making it impossible to file anything new. They were later ordered by a court to restore that office, but after doing so, the administration laid off hundreds of staffers anyway.
So let’s not pretend that the hiring of a paltry 40 more people is genuinely intended to address concerns about detainees dying in custody. After all, the administration’s platonic ideal of a prison is CECOT, El Salvador’s notoriously brutal Terrorism Confinement Center.
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After deporting hundreds of immigrants there in violation of a court order, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went to CECOT to do some content creation, which is a totally cool and normal thing to do at a prison, right? Especially one that crams 156 inmates into a cell with only two toilets where lights blaze 24 hours a day. Unless you’re in solitary confinement, and then it’s pitch black. Hundreds of people have died in Salvadoran prisons and are routinely denied food and medicine.
That’s what the Trump administration wants. That’s what it is trying to achieve. They want mass incarceration and they want it cheap and they want it brutal, so they don’t really care at all if people die.
Lisa Needham October 21, 2025 at 12:30AM From Daily Kos
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