When Parady La, a Cambodian American father and long-time Philadelphia resident, died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody earlier this year just three days after he was arrested, the agency released scant details about what happened.
La, 46, was “found distressed and stuporous with ongoing vomiting and abnormal vital signs” at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, according to the account ICE gave in a detainee death report. The next line in the report says only: “Later that day, medical staff responded to a medical emergency and found Mr. LA unresponsive and pulseless.”
He was then brought to a Philadelphia hospital, where ICE said he “remained unconscious with evidence of anoxic brain injury and multi-organ failure” and was ultimately pronounced dead.
More than seven months later, his family still doesn’t understand what happened in his final hours, or why no one was there to help him sooner. ICE has provided no further information about the “emergency” La suffered or what medical attention—if any—he received following his health troubles earlier in the day.
“There’s obviously a lot missing, a lot we don’t know, and the uncertainty of it all is really hard,” his daughter, Jazmine La, tells TIME. “It makes it hard to move on or grieve properly.”
La is one of more than 30 people who have died in ICE detention since October amid a surge in fatalities that has raised alarm from experts and left rights groups and a growing number of families searching for answers—and, perhaps, a measure of accountability.
The fatality rate in ICE custody reached a 22-year high in the opening months of this fiscal year, according to a report published in the medical journal JAMA earlier this year. Between the beginning of October and Jan. 19, the latest date in the report’s analysis, 18 immigration detainee deaths were reported; since then, at least 17 other people have died while being held by ICE.
By comparison, 3 people died in ICE detention in the full 2022 fiscal year, per the report.
A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses ICE, maintained in a statement to TIME that “there has been NO spike in deaths.”
“Consistent with data over the last decade, as of May 29, death rates in custody under the Trump administration are 0.009% of the detained population,” the spokesperson said. “As bed space has rapidly expanded, we have maintained a higher standard of care than most prisons that hold U.S. citizens—including providing access to proper medical care. For many illegal aliens this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”
The report, however, found that the rate of fatalities relative to the overall population in ICE custody has climbed significantly in recent years, increasing from 13 deaths per 100,000 person-years—a measure that combines the number of detainees with the amount of time they spent in ICE custody—in fiscal year 2023 to 47.5 per 100,000 last year. In the first three and a half months of the current fiscal year, it spiked higher still, to 88.9 per 100,000.
Clinical and legal experts contend that this rise in the death rate in ICE detention is linked to the creation of more detention centers, an increase in the number of people in the agency’s custody, and a lack of sufficient oversight within the facilities.
The decades-high fatality rate comes as President Donald Trump has waged a large-scale crackdown on immigration since the beginning of his second term that has seen the number of detainees in ICE custody rapidly swell. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research and data organization based at Syracuse University that draws on government records, the number of people in ICE detention rose from roughly 40,000 shortly before Trump returned to the White House to over 68,000 in February––about a 70% increase in detainees.
Meanwhile, amid the rise in fatalities ICE has reduced the information it makes public about detainees’ deaths. And last month, the agency announced it would stop reporting instances when people die soon after being released from its custody altogether.
What’s causing the rise in detainee deaths?
The causes of death in individual cases of mortality in ICE custody “are identifiable and amenable to intervention,” Sanjay Basu, one of the authors of the report published in JAMA and the co-founder of Waymark, a medical services provider, tells TIME. “These are not rare genetic diseases or very-difficult-to-treat things. These are things that any doctor in the community routinely prevents deaths from.”
Between fiscal year 2021 and the opening months of 2026, the report published in JAMA found that cardiovascular causes accounted for 18.5% of fatalities in ICE custody; infectious causes—including COVID-19—for about 13.8%; suicide for 10.8%; “neurologic” causes for 7.7%; and other or undertermined causes for 49.2%.
Basu says that a “very steep rise in mental health–related mortality stuck out as profound” in his and his colleagues’ research.
An Associated Press investigation published earlier this year found that ICE detainees are dying by suicide at an increased rate under the Trump Administration, a rise that is outpacing the growth in the detainee population. At least 10 detainees have died by suicide since Trump returned to office last January, according to the AP report. By comparison, there was one reported death by suicide in 2024.
Basu also notes that there were “lots of treatable infections killing people in custody.” And in reference to the largest category of deaths, those from “undetermined” causes, he says that “to have almost half of these deaths in a system that can’t be classified into a standard clinical category is extremely unusual from a medical perspective.” It suggests, he says, “something very wrong with the monitoring and the reporting infrastructure itself” within detention centers.
The DHS spokesperson said in their statement to TIME that “it is a longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody. This includes medical, dental, and mental health services as available, and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.”
But Basu and other experts assert that the increased rate of deaths in detention is linked to a lack of medical supervision across detention sites and an increased detainee population.
“Recent increases in mortality occurred alongside major operational changes reported in 2025, including disrupted or terminated oversight mechanisms, rapid detention expansion with reports of overcrowding, and potentially delayed medical care,” the report reads. Basu also confirms to TIME that his and his colleagues’ research has shown a concentration of deaths in “facilities that are new and rapidly expanded.”
“What we observed within the data was concerning, in that the U.S. immigration detention facilities we had data on seem to operate with pretty limited independent medical oversight and very inconsistent adherence to clinical standards,” Basu adds.
Sharon Dolovich, a professor of law at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, tells TIME that there is “no question in my mind” that a lack of medical oversight is one of the biggest contributing factors to the increase in detention center deaths.
“Although ICE has been operating detention centers now for over 20 years, the rapid expansion has meant that they’re creating institutions out of nothing, and just as a practical matter, they’re bringing in people who haven’t done this before,” says Dolovich, who directed the Behind Bars Data Project, which compiled the first full dataset on deaths in ICE custody going back to 2003. “So that’s a kind of perfect recipe for unsafe and unhealthy conditions.”
A search for answers
Five months before Parady La’s death, Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old Chinese national, died after just five days in ICE custody.
According to to an autopsy report obtained by TIME, Ge died by suicide. The report notes that he had a “clinical history of a psychiatric malady” and “reportedly has a psychiatric history,” a fact Ge’s brother, Yanfeng Ge, corroborates.
However, a death detainee report released by ICE directly after Ge’s death stated that he had denied “any past medical or mental health conditions,” upon being transferred from Dauphin County Prison in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania––the largest immigration detention center on in the northeast.
David Rankin, a partner at the law firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman who is representing Yanfeng Ge and his family, asserts that ICE must have known about Ge’s mental health history if those details were included in the autopsy report.
“The only way that the person performing the autopsy would know there’s a psych history is if ICE told them. The only way ICE would know if there’s a psych history is if they had that information. So ICE’s denials of this are not really credible,” says Rankin. “It is clear that DHS kept Mr. Ge isolated, away from anyone who spoke his language, and failed to treat his mental health condition,” Rankin added in a statement to TIME. “How do you let someone wander through a facility unmonitored and provide him the means to do self-harm? It’s unacceptable.”
ICE also claims in its detainee death report that when Ge was transferred from Dauphin County Prison to the detention center, he arrived “without a … medical transfer summary,” which would have detailed his mental health history. But Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas, who oversees the prison from which Chaofeng Ge was transferred, tells TIME that to his understanding Ge’s records were handed over to ICE.
“There is real risk in these types of collaborations, and I believe Dauphin County Prison is placed at high risk each time we transfer an individual into the care and custody of ICE,” Douglas says.
Another confounding detail surrounding Ge’s death is that when he was found, his hands and feet were bound, and bedsheet strips were tied around his chest, according to his autopsy report. The report also notes that the restraints were applied before his death, since they caused bruising, which requires blood flow. For Yanfeng Ge and his legal counsel, these details have raised doubt about the nature of Ge’s death and its designation as a suicide.
Before his brother’s death, Yanfeng, who doesn’t speak English, made attempts to get in touch with Chaofeng while he was in ICE custody, but he couldn’t understand the instructions being given to him by the operator for the collect call, and said it was “nearly impossible” to make contact as a result.
The brothers were born into poverty in a village in the Henan province in China, where they struggled to find food. They came to the U.S. via the Mexican border around the end of 2023 in search of a better life and lived together in an apartment in Flushing, Queens, in New York City, which has a large Chinese immigrant population.
Today, just over a year since Chaofeng’s death, Yanfeng still lives in the bedroom that they used to share. His legal team is continuing to press the government for answers about what happened.
“My brother, even if he came to the U.S., he didn’t get a happy ending,” Yanfeng says.
Jazmine La, too, is still seeking answers from the government following her father’s death.
She received a call last January while she was at work from her mother, who told her that her father had been detained and was in the hospital. “I hadn’t seen him for a few months before that,” Jazmine says. “And so to get to the hospital and see him completely not there, not responsive, it was really hard. It was heartbreaking.”
Parady La was “adventurous and full of life,” Jazmine recalls. Her mother was the breadwinner of their family, “so he was always at home with me, and we were always on the go,” she says. The two would walk along South Street, a bohemian corridor in Philadelphia. He taught her how to play tennis, and the flute. He loved fashion, especially sneakers. “His shoes had to be crispy-white,” Jazmine remembers. “He would wash and clean them like once a week with a toothbrush.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a Freedom of Information Act request for more details on the circumstances of Parady’s death in February. And now, Jazmine’s family’s lawyer, Jonathan Feinberg of the law firm Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin, is in the process of filing a wrongful death claim with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project.
“Based on what we’ve seen so far, there’s little question in my mind that Parady La’s death could have been prevented,” Feinberg tells TIME. “And someone, or some collection of people, made serious mistakes that led to his death.”
DHS’s internal watchdog has launched two reviews to investigate the increase in deaths in immigration detention amid the rising detainee population and whether detention centers are following use-of-force standards during interactions with detainees.
For now, though, questions continue to loom over the federal government’s expanding network of detention centers and the mounting number of deaths occurring inside their walls..
“There isn’t a tradition in this country of treating deaths in custody seriously enough to make sure that we understand what went wrong and making sure that the public also understands what went wrong,” Dolovich says.
“The system hasn’t demonstrated the ability to characterize its own mortality,” Basu asserts—and “we can’t fix what we can understand.”
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