Daniel Cortes De La Valle had been in immigration detention for more than seven months — sleeping in dirty cells, being mocked by guards for his weight and being denied his epilepsy medication — when, in July 2023, he tried to hang himself. “‘I can’t anymore,’” Mr. Cortes De La Valle, 35, recalls thinking. “‘I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s like a horror movie.’”
Officers at the facility, the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, La., soon placed Mr. Cortes De La Valle on suicide watch. This meant solitary confinement, where he fought off biting ants and endured black mold on the wall and feces in his cell, according to a complaint he later filed against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the staff at the detention center. The lights, kept on 24 hours a day, aggravated his seizure condition.
In November 2023 he voluntarily accepted deportation to Colombia. In his complaint against ICE officials, he said that he attempted suicide four times during his year at the Jena facility, including twice that July. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security found that ICE and its contractor had discriminated against him.
Since January, the Trump administration has been pursuing its promised campaign to deport tens of thousands of immigrants. More than 60,000 people were in detention as of August, many of them in overcrowded facilities where some detainees sleep on bare floors, eat rotten food and often cannot access the medicines they need, according to immigration lawyers. Watching from Colombia, where he now lives, Mr. Cortes De La Valle reflects on what he would tell detainees: “Don’t give in to the dark place.”
But many have thoughts of suicide, and some have taken their own lives. At least 12 immigrants are known to have died in ICE custody since Jan. 1. They include at least two people by suicide: Jesus Molina-Veya, in June at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, and Chaofeng Ge, last month at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania.
The problem is not new. Under the Biden administration, 26 detainees died in ICE custody, of which at least four were either publicly reported as or suspected to be suicides.
But in recent years, and especially in recent months, immigration lawyers and advocacy groups have grown alarmed by persistent reports of suicide attempts and people expressing thoughts of suicide in detention facilities. Some of these are documented in ICE incident reports and audio recordings or logs of 9-1-1 calls from detention facilities obtained by watchdog groups and shared with The Times.
Many detention facilities are already ill-equipped to care for people in mental distress. Inspection reports from ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight reveal more than 150 lapses in self-harm and suicide prevention and intervention protocols at detention facilities from 2020 through recent months. That figure includes facilities that failed to regularly monitor detainees on suicide watch.
The Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, said that suicides in D.H.S. custody were “tragic and rare.” She added, “When there are signs of a detainee being at risk for suicide, staff abides by strict prevention and intervention protocol to ensure the detainee’s health and well-being is protected.”
But watchdog groups contend that the handful of suicide attempts they have learned about in recent months are almost certainly an undercount. Immigration lawyers worry about clients who are in distress and stuck in facilities that aren’t responding with proper mental health care.
“I don’t think D.H.S. had or certainly now has good protocols for dealing with people when they express that they’re contemplating suicide,” said Heather Hogan, who previously worked at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and is now a policy and practice counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “I am frankly terrified for detainees right now, particularly for people with any mental health condition.”
‘People Need to Know What’s Happening’
After more than two months in a detention facility in Michigan, Jesus, a 20-year-old Venezuelan citizen who asked to be identified by his middle name because of safety concerns, often wakes feeling heavy with despair. He had been living in Detroit and working at a McDonald’s; in June he was stopped by ICE agents while driving home. Now he showers and uses the toilet without privacy, and has faced taunts from other detainees for being gay.
“I’ve had moments where I’ve been inconsolably crying,” he said by phone at the facility. “I try not to think too much, so I don’t get desperate.”
Detainees who express thoughts of suicide are frequently put in solitary confinement, where the isolation, darkness and dirty conditions tend to worsen their mental states, according to immigration lawyers and psychiatrists. In addition, the instability of being abruptly transferred from one facility to another can make it difficult for detainees to receive consistent psychiatric care or access to their medications.
“What we know about solitary confinement is that it makes suicide more likely in any jail, prison or detention center,” said Dr. Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the effects of confinement. “People need to be placed in a therapeutic environment,” he added, meaning one with access to mental health care, especially counseling.
Dr. Haney emphasized that many detainee suicide attempts, and suicidal thoughts, were the result “of their circumstances, a reaction to an otherwise very despairing situation,” he said, a perspective voiced by more than two dozen other experts interviewed. “People are frustrated and afraid,” he added. “They need mental health attention.”
“ICE requires annual suicide prevention training, enforces 15-minute checks on suicide watch, and ensures that only clinicians — not custody staff — can remove someone from suicide watch,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
ICE’s health care standards require that detainees receive medical and mental health screenings within 12 hours of arriving at a facility. Detainees must also receive full assessments within two weeks and have constant access to emergency care.
But those conditions are rarely properly met, according to immigration lawyers and people currently in detention. Many detainees do not receive mental health or medical assessments in private or with an interpreter; many do not receive follow-up counseling. Some of these failures were documented long before this year, but have been exacerbated as the detention system has rapidly expanded, according to interviews with immigration lawyers, including Andrew Free, who now tracks deaths in detention.
“I worked in detention centers in Arizona for nearly 15 years and I’m not aware of a single client who received what I would call counseling on mental health,” said Laura St. John, legal director of the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project.
Immigration lawyers around the country said that they were increasingly hearing from clients who began having thoughts about suicide after being detained. “People are losing hope,” said Laura Lunn, director of litigation and advocacy at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.
Sarah Decker, a staff attorney at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, has one such client who has had suicidal thoughts while in detention, a Colombia-born woman who is transgender. The client was being held at a detention center with a transgender unit but was transferred to a jail in Wyoming, where she was in solitary confinement because the facility is all-male. In the detention center she had access to counseling, but she no longer did at the jail. (This month she was returned to the detention center.)
A client of Ms. Lunn recently testified in federal court that, so far during his 20 months in ICE custody, he had never received counseling or mental health treatment despite having expressed suicidal thoughts.
In April, at least two suicide attempts occurred in Tacoma, Wash., at the Northwest ICE Processing Center, which is run by the GEO Group, a private prison firm, according to ICE incident reports shared with the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. In one case, a 32-year-old man from Turkey tried to strangle himself; in another, a 30-year-old man from India tried to cut himself. In March, a detainee jumped off a ledge in the facility, prompting officials there to call emergency dispatchers, according to a 9-1-1 audio recording, obtained by the Center for Human Rights and shared with The Times.
Christopher Ferreira, a spokesman for GEO Group, said that its centers have “around-the-clock access to medical care.” He added, “We train all staff on GEO’s suicide prevention and intervention program, which is clearly defined in our policies and procedures.”
But experts on mental health in correctional facilities said that the number of suicide attempts should spur closer examination of the medical and mental health care offered in these detention centers. Dr. Haney, who has spent decades studying mental health in jails and prisons, said he was especially worried about people in detention centers, because of how abruptly they have been thrust into distressing conditions.
“A completed suicide is an important reflection of the level of despair, but suicide attempts are as well,” Dr. Haney said. “Only some kind of meaningful mental health contact on an ongoing basis will address the issue.”
Tammy Owen, 45, who lives with her 5-year-old daughter and 8-month-old in Florida, knows personally the stakes of the issue. Her British-born husband, Ben Owen, died by suicide in a Florida detention center in 2020. Ms. Owen feels that the conditions of his detention — being suddenly taken from family, staying in a windowless and moldy room — contributed to his mental distress.
“People need to know what’s happening,” Ms. Owen said. “My husband had nothing to die for. He was scared.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. If you are someone living with loss, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention offers grief support.
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
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