Mamuka Artmeladze, a 43-year-old man from the Republic of Georgia, died in ICE custody at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, on June 4, 2026. Artmeladze is the 19th person to die in ICE custody in 2026 and the second person to die at Winn after Alejandro Cabrera Clemente died in the same facility on April 11. Artmeladze is the first person to die in ICE custody in 37 days, the longest streak without a reported tragedy after ICE’s deadly start to 2026. I first learned about this latest detention death from Andrew Free.
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ICE has notified Congress of the 49th in-custody death since January 2025. 43 year-old Mamuka Artmeladze, a Georgian national, passed away June 4 following his detention at the Winn facility in Louisiana, just two days after a scathing report from DHS-OIG finding the facility violated a raft of standards, brutalized people inside, and didn’t keep the records it was supposed to. Winn is reportedly the facility of…
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ICE’s press release does not say much about what happened to Mamuka. He was reportedly found “unresponsive” by detention facility staff, who administered emergency medical care and transported him to a nearby medical facility. He died less than an hour after he was initially found. As reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN has found, this version of events is far from complete and does not take into account the litany of ways that DHS’s systematic indifference towards immigrants’ lives in detention mirrors the president’s and his proxies’ dehumanizing language and translates into understaffing and negligence at facilities across the country. As I’ve written about before, this administration’s abdication of moral responsibility extends not only to immigrants, but to citizens, as well, and exacerbates a longer history of politicians in the US and around the world treating immigrant lives as expendable.
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