I was back on The Majority Report with Emma Vigeland this week to talk about the brutal regularity of ICE detention deaths, currently one every six days. We covered a lot of ground in a relatively short segment, so I wanted to highlight the key threads and point readers to additional resources.
The conversation started with the death of Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, a 49-year-old man from Mexico who died on April 11 at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, the 16th person to die in ICE custody since January 1, 2026. ICE’s press release about Alejandro’s death, as usual, doesn’t tell us much. But as I discussed with St. John Barned-Smith and Ko Lyn Cheang of the San Francisco Chronicle last week, when journalists and medical professionals have been able to review the full records behind these deaths, they consistently find delayed responses, ignored complaints, and failures to provide timely emergency care. In at least 17 of 32 reviewable cases since January 2025, independent physicians concluded that critical care was delayed or withheld in ways that may have cost someone their life.
I first learned about Alejandro through Angela Della Valle, a U.S. citizen whose husband Carlos is detained at that same facility. Angela has been going to Winn every day at great personal expense, advocating for Carlos’s release, and learning about deaths happening around him. You can learn more about what the family is going through on their website, by following Angela’s diligent reports on Facebook, or by joining their efforts to reach out to elected officials to secure his release. It’s so important to remember that real families are impacted by these deaths—not just the individual and their family, but the family members of others who are being held in camps and worried about what will happen to their loved ones.
Emma and I talked about the geographies of detention facilities. Winn is in what some of us call “detention alley” in rural Louisiana, a hub of detention facilities that also serves as a staging ground for deportation flights out of Alexandria. Private contractors look for cheap land in compliant communities, the sacrifice zones of rural America, where the economic incentive to host a facility overrides concerns about what happens inside. Winn itself was the subject of Shane Bauer’s landmark undercover reporting for Mother Jones and his book American Prison. The rural placement compounds the medical crisis: when someone is seizing on the floor for an hour before getting into an ambulance, the accessibility of adequate emergency care is not guaranteed.
Emma also asked a great question I’ve been getting a lot: is the official death count is trustworthy? My short answer was the number of people who die inside the facilities is probably accurate, but the official count almost certainly misses people who are released in deteriorating health, people who are discharged from hospitals while still in a bed, and people who die after deportation, particularly members of vulnerable groups like trans deportees who face persecution in their home countries. A previous ACLU report found that over 90 percent of reviewed detention deaths appeared preventable, and the Chronicle’s recent investigation reached very similar conclusions.
We closed by discussing the newly released deportation numbers, which show that ICE is on track to complete 440,000 removals in fiscal year 2025. The government has been somewhat creative with its definitions to pump up the headline figures. Using consistent metrics, the increase from the last fiscal year of the Biden administration was not that high, certainly not the dramatic leap that the rhetoric suggests. But the pace has clearly accelerated in FY 2026 (though no where near the Trump administration’s purported goal of 1 million removals). As long as Stephen Miller has access to the levers of power, the administration is going to push these numbers as high as they can before the political window closes.