More than 60,000 people are now held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody — a dramatic surge from the roughly 39,000 detained when President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 — and at least 52 of those in custody have died during that period, according to New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, who discussed his findings in an appearance on NPR's Fresh Air.
A notable share of those fatalities are suicides, Blitzer said, a figure he characterized as a reflection of the despair gripping detainees. The rising death toll, in his telling, is one symptom of a wider deterioration in conditions across ICE holding facilities.
Central to Blitzer's most recent piece — hEADlined "Locked Away" — is a tent complex erected on a military installation in El Paso, Texas, capable of housing up to 5,000 people, making it the largest immigrant detention site in the country. Rather than functioning simply as a waiting room for immigration proceedings, Blitzer found that the facility operates as a pressure mechanism: prolonged detention is used to push people into dropping their legal cases and accepting removal.
The article opens not with statistics but with a personal story. A Cuban man known only as Rey arrived in the United States in 1994 amid the rafter crisis, spending 11 months at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before being released to join his father in El Paso. He later moved to Miami, where a robbery conviction earned him a five-year prison sentence in Florida.
Because Cuba refused to take back deportees from the United States, Rey was permitted to remain in the country under a recurring check-in arrangement with a local ICE office. After returning to El Paso in 2014, he honored that requirement for years. People around him cautioned that those very check-ins would one day result in his arrest, but Blitzer reported that Rey held firm to the belief that abiding by the rules was the only honest way to move beyond his past.
Blitzer's reporting lands against a backdrop of intensifying enforcement: ICE is currently carrying out roughly 2,000 arrests every day, he said. Within the past week alone, two of those operations ended in bloodshed when agents fatally shot men inside their vehicles — one a construction worker in Houston, the other in Biddeford, Maine.
The agency's perspective was absent from the report.
This content was rewritten for originality based on information from NPR's Fresh Air interview with Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker. No new facts have been added.