“No puedo respirar!” Geraldo Lunas Campos yelled as guards pinned him down. I can’t breathe. The moments leading up to his death on January 3 were witnessed by another person being held at the Camp East Montana ICE detention facility at Fort Bliss, Texas, who described how the 55-year-old Cuban national struggled with “at least five guards” as they dragged him to solitary. He had been protesting that he didn’t have his medication.
There were 32 deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in 2025—an unconscionable number that looks very likely to be surpassed in 2026.
As of February 11, alongside ICE agents’ fatal shootings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, another six people had already died in ICE custody.
The agency’s go-to response is to lie. As Popular Information detailed, a January 9 ICE press release following Campos’s death said he had died “after experiencing medical distress” in segregation, where he’d been placed for being “disruptive while in line for medication.” An ICE statement to the Washington Post later claimed that Campos had tried to kill himself, “violently resisted the security staff” and “stopped breathing and lost consciousness.”
The witness said they saw one of the guards choke Campos as the others held him down. And the autopsy report released on January 21 by the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s office found abrasions to his chest and knees, hemorrhages on his neck and burst capillaries in his eyes. The cause of death was determined to be asphyxia.
“The Trump administration is ruthlessly pursuing a multi-layered detention expansion plan … Looming large is the imminent threat of using warehouses to detain up to 80,000 people.”
Besides brutality, another reason deaths are likely to rise is the unprecedented surge in the total number of people being held by ICE under President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants. When he took office in January 2025, about 40,000 people were in ICE custody. A year later, that number had reached a record 73,000—up 75 percent.
Flush with $45 billion for detention capacity expansion under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” ICE plans to deal with this ongoing influx in part by reopening shuttered jails around the United States, including facilities particularly notorious for past abuses and dire conditions.
But all those jails still won’t be enough to realize the full extent of the administration’s sadistic plans.
“The Trump administration is ruthlessly pursuing a multi-layered detention expansion plan, skyrocketing the number of people in detention,” Stacy Suh, program director at Detention Watch Network, told Filter. “Looming large is the imminent threat of using warehouses to detain up to 80,000 people across the country.”
As the Atlanta Journal–Constitution recently reported, ICE is looking to buy up industrial warehouses in Missouri, Arizona, Louisiana, Texas and Virginia. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people would be detained in each of these vast facilities, while smaller warehouses—another 16 all over the country—would hold 1,500 each.
“All immigration detention is inherently inhumane and rife with abuse, and yet the warehouse model currently being pursued is particularly horrifying.”
Jails, however appalling, at least have some infrastructure like toilets, bunks, kitchens and outrageously overpriced commissaries. It’s not clear how ICE is planning the day-to-day logistics of literally warehousing people.
“All immigration detention is inherently inhumane and rife with abuse,” Suh said, “and yet the warehouse model currently being pursued is particularly horrifying.”
Warehouses are designed to store inanimate objects that don’t need bathrooms or food. There’s little prospect that ICE will furnish them at the level required to meet even the most basic human rights standards, and the sheer size of these buildings adds to an anticipated nightmare.
“People are not commodities to be shipped, discarded, and profited off of,” Suh said. “Subjecting people to large-scale, makeshift warehouse detention camps will exponentially increase the likelihood for abuse and death in ICE custody, as ICE cuts people off from their loved ones and support networks, and subjects them to inhumane conditions.”
As for likely outcomes at the jails ICE plans to reopen, those facilities already have track records.
A lawsuit initiated by the ACLU of Virginia and North Carolina, after their FOIA request was denied, led to the January release of documents concerning eight facilities ICE plans to take over. Two former jails among them include the Augusta Correctional Center in Craigsville, Virginia, where detainees were subjected to sexual assaults and guards smuggled drugs. And the Rivers Correctional Facility in Winton, North Carolina, formerly operated by the GEO Group, which lost a federal contract after evidence of violence and sexual assault. There, too, former guards were found to have engaged in smuggling contraband and bribery, according to the ACLU.
“It’s a deliberate strategy … to make it so people leave the US instead of protesting their cases.”
Detention everywhere will be in atrocious conditions. And the scale of the plans ensures that more and more people will be forced to endure it.
“The major threat of converting jails into detention facilities is ICE’s increased efficiency in terms of the deportation project,” Eunice Hyunhye Cho, senior counsel with the ACLU National Prison Project, told Filter. “These facilities will house hundreds if not thousands of people.”
“ICE is detaining thousands of people every day, who in the past would never have been detained: with work permits, having lived in the community for many years, many medically vulnerable,” she added. “ICE is choosing to grab people and putting them in jail for a civil offense. It makes it harder for them to make bond and be released while their immigration case proceeds.”
“It’s a deliberate strategy to expand detention beds to make it so people leave the US instead of protesting their cases,” Cho concluded.
Photograph of dorm room at the ICE Farmville Detention Center via NARA & DVIDS Public Domain Archive
