As the Death Toll Rises in Trump's Immigration Crackdown, Support for ICE Shrinks

The first year of President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort has been filled with rights violations. Unsurprisingly, that militant approach has had deadly consequences.

Out of public view, deaths in ICE custody hit a 20-year high in 2025. Thirty-two people died from varying causes, including heart failure, stroke, tuberculosis, and suicide. "In some cases, their families and lawyers have alleged, they died of neglect, after repeatedly trying and failing to get medical care," per The Guardian. Four migrants died in ICE custody in just the first 10 days of 2026, according to Reuters.

Those deaths come amid a speedy expansion in the number of people ICE detains. By the end of 2025, nearly 70,000 people were being detained by ICE—"a 78% increase from the number detained in mid-December 2024," according to the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). Despite the massive increase in the detained population, facility inspections fell by 36 percent, per POGO. In December, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) detailed medical neglect at a California detention center, claiming that detainees were denied cancer treatment, insulin, and wheelchairs. The ACLU and other immigrant rights groups reported in October that detained pregnant women were experiencing miscarriages and denied prenatal care while in custody.

From September through January, federal immigration agents shot 13 people, killing four, according to NBC News. Two of those deaths involved U.S. citizens in Minneapolis: An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed Renée Good and a Customs and Border Protection agent shot and killed Alex Pretti just weeks apart in January. In both cases, the agents resorted to violence in situations that could have been resolved peacefully. In September, agents fatally shot Mexican immigrant Silverio Villegas González during a traffic stop in Chicago, and in December, a Border Patrol agent fatally shot Isaias Sanchez Barboza, a Mexican citizen, in Rio Grande City, Texas. It took nearly a year—and a public records request—for federal officials to acknowledge that a Homeland Security Investigations officer had fatally shot U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez during a late-night traffic stop in March 2025.

America's immigration enforcement apparatus is dangerous in part because of the ways it flouts legal checks on its behavior. "ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence," wrote U.S. District Court Judge Patrick J. Schiltz in a January order.

But immigration enforcement has also proven deadly because violence is behind the very laws that ICE agents are enforcing. "All state laws ultimately rest on the threat of violent enforcement," Reason's Christian Britschgi wrote after Pretti's killing. When it comes to "the state's immigration restrictions," he continued, "the less popular they are, the more violence will be required to enforce them."

Six in 10 Americans now disapprove of how ICE is carrying out the immigration crackdown, according to a January PBS News/NPR/Marist poll. An even greater share—62 percent—believe that ICE's actions are leaving Americans less safe.

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