People place flowers on a fence outside Krome Detention Center in Miami, Florida, last year during a vigil that recognized people who have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.Rebecca Blackwell/AP
In February 2025, Maksym Chernyak had a medical emergency. There were multiple signs that Chernyak—a 44-year-old from Ukraine detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Florida—was suffering a severe stroke. But ICE’s medical personnel missed those clues. By the time 911 was called, it was too late. Chernyak’s systolic blood pressure was more than 280 when he got to the hospital. He died soon after.
Chernyak is one of 52 people who died in ICE custody during the 500 days after President Donald Trump returned to office. A new report from two watchdog groups argues that ICE’s mistakes “almost certainly” cost Chernyak his life. It also reveals that he was far from alone in receiving abysmal medical treatment while in immigration detention.
The analysis—released on Thursday by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights—found that the mortality rate for people in ICE custody has skyrocketed during Trump’s second-term mass-deportation campaign. It’s nearly three times what it was during Joe Biden’s presidency and about two times higher than during Trump’s first term—a period that covered the first 10 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, far more people are now in ICE detention than in prior administrations, and a far greater percentage of those detainees are dying.
The report combines statistical analysis with detailed reviews of specific deaths in ICE custody. It states that PHR—whose medical experts investigate allegations of abuse across the world—identified a “high suspicion of inadequate or delayed health care” in several deaths that raised “serious concerns that the deaths may have been preventable.”
Along with calling for improved medical care within ICE detention, the report recommends that ICE reduce the number of people in detention and prevent overcrowding. Reagan Williams, a researcher in the Crisis, Conflict, and Arms division at HRW, told me that could partly be done by ending mandatory immigration detention, which has been greatly expanded under Trump.
The current policy, which is the subject of an ongoing legal battle, subjects people who entered the country without inspection to mandatory detention regardless of criminal history or how long they have lived in the United States. In the past—including during Trump’s first term—the people covered by the policy would have been eligible for bond hearings and could be released as their immigration cases proceeded.
NBC News reported on Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is launching a review of the increase in deaths in ICE detention centers. ICE did not respond to my request for comment.
Williams said that HRW and PHR are also asking Congress to mandate detailed independent reviews of deaths in ICE custody. Additionally, HRW and PHR are calling for a new independent entity that would have authority and jurisdiction over the quality of medical services that are provided to people in detention.
Some of the most disturbing sections of the report focus on the medical treatment received by men like Chernyak in the lead-up to their deaths. In Chernyak’s case, HRW and PHR were able to gain a much more detailed understanding of what happened after obtaining medical records from his family. In other cases, they had to rely on inadequate information released by ICE that can obscure the scale of the agency’s mistakes.
Dr. Katherine Peeler, a PHR medical adviser and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard, told me that Chernyak’s case was “shocking” on many levels. One of the most concerning things noted by ICE’s medical staff while Chernyak was at the detention center was that he was unresponsive and had “dilated equal but nonreactive pupils.” He also experienced “seizure-like” activity. Peeler said medical staff should have recognized that Chernyak may have been experiencing potentially life-threatening brain swelling.
Nevertheless, it was recommended that Chernyak be sent to an emergency room via “non-emergency, medical transport.” Thirty minutes later—while Chernyak was still waiting at the detention center—he began having “additional seizures, vomited, and his pupils became unequal and remained non-reactive,” according to the report from HRW and PHR. Medical staff at the detention center then finally called 911. At the hospital, Peeler said, medical professionals immediately recognized that he was suffering from what proved to be a fatal stroke.
While conditions in ICE detention have deteriorated since Trump returned to office, HRW and PHR’s investigation makes clear that many of the problems are longstanding. That can be seen from the death of Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, a 45-year-old man from Ethiopia, on January 29, 2025. Dejene—who was first detained during the Biden administration in August 2024—began suffering from back pain around November 2024, according to information released by ICE.
During one six-week period, he was evaluated four different times by medical staff at an Arizona detention center. On the last of those visits, after a nurse noted that he had an “abnormal slow gait,” he was provided with pain medication and instructions for spine exercises. The nurse recommended a follow-up in two weeks, but Dejene needed medical attention again just four days later.
This time, medical staff noted that Dejene had lost 20 percent of his body weight and sent him to a local emergency room, which then returned him to the detention center with a diagnosis of “probable lymphoma.” Dejene’s condition quickly deteriorated and he was sent back to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Dejene died soon after. Peeler said the autopsy revealed that Dejene had a number of conditions that stemmed from AIDS that somehow went unnoticed by medical providers. According to the autopsy, those included “central nervous system toxoplasmosis, tuberculosis, Diphyllobothrium tapeworm, pneumocystis pneumonia, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Candida albicans, and Cytomegalovirus.” (ICE’s detainee death report for Dejene states that he denied having “any medical history.”)
“He was immunocompromised, which led him to have all these infections,” Peeler explained. “Which is how people used to die from AIDS. But people don’t typically die from AIDS in this country anymore because we have such effective antiretrovirals.” Peeler emphasized that ICE medical staff had multiple opportunities to potentially save Dejene’s life. “He must have looked sick,” she said. “There’s no way that he looked okay.”
“This one I found really, really egregious,” Peeler added. “It was over so many weeks. There were so many opportunities that he presented where they should have drawn labs.”
Williams, the HRW researcher, said she was struck in her research by just how little information is provided to people whose loved ones have died in ICE custody. She mentioned talking to a mother who “was desperate to know more about what had happened to her son.”
Williams stressed the human lives behind the numbers in the report. “When we talk about a rising death rate,” she explained, “we’re talking about a mother losing her son who cooked for her, who cared for her, who she loves deeply, and who she is now suffering without.”
