Four detainees at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County have died since last year. Photo: Peg Hunter/Flickr
Last year, the number of people across the nation who died in immigration detention reached a record high of 33. So far this year, 23 more have died. This increase is happening inside facilities known for their lack of transparency, creating serious challenges for reporters who want to help the public understand the surge in deaths.
Ko Lyn Cheang and St. John Barned-Smith, reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle, have committed to taking on that challenge. Earlier this year, they published an investigation based on their examination of ICE death reports, autopsies, toxicology reports and other records they collected over six months. After sharing those records with doctors, they found that at least 17 people had died after delays or failure to provide care.
Since then, Cheang and Barned-Smith have continued to track deaths in detention in a database that is regularly updated on the Chronicle’s website.
The journalists talked with FAC about the difficulty of reporting on immigration detention and the numerous steps they took to pierce the veil of secrecy. Some of the records they obtained are posted publicly, as required by law. Others, like autopsy reports, they tracked down state by state. They shared details about their reporting process to help other journalists who are also trying to shed light on immigration detention.
“I think collaboration is just so important for journalists when we’re writing about such a difficult and opaque topic because we can help each other figure out how to get records that maybe one person doesn’t have or give each other tips on how to navigate this very thorny environment,” Cheang said.
FAC: How did you decide to pursue this story?
Ko Lyn Cheang:
I started noticing that more people were dying in ICE detention and one case in particular drew my attention in September of 2025. Huabing Xie, who died at a California detention center. Having done a bit of reporting at the border with Chinese migrants who were crossing in record numbers through 2024, it really struck me because I remember the struggles that those Chinese migrants faced that led to them as part of this new group of people who cross the border on foot, to come to the U.S. in huge numbers. And I was really struck that one of them had now died. St. John, at the same time, was working on various immigration projects and we started tracking people who had died in ICE detention.
St. John Barned-Smith:
It was a small enough population that it was something where we felt like we could look at the whole country. And so we just started tracking these deaths. Every time a detainee dies, ICE is required by law to first put out a death notification, and then a detainee death report. We realized we could just go get all of these reports as far back as 2018, so we started building a database from there, with those two documents.
We also added in the database any news reports, if we identified family members who were quoted or lawyers for the families and other relevant people who would be good to talk to. So we sort of built a source list that way, while also building this database which had the details from these detainee death records.
We created fields like, the date they were taken, where they were held, was it a private or a public facility, how long were they in detention, and what were the descriptions included in these detainee death reports about the medical conditions and what kind of medical care they received.
As we were doing this, we started reaching out to the attorneys and family members of these people, and also filing records requests to try to get autopsy reports, or coroner’s reports. Ko Lyn handled a bunch of those and we found out that in some states you can’t get them. In other states you can get them if you’re a relative. In other states they’re just public records. So we got as many of those as we could.
FAC: Can you tell me a little bit more about the detainee death reports? What are they? And did you have to put in a records request to get them or are they publicly available?
St. John: By law, ICE is required to issue these records (when a detainee dies). And typically they have been between three to five pages. They will include their name, age, date of death, country of origin, criminal history and immigration history – so if they’ve crossed into the U.S. multiple times, where and when that is believed to have happened, if they encountered Customs and Border Protection or other agencies like that. Then it would include a kind of record, a shortened record of their medical care while in custody.
This changed a little bit while we were doing our project, but ICE posts these records on its website. So one of the reasons this was attractive was that there are these records that they are required to provide that are already available, which created a foundation for our story. So we didn’t have to do any records requests for that part.
We did put in a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request for something called a mortality review. When a person dies, ICE has to put out a press release, it’s called death notification. Then they have to provide a more detailed explanation within 90 days. Then, they are also required to do this much more comprehensive review called a mortality review. Some of those records have come out in the past but they are not public in the same way. They’re not automatically released like the detainee death reports are. We put in a FOIA for those. We have not even received a response from the federal government about that.
Ko Lyn: In 2024, an organization called American Oversight, working with the ACLU, litigated for these mortality reviews – for every death from 2017 to 2024, and they obtained them. It formed the basis of a really sweeping study they did in 2024 about those deaths. We were trying to obtain the same records for 2025 and 2026, but we’re still fighting for that FOIA request.
FAC: They just haven’t even responded yet?
St. John: They’re months behind the legally required deadline just to reply. As we were doing this, Ko Lyn realized also that, first of all, instead of releasing (the detainee death reports) within the 90-day deadline, they were releasing them at the end of a quarter and publishing them all at once.
Ko Lyn: Which violated the congressionally mandated deadline in a number of cases. The records also became much more sparse. NBC news has covered this. They went from being three-to-four pages to half-a-page long.
FAC: Can you talk a little bit more about the autopsy reports and the differences between states? It looked like from the story, you were able to get a good amount of information from the deaths in California, at least.
Ko Lyn: Some states, like California and Florida, have more open laws about autopsy reports where they are publicly available documents for a fee. (NOTE: FAC and others have successfully challenged flat autopsy fees in one California county.) In some states, like New York and Pennsylvania, they’re confidential and only immediate family, or legal representatives, or law enforcement are allowed to obtain them. Because of this, our investigation ended up being guided a bit by what records were available. For the cases where we got more records, like an autopsy report, we were able to get deeper insights about what went wrong in this person’s medical care that led to their death. Unfortunately in some of the deaths in New York and Pennsylvania, where we couldn’t get these records, it was just a much cloudier picture.
One man, Parady La, died a drug withdrawal death in Pennsylvania. We couldn’t get his autopsy report. ICE still has not yet released his detainee death report because he just died this year (Note: the report was released after the Chronicle’s story published.) At the same time, we did as much as we could with the limited information, and doctors still found that he experienced delayed medical care that could have saved his life, simply by virtue of the fact that ICE told us he had been diagnosed with severe drug withdrawal and then was found unresponsive 24 hours later. Just based on that information, addiction medicine specialists were able to draw pretty powerful conclusions that someone with severe drug withdrawal should be treated in a hospital rather than being left in a cell, where he was found unresponsive, indicating that he was not monitored in the most immediate moments right before he collapsed. So we tried to make the most of the records that we could get, despite the limitations.
FAC: Once you gathered your records and started looking at them, what stood out about those reports, the autopsy reports, the death reports?
Ko Lyn: Even as reporters without medical expertise, there were a lot of red flags that were raised as we were reading through these records that raised concerns for us. For instance, how is it that someone who was complaining of 10 out of 10 pain was not sent to an emergency room, but returned to a cell with fiber supplements? We’re talking here about Ismael Ayala Uribe who died of septic shock from a pelvic abscess.
We took those concerns and brought those concerns to doctors who offered expert medical opinions on how these individuals should have been treated.
St. John: I kept looking at these records, and this happened multiple times, I was like, “Wait, surely there must be something missing here?” Maybe I’m just naive, but reading these records it seemed like, “that can’t be it, can it?” But again, this is an official record of the U.S. government about the care that this person received in custody, and so it was on the government to tell us this conclusion we’re drawing is wrong. So, we took this to the doctors who are obviously much more equipped, much more knowledgeable than we are, and asked, “What do you guys think of this?”
Over and over again, doctors were like, “This is not great.” So we wrote the story from that assumption. But as we were getting closer to publication, we sent the government an eight-page list of questions about the care of every detainee that we were discussing in the story. We sort of felt like, well, if we’re wrong, or if there was more that happened, they’ll tell us, they’ll say, “You’re wrong. This person received appropriate care.” They never sent any response to any of our questions.
FAC: What’s been the response to the story?
Ko Lyn: It’s been good to see family members, attorneys for the people who died, immigration attorneys and immigration advocates say that the story offered important insight into this crisis that’s happening in ICE detention centers. Jose Ayala, who’s Ismael’s brother, texted St. John to say thank you.
St. John: It was really widely shared in the immigration lawyer community. Tons of doctors were sharing it with their colleagues. A week after we published, Congresswoman Lauren Underwood, who’s a registered nurse and cares about issues in ICE detention, asked the acting ICE director about issues we raised in our story and cited the story by name. That was the first time that we heard any kind of official response to any of the questions that we had asked was when a congresswoman asked about some of the issues.
FAC: Do you have any advice for reporters who want to report on what’s happening in immigration detention, and find themselves really challenged by the difficulty of getting information?
Ko Lyn: Given the challenges, sometimes of obtaining government records, reporters should just be really persistent and try to explore all avenues for getting primary records about people’s medical care and their conditions. Especially consider building relationships with family members and attorneys. The attorney of Maksym Chernyak and his former partner shared his medical records with us, which allowed us to write about how staff took an hour and 13 minutes to call 911 after he had a stroke. So where records laws aren’t your friends and where they can’t help you, maybe the family members and attorneys or people that you’re reporting about can. That just speaks to the importance of building those strong relationships, especially when trying to report about something that is as opaque as immigration detention.
St. John: I would say persistence is really important. You also have to remember that people who are undergoing or involved in this process are under tremendous strain. Family members themselves obviously. The attorneys who are representing them are also dealing with this deluge of cases because of Trump’s immigrant deportation crackdown. So, they have these huge caseloads and are stretched very thin. Ko Lyn and I both contacted one attorney multiple times over a four-month period before we finally were able to make contact successfully. It was Maksym’s attorney, and then we got this medical record, which was a huge boon to our reporting. So, yeah, stay persistent.
FAC: Is there anything I didn’t ask you about that you want people to know about the story?
Ko Lyn: One thing I’d say is we had a lot of collaborative conversations with nonprofit organizations, attorneys, advocates, and journalists who work in this space, including Andrew Free, who is a leading researcher in ICE detention deaths. I think collaboration is just so important for journalists when we’re writing about such a difficult and opaque topic because we can help each other figure out how to get records that maybe one person doesn’t have or give each other tips on how to navigate this very thorny environment.
St. John: One of the things that was nice about this project was we were writing a broad, sweeping look at issues that had been handled on local levels. So, sometimes journalists don’t like to talk. They don’t want to talk or ask other journalists for help. In this case, I asked multiple journalists who had written about individual deaths for tips, suggestions, assistance. There was one reporter I talked to in Florida, who had written about a 75-year-old Cuban man, who died a few weeks after being in detention from a heart attack, and he had already had multiple heart attacks previously. He was this very frail man, Isidro Perez. And (the reporter) connected me with Isidro’s former partner. And that was really helpful. I think reporters shouldn’t be afraid to do that.
The other thing, which was really helpful to the story, and I just wanted to give Ko Lyn credit, she’s very systematic, and she was really insistent that we ask the same questions to create this rubric. One of the things about doing investigations is proper counting, right? Numbers, or these basic findings, can be really powerful when you’re writing your story.
We had 48 deaths by the time we published. We decided to look at 32 of those because we had detainee death reports. So we asked the same questions (to the doctors) of all of those, and then we could make this finding that more than half experienced misdiagnoses or delayed treatment or denied treatment, critical treatment that they needed. And that was a really bombshell finding for this story. And it was because Ko Lyn set up this method where, even though we’re looking at different states, different facilities, different medical treatment, different doctors, we could still apply the same standard to each of those cases. And that was a really important thing that happened in the story, which really elevated it.
That was a way of systematizing it in a way that we could then present to readers in a very powerful way.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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