An Albanian man, held for months in a New Mexico immigration detention center, said he pulled out his own tooth due to excruciating, untreated pain.
His harrowing account is one of several emerging from US immigration facilities, highlighting severe medical neglect.
A Honduran mother of two claims she was hospitalized with a heart condition after being denied essential blood pressure medication during her detention in Florida.
In Vermont, a Venezuelan man alleges his leg became purple and severely swollen from flesh-eating bacteria, a condition he attributes to staff failing to take him to a scheduled doctor’s appointment.
Hundreds of detainees across at least 33 states allege in federal lawsuits that immigration detention facilities are failing to provide adequate medical care, an investigation by KFF Health News and The Associated Press found.
Detainees in U.S. jails and immigration centers are reportedly denied vital medications for conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and HIV.
Requests for help often go unanswered for weeks, leading to rising blood sugars, festering infections, untreated cancers, and instances of collapse and seizures.
While these facilities have long struggled with medical care, the system is now buckling under a significant influx of detentions. As of mid-January, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was holding over 75,000 immigrants, a stark increase from approximately 40,000 just a year prior.
KFF Health News and AP analyzed thousands of court cases filed since Trump’s second inauguration that use a legal route known as habeas corpus to argue people are being held illegally by ICE. The records offer a rare window into how those detained say — often under penalty of perjury — ICE is handling their medical needs. Reporters also interviewed more than 50 detainees, family members and lawyers.
The investigation revealed that medical neglect is alleged across the sprawling detention system, including in offices not designed to house people, county jails and quickly staged sites with nicknames such as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
ICE custody is deadlier than it has been in two decades, researchers wrote in JAMA in April. The Department of Homeland Security reported 51 people had died in detention since the start of Trump’s second administration, with suicides spiking to an unprecedented number.
KFF Health News and AP asked DHS to respond to the findings six days before publication but it did not provide comment. The department’s acting chief medical officer, Sean Conley, previously said “it is both policy and longstanding practice for aliens to receive timely and appropriate medical care from the moment they enter ICE custody” and that DHS recruits healthcare professionals to maintain high standards. “This is better, more responsive healthcare than many aliens have ever received in their entire lives,” he said.
Individual facilities and private prison companies contracting with DHS that responded to requests for comment said they follow ICE standards and that detainees receive medical care when it is required. Some said they were unfamiliar with the allegations outlined in court documents; others blamed the detainees themselves for lapses in their medical care.
“I have never seen such disregard or medical neglect like this anywhere,” Vardan Gukasian, a political dissident and former paramedic who spent years behind bars in Armenia, wrote in a court declaration in March to contest his detention in Henderson, Nevada, as it stretched to 13 months despite his health problems.
Madeleine Skains, a spokesperson for the city of Henderson, said medical care is always available at the facility and that the court had not ordered changes to his care.
Last June, as Gukasian experienced the symptoms of uncontrolled high blood pressure — dizziness, a nosebleed and a headache — his cellmate banged on their door for help.
“When it did not arrive, the rest of the block banged on their doors,” he wrote. Gukasian was hospitalized that day.
The administration’s mass deportation effort has swept up hundreds of thousands of people during routine immigration check-ins, at traffic stops, at their homes and in hospitals.
About 70% of detainees have no criminal conviction. Their immigration proceedings are civil, not criminal.
“I couldn’t understand why they treated me so harshly,” said a father of six in Georgia. He said he was injured while shackled in custody when the vehicle transporting him to an Atlanta facility jolted, throwing him out of his seat and into a metal armrest. His wound became infected with E. coli, he said, because he had to sleep on a dirty concrete floor amid leaking toilets.
Like other detainees interviewed, he spoke on the condition of anonymity; they said they fear for their safety, for the safety of their families or that speaking out would jeopardize their immigration cases. The AP and KFF Health News are not naming anyone identified in court documents without their consent.
Staffers at Stewart Detention Center in rural Lumpkin, Georgia, didn’t adequately respond to that man’s request for medical help, court records say, until he passed out and was taken to a hospital about an hour away. There, he said, a doctor told him he’d narrowly escaped amputation of his left leg.
Medical staff found no records of a case matching this description, according to Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, a private prison company, which runs the facility.
The 48-year-old, who moved to the U.S. from Guatemala more than two decades ago, was released in October and is now a legal permanent resident. But he is unsure if he’ll be able to return to his job in construction because he said he can no longer lift heavy things due to his injury.
Some detainees or their lawyers said even basic care was denied: gauze to protect an open foot wound, prenatal care for a high-risk pregnancy, a pillow to ease the pain of sleeping with advanced stomach cancer, sanitary pads for postpartum bleeding.
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