When Parady La, a Cambodian American father and long-time Philadelphia resident, died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody earlier this year just three days after he was arrested, the agency released scant details about what happened.
La, 46, was “found distressed and stuporous with ongoing vomiting and abnormal vital signs” at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, according to the account ICE gave in a detainee death report. The next line in the report says only: “Later that day, medical staff responded to a medical emergency and found Mr. LA unresponsive and pulseless.”
He was then brought to a Philadelphia hospital, where ICE said he “remained unconscious with evidence of anoxic brain injury and multi-organ failure” and was ultimately pronounced dead.
More than seven months later, his family still doesn’t understand what happened in his final hours, or why no one was there to help him sooner. ICE has provided no further information about the “emergency” La suffered or what medical attention—if any—he received following his health troubles earlier in the day.
“There's obviously a lot missing, a lot we don't know, and the uncertainty of it all is really hard,” his daughter, Jazmine La, tells TIME. “It makes it hard to move on or grieve properly.”
Parady La with his daughter, Jazmine, as a baby. Courtesy of Jazmine La
La is one of more than 30 people who have died in ICE detention since October amid a surge in fatalities that has raised alarm from experts and left rights groups and a growing number of families searching for answers—and, perhaps, a measure of accountability.
The fatality rate in ICE custody reached a 22-year high in the opening months of this fiscal year, according to a report published in the medical journal JAMA earlier this year. Between the beginning of October and Jan. 19, the latest date in the report’s analysis, 18 immigration detainee deaths were reported; since then, at least 17 other people have died while being held by ICE.
By comparison, 3 people died in ICE detention in the full 2022 fiscal year, per the report.
A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which houses ICE, maintained in a statement to TIME that “there has been NO spike in deaths.”
“Consistent with data over the last decade, as of May 29, death rates in custody under the Trump administration are 0.009% of the detained population,” the spokesperson said. “As bed space has rapidly expanded, we have maintained a higher standard of care than most prisons that hold U.S. citizens—including providing access to proper medical care. For many illegal aliens this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”
The report, however, found that the rate of fatalities relative to the overall population in ICE custody has climbed significantly in recent years, increasing from 13 deaths per 100,000 person-years—a measure that combines the number of detainees with the amount of time they spent in ICE custody—in fiscal year 2023 to 47.5 per 100,000 last year. In the first three and a half months of the current fiscal year, it spiked higher still, to 88.9 per 100,000.
Clinical and legal experts contend that this rise in the death rate in ICE detention is linked to the creation of more detention centers, an increase in the number of people in the agency’s custody, and a lack of sufficient oversight within the facilities.
The decades-high fatality rate comes as President Donald Trump has waged a large-scale crackdown on immigration since the beginning of his second term that has seen the number of detainees in ICE custody rapidly swell. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research and data organization based at Syracuse University that draws on government records, the number of people in ICE detention rose from roughly 40,000 shortly before Trump returned to the White House to over 68,000 in February––about a 70% increase in detainees.
Meanwhile, amid the rise in fatalities ICE has reduced the information it makes public about detainees’ deaths. And last month, the agency announced it would stop reporting instances when people die soon after being released from its custody altogether.
