Last year saw countless news reports about death and despair surrounding the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One such harrowing story was out of St. Louis, where amid the violent detainments of 2025, mourners wept beside a pop-up altar in a public park after the suicide in a detention center of 27-year-old Brayan Garzon-Rayo.
Garzon-Rayo is among the rising number of ICE detainees whose reported suicides are shifting some public attention toward mental health care in these institutions. According to data compiled by the Guardian from various reporting sources, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, the agency’s deadliest year since 2004.
ICE detention centers throughout the US have been dogged by allegations of human rights violations since detainee numbers started growing in recent years. Conditions in those centers have been widely criticized, including by immigrant rights groups, in response to allegations by detainees and their families of poor living, nutritional, and medical standards. Per several reports, basic care and services continue to be substandard.
ICE in Massachusetts
A decade ago, there were several houses of correction in the Bay State willing to take ICE detainees. Amid ongoing protests going back to the first Trump administration, though, all but one of the facilities ended their contracts with ICE.
The Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department was the first to have its contract discontinued, in 2019. Critics linked the change to abuse, but leadership claimed that the jail needed to make room for additional female prisoners. Bristol and Franklin counties followed suit in 2021, with allegations of abuse against the former’s sheriff sparking enough public attention to lead the Biden administration to terminate its contract. In Franklin County, a spokesperson cited a low population as the reason its detainees were transferred to the Plymouth County Correctional Facility.
PCCF is currently Massachusetts’ sole remaining long-term ICE detention center for noncitizens. According to a 2024 report, “Chronicling 25 Years of Violations,” published by Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts and Boston University School of Law’s Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking Program, the facility has expanded its holding capacity to 402 individuals despite its critics’ protests for decarceration. The document includes the personal accounts of more than 60 male ICE detainees who reported substandard conditions over two decades.
PLS immigration attorney Leah Hastings said that PCCF follows the 2025 National Detention Standards, which require mental health screenings within 12 hours of arriving at a detention facility and a complete mental health assessment within 14 days.
“But the more discretionary, vague, and broad requirements are minimally enforceable, and the quality of mental health care tends to be poor and inconsistent, even within a given detention center,” Hastings said.
She went on to explain that direct communication between PLS and behavioral health care providers is limited since the legal services nonprofit isn’t updated on the status of Plymouth detainees after medical requests are made: “In most cases, we have no way of knowing whether the concerns we raise are communicated to the providers, and must infer this based on our clients’ medical records and their direct communication of their experiences to us.”
Detention centers only provide mental health care to limit the facility’s liability if detained persons harm themselves or others, Hastings continued. Detainees fear making mental health care requests, or exhibiting acute distress, which “will result in them being placed in conditions akin to, or worse than, solitary confinement.”
The PLS attorney said detainees at PCCF lean on their legal service providers for mental health support to avoid the harsh interventions that result from urgent mental health requests. Though legal representatives aren’t capable or trained to provide mental health care, detainees are compelled to trust these providers for assistance.
“Mental health services don’t exist,” PCCF ICE detainee Santiago said in the report. “They just want to make sure they are not on the news and that we don’t hurt ourselves.”
Carlos, another PCCF ICE detainee, said, “They use suicide watch for people who answer ‘yes’ to questions like ‘do you hear things?’ But they also use it as punishment. … Sometimes I can’t sleep because I have so much running through my head. I want to ask for medicine to help me sleep, but I’m afraid they will punish me by sending me to the hole.”
A deadly lack of communication
Immigrant advocates especially condemn the isolation methods of the “Q5 protocol,” which is utilized for detainees on suicide watch.
“Inmates are locked in ‘Q5’ alone, naked or nearly naked, and without a mattress.” In the aforementioned report, PCCF ICE detainee Marty detailed the “indignity” he endured there in 2017: “There is no toilet in ‘Q5.’ Instead, inmates must defecate in a hole in the floor. … Human beings endure these deplorable conditions for days, never receiving therapy, before they are asked if they still need help. Anyone who answers that they do is held there longer.”
In Pennsylvania, Yangfeng Ge, the brother of the 32-year-old suicide victim Chaofeng Ge, pursued a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit with the federal government in 2025 due to the discrepancies in the manner of his death in an autopsy report released by ICE. It’s a nationwide pattern. The Ge family’s grievances were similar to those of relatives of Leo Cruz-Silva of Missouri. The 34-year-old was held in the Ste. Genevieve County Sheriff’s Office Detention Center for 24 hours before he was discovered unresponsive. ICE later reported his death as an apparent suicide.
Sara Drost is the president of the immigrant resource organization Abide in Love that coordinates resources, legal services, and a pen pal program between ICE detainees and the Ste. Genevieve community. The org was unable to make contact with Cruz-Silva due to his rapid decline at the detention center.
“In our experience, the jail usually notices the mental health emergencies before we do and will put detainees on ‘medical watch’ or ‘medical lockdown,’” Drost said in an interview. “However, when this happens, we cannot communicate with the detainee and that makes some of our efforts impossible—plus, we worry when we don’t hear from someone for an extended time.”
Chief Deputy Sheriff Major Jason Schott of the ICE-contracted Ste. Genevieve County Sheriff’s Office Detention Center responded to an inquiry about the US Marshals Service Federal Performance-Based Detention Standards his facility utilizes (a different protocol than the National Detention Standards used in Plymouth). Schott said that medical staff are notified to initiate an evaluation, assess care, and work alongside detention staff for follow-up care.
“Our medical staff are county employees who work alongside detention staff,” the deputy sheriff major explained. “This structure allows for direct, timely, and effective communication between healthcare providers and law enforcement personnel.”
Advocates from Abide in Love were told that detainees are given a physical, dental, and mental health assessment upon arrival. “Clearly,” Drost said, “this is not very thorough.”
Advocating for improvement
Through so much indignity, migrant advocates across the country are seeking a ban on jails and prisons being used by ICE as holding centers. In New York, lawmakers in Albany are weighing a “Dignity Not Detention” measure which would “prohibit governmental entities from entering into agreements to house individuals in immigration detention facilities,” and “require governmental entities to terminate existing contracts for the detention of individuals in immigration detention facilities.”
In Massachusetts, advocates have similarly sought to terminate the remaining contract with a county house of correction. Last December, in a letter to the Plymouth Select Board, Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph McDonald bemoaned protesters who had recently “gathered near the jail and called for an end to the sheriff’s contract with ICE.” The sheriff wrote that ICE detainees are “better off” in PCCF than elsewhere, since they can be closer to their families. Immigrant rights advocates have called such claims into question, saying that Plymouth is used as a transit hub for detainees from several states.
While the ICE contract at PCCF remains active, some adjustments in care were outlined in the executive summary of the PLS/IRHTP report. One change was to prioritize complete medical care requests within 24 hours. Another was to allow contact visitation, not limited to 30 minutes, as well as free phone or video calls with loved ones.
“A lot of men have issues,” PCCF ICE detainee Samuel said in the report. “People start walking around, talking to themselves—they don’t know who to talk to. … There’s dudes in here who won’t eat. It’s not like they are on hunger strike, but they’re so stressed out it’s hard for them to eat. It’s complicated up in here.”
