The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are flashpoints because they are the most egregious and most visible examples of a campaign of aggression from immigration enforcement agents in American cities.
Unlike the streets of Minneapolis, there aren’t cameras and phones in immigration detention to capture what federal agents are doing. But the possibility of death, and the reality of lesser indignities, are combining to push many immigrants to abandon their cases and head home – something I realized as I watched several of them make exactly that choice in immigration court last week.
Thirty-five immigrants died in immigration detention in 2025 – a two-decade high. Compare that to an average of 13 deaths in custody a year during the first three years of Trump’s first term (exempting the COVID year of 2020) and 6.5 deaths a year under Biden, who relied far less on detention.
And more have died in 2026, including two individuals at Camp East Montana, the detention facility on the grounds of Fort Bliss in Texas. Geraldo Lunas Campos’ death on Jan. 3 was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner; witnesses reportedly saw him slammed hard to the ground by guards. Victor Manuel Martinez’s on death Jan. 14 was labeled a “presumed suicide” in the DHS statement, but the autopsy was assigned to an army medical facility rather than the local examiner – raising alarm from Martinez’ family, who do not believe he died by suicide.
Deaths in detention are one of the few things that the federal government is legally obligated to report in a timely fashion to Congress and the public. So while “how many people are dying in detention?” is only part of the question of “what is it like to be in immigration detention?” deaths in immigration detention represent fundamental concerns about how the U.S. is caring for people it is keeping behind bars.
It’s a general truth of immigration detention that conditions inevitably decline once facilities get more and more crowded. So policymakers inevitably have to choose to either release people or stop arresting more if they want to keep conditions above a certain humanitarian minimum. This administration has shown no willingness to make either choice unless it’s being forced by the federal courts; and even in those cases, it has often dragged its feet.
Paying attention to immigrant detention is important not just for understanding how people are victimized, but for understanding how they make choices and what choices they make: in particular, the choice whether to continue to fight their case from detention or agree to leave the U.S.
Last week, I spent a morning watching hearings in immigration court. (I won’t say which one; “master calendar” hearings, which cover initial pleadings and motions, are supposed to be open to the public, but the combination of the COVID pandemic and the Trump administration’s general hostility to transparency has made it harder for observers to actually get into either a physical or virtual courtroom.) What I will say is that I was watching the “detained docket.”
The benefit of watching this type of hearing is that instead of seeing trends in the aggregate, you see individual cases – 15 minutes’ worth of details, at most, about a person’s life and their current circumstances. Instead of seeing the big picture, you hear individual cases of individual people over and over. And what I heard last week was this: detainees asking, over and over again, to be allowed to leave the U.S. or even deported outright rather than having to stay behind bars to fight their cases.
Some were withdrawing asylum applications they’d already completed. Some had family in the United States; one had ordered his wife to sell the home they’d owned in Florida for years. For all of them, leaving the U.S. wasn’t better than staying in the U.S., but it was better than remaining detained here.
They may or may not have known that even people who have agreed to be deported or to accept “voluntary departure” – which doesn’t carry the same consequences if you want to apply to enter the U.S. legally later – are still being held for months before they actually get on a plane. (One lawyer last week asked a judge to extend the 30 days traditionally given for “voluntary departure” because ICE has failed to schedule some flights within that window and the detainee ended up with a deportation on their record through no fault of their own.) Either way, the departures certainly bolster the administration’s numbers when it boasts about how many people it’s gotten to leave the U.S.
Since last fall, immigration court watchers have noticed huge spikes in the number of voluntary-departure motions being filed (up over 1,300 percent over summer 2025), as well as withdrawal and “abandonment” of cases. And then there are the people who simply sign forms accepting a deportation order within the detention center.
One of the Trump administration’s signature achievements so far has been to generate this outcome as frequently as possible: get people to give up, and agree not to pursue their immigration cases to the fullest extent of the law. They’ve loaded incentives on both sides. The carrot they’re dangling is an offer of money for those who agree to leave the U.S. on their own, which was recently increased from $1,000 to $2,600 (money that reportedly was taken from the State Department’s refugee budget). Unsurprisingly, many who accept the offer aren’t actually getting the money – sometimes because they were held in detention for so long that the money wasn’t available when they were finally sent home.
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
At the hearings I watched, the detainees had seen a poster about the $2,600, but the ICE attorney prosecuting them wasn’t authorized to agree that they would qualify for it – so they had to agree to voluntary departure in court, then hope that their deportation officer would offer the funds.
For that carrot, the administration has several sticks. It can threaten to send people to countries that they’ve never seen before. It can lie to detainees about their rights; people who’ve been in detention often say the guards told them they had none.. But the most powerful incentive may simply be the conditions in which detainees are held – and the word of mouth about deaths and other more serious abuses lurking elsewhere in the system.
In November 2023, the New York Times published a major article on planning for a genuine mass deportation campaign if Trump were elected to a second term. The gist of the plan was to keep as many immigrants in detention as possible, and to reduce the resulting court bottleneck by getting as many of them as possible to abandon their court cases. At the time, it seemed awfully ambitious: detention capacity then was a fraction of what would be required. But detention has already grown by over 50 percent since Trump took office, and it’s poised to grow further. Trump may not have hit one million deportations in his first year, but the germ of the plan has been proven to work – at great human cost.
