On Friday, September 25, 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted 33 internal mortality reviews to its public records library. By Wednesday, September 30, they were gone, and the pages that had held them read “not found,” The American Prospect reported. The Intercept, whose reporter is suing ICE for records, said the agency “appeared to have pulled them offline and de-indexed them” four days after posting them, “a little after” a lawyer representing the reporter in that Freedom of Information Act suit noticed the documents. The watchdog Project Salt Box had already downloaded and published the files, and several outlets kept copies. ICE has not said why they came down.
The reviews cover 33 deaths in detention from September 2019 to January 2026, so they span three administrations. In 27 of the 33, independent investigators concluded that the care the detainees received fell outside “safe practice limits,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported; four met the standard. Of the 11 reviews of deaths since January 2025, eight found care that violated safe practice limits, two found adequate care and one was a preliminary review without a finding, according to the Chronicle.
The details contradict what ICE said publicly. The review of Marie Ange Blaise's death found that health staff did not give her rescue breaths and “failed to initiate” CPR “despite Ms. Blaise's pulselessness,” The Intercept reported; ICE's public death report had said staff “immediately began cardiopulmonary resuscitation,” Reason noted. In the case of Ismael Ayala-Uribe, guards asked medical staff to check on him the day before he died, and staff did not respond for more than 13 hours, Reason reported. Lorenzo Batrez-Vargas complained of trouble breathing on the day he died and his oxygen levels were not checked.
Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official in the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, told the Chronicle, “I see why they pulled (the reports) down, it's pretty damning.” ICE's statement to the paper: “At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care.” The timing of the removal next to the FOIA lawyer's discovery is suggestive but does not establish a motive. The removal comes as deaths in ICE custody are running far above recent years (see At Least 60 People Have Died in ICE Custody Since Trump's Second Term Began, at a Death Rate Far Above Recent Years).