On Tuesday, Denny Adan Gonzalez, a Cuban man detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, died from apparent suicide, according to an ICE news release and earlier reporting by immigration researcher Andrew Free – the latest in a surge of deaths inside U.S. immigration detention facilities.
This death is the fifth apparent suicide among the 18 known deaths in ICE detention so far in 2026 and reflects a pattern of increasing suicides in a system where solitary confinement remains widespread, despite well-documented evidence of its severe psychological harms. Gonzales was held in solitary confinement, according to immigration expert Andrew Free.
“As a physician, I am not surprised by this death – and that is precisely what makes it so devastating,” said Katherine Peeler, MD, PHR medical advisor and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “Decades of medical evidence show that solitary confinement places individuals at significantly elevated risk of psychological deterioration and suicidal behavior. When someone in immigration detention is placed in isolation, already separated from family, community, social and legal support, the risk compounds. ICE has received this evidence repeatedly, through our reports, through congressional testimony, through research by their own oversight bodies. The continued and widespread use of solitary confinement in this system is not a failure of knowledge or understanding but a failure of will.”
The mortality rate in ICE detention during fiscal year 2026 to date is already the highest on record in the last two decades, according to recent research published in the Journal of the American Medical association (JAMA). Given that the article calculated the mortality rate from 2004 through January 19, 2026 and there have been 12 additional deaths in ICE custody since that time, the mortality rate remains on track to be the highest in ICE’s history.
Physicians for Human Rights and its partners have repeatedly reported on the high rates of solitary confinement in ICE detention under both the Biden and Trump administrations, including most recently in our 2025 report Cruelty Campaign: Solitary Confinement in U.S. Immigration Detention. Despite numerous calls to end this practice, given its long-known severe detrimental health effects – including increased rates of suicidality – ICE continues to place individuals in solitary, sometimes with fatal consequences. There is a long history of high suicide rates in ICE detention, and 2026 is no different. Of the 18 known deaths this year, five have been categorized as apparent suicide. Numerous other deaths do not yet state a cause of death and ICE has not published all detainee death reports, so that figure could be higher.
As Dr. Peeler and PHR medical director Michele Heisler, MD, MPA, noted in a recent accompanying JAMA editorial:
“Most consequentially, the administration has dismantled the oversight infrastructure designed to identify and correct detention health failures. In March 2025, the US Department of Homeland Security all but eliminated the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman…The result is a detention system that is simultaneously larger, more crowded, less medically supported, and less subject to external scrutiny than at any point in recent history—conditions likely to increase mortality risk.”
PHR calls on Congress to act to end the preventable deaths crisis in immigration detention. As lawmakers consider tens of billions of dollars in additional funding for ICE detention, they must demand an immediate end to the use of solitary confinement in immigration detention facilities, the restoration of independent oversight mechanisms dismantled by this administration, and full transparency in the reporting of detention deaths. Expanding a detention system that is producing record mortality without accountability, without oversight, and without basic standards of humane care is not border security – it is abuse.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is a New York-based advocacy organization that uses science and medicine to prevent mass atrocities and severe human rights violations. Learn more here.