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migrant rights
ICE Detention Is Even Deadlier Under Trump 2.0
At least 25 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office, making 2025 the deadliest year for people in ICE custody since 2004.
Dec 13, 2025
Gabriel Garcia-Aviles was a 56-year-old grandfather with a work permit who’d been living in the US for over 30 years. He was a beloved member of his Southern California community.
This fall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained Garcia-Aviles and sent him to the Adelanto immigration detention center. He died around a week later, with ICE only informing his family that he was in critical condition once he was on his deathbed.
At the hospital, his daughter Mariel found him “unconscious, intubated,” and with “dried blood on his forehead.” He had “a cut on his tongue and blood on his lips” and “broken teeth and bruising on his body,” according to reporting from LA Taco. No clear cause of death was given, leaving his family shattered and still searching for answers.
That’s the second death this year at Adelanto.
Ultimately Congress must defund and dismantle ICE, end the unnecessary and inhumane system of immigration detention, and create more legal pathways to citizenship, among other reforms.
Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old former DACA recipient from Orange County, lived in the US for nearly 35 years. ICE apprehended him while he was working at a car wash and sent him to Adelanto on August 22. He died a month later of an abscess after reportedly being denied lifesaving medical treatment.
ICE didn’t inform his family that he’d been hospitalized. They only learned of Ayala-Uribe’s death the following day after a police visit.
At least 25 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office, making 2025 the deadliest year for people in ICE custody since 2004. Over 65,000 others remain detained, also the highest number in years. Immigrants with no criminal record remain the largest group in immigration detention. According to ProPublica, ICE has also detained over 170 US citizens this year.
Adelanto, owned and operated by the GEO Group, is among ICE’s sprawling network of mostly private, for-profit detention facilities notorious for human rights abuses. But it’s hardly alone.
From the Krome Detention Center in Florida to the Karnes County detention facility in Texas, people in ICE custody are routinely subjected to abysmal conditions and medical neglect. The detention population has increased by 50% this year, which experts have warned could lead to more deaths.
Rights groups have been issuing warnings like these for years.
In 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union and Physicians for Human Rights examined the deaths of 52 people who died in ICE custody between 2017 to 2021 and concluded that 95% of those deaths would have been “preventable or possibly preventable” with appropriate medical care. The researchers also found ICE’s oversight and accountability mechanisms “critically flawed.”
These problems have only worsened as immigration arrests have escalated as part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. Recent US Senate investigations uncovered dozens of cases of medical neglect, insufficient or rotten food, foul water, and pregnant women forced to sleep on the floor in ICE detention facilities this year.
Watchdog groups and lawmakers have found that ICE has repeatedly failed to comply with its own protocols, ignored congressional inquiries, and denied members of Congress entry to facilities, even though they have the authority to conduct unannounced oversight visits.
ICE acts increasingly like a rogue agency, refusing to follow US and international law. Yet the “Big Beautiful Bill” Trump signed this year includes $45 billion for ICE to build new prisons housing adults and children, which all but ensures more abuses and preventable deaths. Meanwhile, private prison companies continue to profit.
It doesn’t have to be this way. More oversight would help safeguard civil and human rights. But ultimately Congress must defund and dismantle ICE, end the unnecessary and inhumane system of immigration detention, and create more legal pathways to citizenship, among other reforms.
Legislation recently introduced by US Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) would be a step forward. If passed, it would repeal mandatory detention and phase out privatized detention.
As more families are ripped apart, our nation of immigrants stands at a crossroads. It can continue on this path of extreme cruelty and systemic abuse, or it can uphold human rights and dignity for all people.
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From Fields to Kitchens, the Fight Against Extreme Heat Is a Fight for Workers’ Lives
Worker organizing points the way forward, reminding us that the fight for safe working conditions is inseparable from the fight for dignity, racial justice, and migrant rights.
Oct 13, 2025
As temperatures shattered records across North America this summer, Jeremiah, a greenhouse worker in Ontario’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker program, stepped inside a plastic tunnel where the heat doubled the 32°C (89.6°F) outside. Within hours, workers fainted and vomited, while supervisors worried only about the plants. Another day, Jeremiah himself had to be carried out on a cart after collapsing.
Unwilling to put up with the conditions any longer, Jeremiah and his coworkers came together on one of the season’s worst days to demand managers implement safer conditions. Using broken Spanish, “tu casa, mucho calor,” they signaled to fellow Mexican, Guatemalan, and Honduran workers to walk out in unison, knowing they’re stronger when united.
Jeremiah’s story is not unusual. Across the food chain, from farm fields and greenhouses to warehouses and kitchens, workers are enduring escalating, life-threatening heat. What is new is how boldly they are organizing for change.
I have been an organizer with Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW) for 25 years. In that time, I have seen how rising temperatures and more frequent heatwaves have transformed the daily lives of migrant and food system workers. And I have also witnessed something else: workers resisting, demanding protections, and refusing to be sacrificed to profit and climate inaction.
The climate crisis is not some distant threat; it is here, bearing down on workers who already face some of the most exploitative conditions.
Workers themselves are the most credible experts on what is happening. At a 2024 People’s Tribunal hosted by the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), dozens of testimonies revealed the same pattern: temperatures climbing, employers refusing to adapt, and workers bearing the cost.
Lelo, a farmworker from Washington, remembers when rain was the biggest concern back when he started picking berries in 2012. "When I started picking berries, I didn’t see workers pass out… in 2022 I saw and heard about many."
A farmworker in Florida, with 18 years in the fields, reported temperatures now reaching 105°F (40.5°C) with little protection from managers. "The bosses do not adapt… There are times when they give us water, but when we tell them it's over, they don't give us more.”
Heat dangers are not limited to farm workers. Lorena, a warehouse worker in Illinois, described how tin roofs trap suffocating heat. “Employers could give workers water or 15 minutes every hour to get some fresh air, or reduce the speed of the machines, but they don’t,” she said. “The office managers don’t notice it because they’re comfortable with air conditioning.”
Ingrid, a restaurant worker in New York, spoke about kitchen conditions: “The heat is overwhelming, tiring, and it lasts all day. There’s no time to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. The only thing we can do is hydrate before we get in and use wet towels on our bodies while we work.”
These are not isolated grievances; they are the lived realities of a workforce that feeds millions while being denied basic safety.
International agencies have started to catch up. The World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization recently warned that “protecting workers from extreme heat is not just a health imperative but an economic necessity.” Their new report underscores what workers have long said: Productivity drops as temperatures rise, and unchecked exposure leads to kidney disease, heatstroke, and premature death. According to the International Labour Organization, more than 2.4 billion people worldwide are exposed to workplace heat stress. That is nearly1 in every 3 workers on Earth.
Yet policymakers in North America are moving backward. In Ontario, the provincial government promised heat protections in 2023, only to quietly kill them a year later. In the United States, agricultural and construction lobbyists have stalled a federal heat stress law. These retreats are not neutral; they are a direct assault on racialized and immigrant working-class communities, who make up the backbone of the food system.
Faced with government inaction, workers are taking the lead. This summer, on one of the hottest days yet, Ontario farmworkers and allies staged a street protest. They fried eggs on the pavement outside the Ministry of Labour and inside a car that reached 68°C (154.4°F). Their message was unmissable: The conditions we endure at work are deadly. When the minister refused to act, they called it what it was—environmental racism.
Acts of resistance like these are multiplying. Whether walking off the job, holding tribunals, or staging creative protests, workers are asserting that survival should not depend on employer goodwill. They are demanding enforceable regulations: access to shade and water, mandated rest breaks, and the right to stop work in unsafe conditions. And they are insisting that climate justice is part of migrant justice. Because for local workers and seasonal guest workers alike, it's nearly impossible to exert your right to protections when employers can hold the threat of immigration law over your head. That's why we support permanent status for all migrant workers.
This is a fight that stretches across borders and industries. Under guest worker schemes like Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program or the US H-2A system, bosses often pit workers of different nationalities against one another. Yet when Jeremiah and his colleagues risked retaliation to walk out together, they showed the power of cross-border solidarity. That spirit echoes in warehouses, restaurants, and processing plants where workers are refusing to be divided by language, status, or immigration papers.
The climate crisis is not some distant threat; it is here, bearing down on workers who already face some of the most exploitative conditions. Governments may drag their feet, but workers are on the move. Their organizing points the way forward, reminding us that the fight for safe working conditions is inseparable from the fight for dignity, racial justice, and migrant rights.
When the heat rises, so do workers. And if we want a food system that is sustainable, just, and resilient in the face of climate change, we must follow their lead.
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Trump’s Attacks on Citizenship Reveal a Deeper Problem with ‘Citizenship’ Itself
We must reimagine a world where freedom and equality are guaranteed to all, no matter their status.
Aug 14, 2025
There are two main paths to citizenship in the United States: birthright, which is guaranteed to those born on US soil or to citizen parents, and naturalization, a process applied for after immigrating.
The Trump administration is attempting to upend these long-held and widely accepted rules, arguing for an end to birthright citizenship, which is constitutionally protected, while attacking the naturalization status of populations across the country.
These attacks on citizenship come amid a substantial investment in immigration crackdowns. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” allocates an unprecedented $178 billion toward immigration enforcement, a figure higher than the military budgets of entire nations and a price tag 13 times greater than Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) already booming budget.
And we know exactly what this expansion will be used for.
America’s immigration system must honor human rights for everyone, especially those at the margins.
In just the first few months of the Trump administration, ICE agents donning masks and unmarked clothing have surveilled, interrogated, and kidnapped individuals off the streets en masse. Arbitrary arrest quotas fill overcrowded, inhumane, and unsanitary detention centers. And despite claims that only “criminals” are being targeted, people of all backgrounds—including students, politicians, children, and U.S.-born citizens—are being arrested and abused, stripped of their dignity and humanity.
Trump is undoubtedly culpable for these abuses. But he did not invent the playbook. He simply adapted the rules long built into this country’s citizenship policies—both the implicit and explicit ones.
US citizenship has always been negotiated between those the state deemed worthy and unworthy. Race and gender have long restricted individuals from obtaining citizenship and the privileges granted with it. The 14th Amendment, the guarantor of jus soli, transformed the status and rights of all those to come—myself included. I would not be a US citizen without this code.
But documents and formalities cannot erase the existence of an informal, second-class citizenry that continues to pervade American society.
Native Americans, Indigenous peoples native to these lands, were denied this framework of legality and excluded from guaranteed citizenship for generations. Systems of oppression, domination, and exclusion allowed white bodies to be favored over Black and brown ones—even when they held and waved that landmark document, demanding their civil liberties be guaranteed and protected. Those born in U.S. territories like Puerto Rico and Guam continue to lack meaningful electoral rights and, in American Samoa’s case, even citizenship itself.
An examination of the difficult and lengthy naturalization process reveals further discrepancies. Volume 12 Part F states that individuals must possess “good moral character” to become naturalized, a measure that is both vague and arbitrary. Any conduct or act that deviates from a community’s moral standard is grounds for both denial of citizenship and denaturalization if citizenship is already obtained.
But how is morality defined? Immoral behavior is outlined by the state—murder, aggravated felonies, genocide, and torture are some examples listed. But aggravated felonies also include failing to appear in court. So when we see ICE arresting immigrants at court hearings and scaring others from appearing out of fear of arrest, suddenly the intent behind these actions becomes clear.
In this system, any action or inaction becomes punishable—including the “crime” of being an immigrant. Notably, this “moral character” clause has existed since the Naturalization Act of 1790—a reminder that these pursuits are not a recent political development but built into our founding documents.
Now, the Justice Department is expanding its criteria for denaturalization, using the definitions established by Congress centuries ago. A recent Justice Department memo orders those accused of involvement with terrorist, gang, or cartel groups to be targeted for deportation or even stripped of their citizenship, an indicator of their “immoral character.”
But the administration’s definition of “terrorism” and “criminal involvement” is both flawed and targeted. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, accused of being a member of MS-13, an international criminal gang, was wrongfully deported and imprisoned in El Salvador without due process—a move that was actually illegal, given that a court order barred his deportation to El Salvador on account of the gang threats and violence he faced there.
In another example, Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student at Tufts, cowrote an op-ed criticizing the university’s response to resolutions passed by its student body about Israel’s violations of international law. She was subsequently kidnapped and detained in an ICE prison for months.
These are simply two instances of a series of repeated offenses committed by the US government. In an effort to apprehend and throw out immigrants en masse, the state criminalizes individuals for free speech and seeking asylum.
Elsewhere, the right to vote is denied to citizens the US deems unworthy of representation. Essential rights and civil liberties are being stripped from legal residents, mitigating access to the freedoms that have defined America for centuries. More and more individuals are sorted into different tiers of citizenship, soon leaving few with the guarantee of liberty and justice promised to all.
For all its extremism and cruelty, the Trump administration is simply using the tools already available to them. Citizenship requirements contain too many loopholes that are easily exploited. So for progressives, opposing restrictive immigration policies is not enough. We must move beyond an idea of “citizenship” that only guarantees rights according to an individual’s status and reimagine a world that respects the freedom and equality of all people no matter their status.
If “morality” is a requirement for entry, then anything can be redefined as “immoral.” Economic metrics of inclusion fail for the same reason. Nations should not prioritize people solely based on what they can provide to employers. The argument that “immigrants help our economy” only emphasizes the need for individuals with economic value.
America’s immigration system must honor human rights for everyone, especially those at the margins. Those seeking asylum, refuge, education, or simply a better life should not be denied access to civil liberties and fundamental freedoms.
Aren’t these the true American values?
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