When responding to questions about dehumanizing conditions and deaths inside its incarceration centers, including those at New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, the Department of Homeland Security recently told The Emancipator: “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”
DHS has repeatedly made this claim. The Emancipator investigated it and found it egregiously false.
To investigate DHS’s claims, The Emancipator examined three of the Bureau of Prisons’ most populated individual federal institutions and their associated work camps: Fort Dix in New Jersey, which has more than 4,000 inmates; Thomson in Illinois with more than 2,000 inmates; and Lompoc II in California with more than 2,200 inmates as of the end of August.
The Emancipator also examined the three most populated ICE detention centers: Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, which has more than 2,000 detainees; Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi, with more than 1,800 detainees; and Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, with more than 1,700 detainees.
We looked at several “standards of care”: access to adequate nutrition, water, and medical treatment, as well as the number of deaths.
The Claim: “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment…”
The Reality: Multiple independent reports, eyewitness accounts and those detained have decried the lack of adequate food, water, and medical care.
While an ICE detention report released in July says the three most populated detention centers recently passed inspections based on several factors, including the 2025 detention standards of care, those detained have described deplorable conditions such as rotten food and physical and mental abuse.
Detainees, immigration lawyers, and watchdog groups have described unsanitary conditions such as mold and unclean toilets at several detention centers, including at Camp East Montana.
A report released in June by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that Camp East Montana did not meet several detention standards when it came to healthcare and dietitians certifying food menus.
In one example listed by GAO, investigators found there were no treatment plans for detainees with conditions such as HIV and diabetes. A contractor also could not provide evidence that the dietitian reviewed food menus for people who are detained.
At Adams County Correctional Center, at least 100 detainees protested last week over spoiled food, according to local reports. Reports cite a lack of food and hot water due to a gas leak.
Lawmakers, including Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat, have called for Stewart Detention Center to be shut down after an oversight visit at the facility earlier this month.
“What we heard from detained people today was that they are not getting the care, the proper food, or the clean water that ICE says they are — to the point that we heard from several people who are simply not drinking water that they haven’t bought bottled from the commissary,” Jayapal said after the oversight visit.
A different 2025 GAO report criticized the Department of Homeland Security for failing to adequately measure whether its inspection programs are working. The report found that ICE facilities often pass inspections even when those inspectors found medical, safety, and sanitation issues.
To be clear, inmates held within the Bureau of Prisons facilities have died from such causes as heart disease, cancer and respiratory illnesses, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. The organization examined deaths in jails and prisons run by the Department of Justice between 2019 and 2023 and found 21,675 deaths, including those classified as “suicides or deaths from “natural causes” without details or justification.”
However, the rapid uptick in the number of those dying in ICE detention has alarmed immigration rights and civil rights groups. A report released by JAMA in April found that deaths in ICE detention have reached a 22-year high in those facilities.
At least 35 people detained by ICE since Oct. 2025 have died, according to the agency. Overall, an estimated 65,000 people are detained in ICE facilities, according to the agency’s most recent fiscal year 2026 data.
Those who have died include three detained people at Camp East Montana, one person at Adams County Correctional Center and one person detained at Stewart Detention Center, according to ICE. Another person who was diagnosed with leukemia while detained at Stewart Detention Center died after his release.
During that same time period, at least 56 inmates died at Bureau of Prisons federal institutions, according to a review of public releases by the bureau. An estimated 153,303 people are in federal prisons overseen by that agency, or more than twice the number in ICE facilities.
There were no reported inmate deaths at Lompoc II. One person died at Thomson, and one person died at Fort Dix, according to data from the Bureau of Prisons.
That means the death rate of people detained by ICE was roughly 47% higher than those incarcerated by the Bureau of Prisons during the same time period.
ICE claiming its detention standards are higher than U.S. prisons isn’t saying much when U.S. prisons are relatively inhumane. First, numerous reports, including one released in March, found that U.S. federal prisons’ standards of care violated several international standards for human detention. Some professors and criminal justice scholars also say that while standards of care exist among federal prisons and detention centers, they are not uniformly enforceable and, as such, data in this space is unreliable.
More to the point, ICE’s comparison, at the onset, is not an appropriate one for still another reason. DHS compares the treatment of those convicted of breaking the law, who are confined through the U.S. prison system.
The majority of those detained in ICE detention centers have not been convicted of lawbreaking, according to an analysis of ICE data by The Emancipator.
“Detention is non-punitive. Once an [immigrant] is transferred to ICE custody, the agency makes a custody determination,” according to the agency’s website.
ICE also said it used detention resources to “detain [immigrants] to secure their presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States” or those it believes are a “public safety or flight risk” during the process.
ICE’s narrative of higher standards is based on the false presumption that it has one set of standards. Federal prisons operate under federal laws and regulations. ICE uses several sets of detention standards. Which standards apply can vary by facility, depending on the facility’s arrangement with ICE.
“Detention standards provide the clearest set of requirements for the treatment of immigrants in detention, and contractually bind the local jails, prisons, and private prison operators that detain immigrants for ICE,” according to the ACLU’s North Carolina chapter. “ICE’s standards also serve as the metric for facility inspections and oversight by the Department of Homeland Security, which the DHS’s Office of Inspector General has already found to be dangerously flawed.”
