A nationwide investigation has uncovered disturbing allegations of medical neglect affecting immigration detainees held in facilities across the United States, with some individuals resorting to desperate measures like extracting their own teeth due to untreated pain.
An investigation conducted by KFF Health News and The Associated Press discovered that detainees in at least 33 states have filed federal lawsuits claiming immigration detention centers are providing inadequate healthcare. The investigation analyzed thousands of court cases and interviewed more than 50 detainees, family members and attorneys.
The allegations include stories of an Albanian man who removed his own tooth after enduring months of pain at a New Mexico facility, a Honduran mother who required hospitalization for heart issues after being denied blood pressure medication in Florida, and a Venezuelan man whose leg became infected with flesh-eating bacteria when staff failed to transport him to a scheduled medical appointment in Vermont.
Detainees report missing critical medications for serious conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, depression, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and HIV. According to court documents, requests for medical assistance have gone unanswered for weeks, leading to rising blood sugar levels, worsening infections, untreated cancers, and incidents of collapse and seizures.
The detention system is experiencing significant strain as the detained population has surged to more than 75,000 immigrants as of mid-January, compared to approximately 40,000 one year prior.
Research published in JAMA in April indicated that ICE custody has become more deadly than it has been in two decades. The Department of Homeland Security has reported 51 deaths in detention since the start of the current administration, with suicides reaching unprecedented levels.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment made six days before publication. However, the department’s acting chief medical officer, Sean Conley, has previously stated that “it is both policy and longstanding practice for aliens to receive timely and appropriate medical care from the moment they enter ICE custody” and emphasized that DHS recruits healthcare professionals to maintain high standards. “This is better, more responsive healthcare than many aliens have ever received in their entire lives,” he said.
Individual facilities and private prison companies contracting with DHS that responded to inquiries said they adhere to ICE standards and provide medical care when required. Some claimed unfamiliarity with the allegations detailed in court documents, while others attributed medical care gaps to the detainees themselves.
Vardan Gukasian, a political dissident and former paramedic who spent years imprisoned in Armenia, described his experience in a March court declaration while contesting his 13-month detention in Henderson, Nevada. “I have never seen such disregard or medical neglect like this anywhere,” he wrote.
Madeleine Skains, a spokesperson for the city of Henderson, stated that medical care is always available at the facility and that the court had not ordered changes to his care.
In June, when Gukasian experienced symptoms of uncontrolled high blood pressure including dizziness, nosebleeds and headaches, his cellmate attempted to get help by banging on their door. “When it did not arrive, the rest of the block banged on their doors,” he wrote. Gukasian was hospitalized that same day.
The current administration’s mass deportation efforts have resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being detained during routine immigration check-ins, traffic stops, at their homes and in hospitals. Approximately 70% of detainees have no criminal conviction, and their immigration proceedings are civil rather than criminal in nature.
A father of six in Georgia described being injured while shackled during transport to an Atlanta facility when the vehicle jolted, throwing him into a metal armrest. “I couldn’t understand why they treated me so harshly,” he said. His wound became infected with E. coli, he reported, because he had to sleep on a dirty concrete floor amid leaking toilets.
Court records indicate that staffers at Stewart Detention Center in rural Lumpkin, Georgia, did not adequately respond to that man’s medical requests until he lost consciousness and was transported to a hospital approximately one hour away. There, he said, a doctor informed him he had narrowly avoided amputation of his left leg. Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the private prison company operating the facility, said medical staff found no records of a case matching this description.
The 48-year-old man, who moved to the U.S. from Guatemala more than two decades ago, was released in October and is now a legal permanent resident. However, he remains uncertain about returning to his construction job because he says he can no longer lift heavy objects due to his injury.
Some detainees and their attorneys report being denied even basic care, including gauze for open foot wounds, prenatal care for high-risk pregnancies, pillows to ease pain for those with advanced stomach cancer, and sanitary pads for postpartum bleeding.
During an October hearing concerning a 70-year-old woman who alleged the government lost her glasses during arrest, Judge Benita Pearson, a federal judge in Ohio, stated: “I would like to believe the government has the best interest of those it holds in detention for whatever period of time. If one is unable to see due to the loss of glasses when detained, that should be fixed.”
Dora Schriro, who previously worked for ICE and now serves as a special adviser to the American Bar Association, explained that case law requires the government to provide people in immigration detention with the same care afforded to those in traditional jails awaiting trial. However, administrators have discretion and medical care standards vary.
Frequent transfers of detainees across the country, often without warning, interrupt ongoing treatment. A woman from El Salvador reported missing a week of HIV medication when she was transferred from Colorado to a county jail in Wyoming.
A Russian man wrote that he consulted with a gastroenterologist about painful gallstones while detained in Texas and scheduled an appointment with a surgeon. “Unfortunately, I never got to see him, due to my being moved around various detention centers.”
Advocates say even obvious disabilities, such as legal blindness, are being ignored. A detainee who lost one eye and had severe glaucoma in the other required twice-daily eye drops to preserve his remaining vision. However, he said some days the drops never arrived.
“Now, I can only see a little bit straight in front. It now often looks like I’m seeing through gauze,” the man wrote in a court declaration. “This makes me very afraid that one of these times I am going to open my eyes and not be able to see anything at all.”
He expressed fear that he wouldn’t be able to see his infant son grow up.
“It’s just sort of brazen indifference to really obvious problems, things you would have thought absurd a decade ago — like the fact that you can’t see,” said the man’s attorney, Brian Hoffman. “Before, you could attempt to work with folks on the government side and maybe shame them into doing the right thing. Now, it’s sort of like anything you want done you have to go to court and sue over.”
Even court orders don’t always guarantee compliance. One California judge ordered the government to take a man showing signs of prostate cancer to a specialist for diagnosis and treatment, but records show they failed to do so. Lawyers representing ICE told the judge that officials missed the appointment due to an “internal scheduling error.” CoreCivic, which operates that facility, said it was unable to comment on active litigation.
When immigrants file habeas corpus petitions, they exercise a right to challenge unlawful imprisonment that dates back to medieval times. More than 40,000 such petitions have been filed during the current administration, driven by decisions last year to deny bond to many people held on immigration charges. Judges are divided on whether this practice is legal, and the question appears headed to the Supreme Court.
Many habeas claims have succeeded, but judges typically cite reasons unrelated to the medical neglect described in the petitions, such as being held too long before deportation.
The more than 300 medical neglect claims identified in this investigation represent only a fraction of the problem. Details of habeas corpus cases are often hidden due to a federal rule preventing public online viewing of such documents. KFF Health News and AP obtained some documents directly and received records on 4,400 cases from Habeas Dockets, a project of the nonprofit Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative. However, tens of thousands more remain largely inaccessible.
Some judges have written that the habeas process is not the appropriate venue for raising medical neglect allegations and have declined to release detainees based on those claims. Not every detainee who believes they experienced medical neglect files a habeas petition or mentions their medical issues if they do.
Jose-Antonio Segismundo’s petition made no mention of being unable to see an oncologist for abdominal cancer while detained for more than seven months at the Florida detention facility known as Alligator Alcatraz and Folkston D Ray ICE Processing Center in Georgia. Medical records in his court filings show he was arrested approximately five weeks before his scheduled appointment with a cancer specialist.
His wife, Maria Jose Gonzalez, said he received no treatment despite her sending his medical records and explaining his condition to officials at Folkston. When his stomach pain erupted, often suddenly and intensely, she said they provided him with Tylenol.
Christopher Ferreira, spokesperson for Geo Group which operates Folkston, said the company follows ICE standards and provides healthcare and access to off-site medical specialists when needed.
This spring, Segismundo, 48, was deported to Mexico, a country he left nearly 30 years ago, Gonzalez said. Now, she said, he will have to restart his search for care in the Oaxacan village where he grew up.
Detainees receiving inadequate healthcare have limited recourse. DHS last year eliminated most functions of the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and shut the office entirely in early May, citing lack of funding from Congress.
Previously, ombudsman staff could facilitate medical care or investigate complaints of neglect, according to Matt Boles, an immigration attorney in Georgia. Now, he said, there’s no one to contact.
Meanwhile, detainees’ families report feeling helpless, making desperate calls to facilities, the government and their legislators while watching their loved ones deteriorate.
Riya Khan watched her mother become sicker at the California City Detention Facility, owned by CoreCivic. When she visited a week after her mother arrived at the Mojave Desert facility, Riya said the 64-year-old woman stumbled into her seat, shaking with labored breathing.
Masuma Khan came to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1997. She has no criminal history according to her records and was detained in October when she appeared for her regular ICE check-in.
During the month she was detained, according to her daughter, she only intermittently received medications for conditions including high blood pressure, hypothyroidism and prediabetes.
Todd said CoreCivic treats chronic conditions in line with applicable medical standards. “Nothing matters more to CoreCivic than the health, safety and well-being of the people in our care,” Todd said.
Khan said she received her asthma medication for the first time two days before release and her glaucoma eye drops never arrived. Staff told Khan she needed to purchase some medications from the commissary, but it didn’t stock them, her daughter said.
Before ICE detained Masuma Khan, she made friends with everyone, her daughter said. She had worked for years at Lucky Boy, an iconic Pasadena fast-food restaurant, and in her free time fed birds and left out fruit for bees that visited her apartment’s balcony.
Now she’s too scared to go outside. She still must regularly check in with ICE, and she’s terrified each time.
Previously, detainees with serious medical needs would likely have been released on humanitarian parole, partly to avoid the cost of their care, said Vermont attorney Andrew Pelcher.
In fiscal year 2023 — before the detained population soared — ICE spent more than $390 million on healthcare for detained noncitizens, according to its most recent annual report to Congress. At a May conference, then acting director Todd Lyons said ICE has spent “almost half a billion dollars” on detainee healthcare this year.
Now, under “mandatory detention,” attorneys say people are remaining locked up with serious — and expensive — conditions.
A Romanian citizen underwent several heart surgeries, including an emergency triple bypass in April 2025, before his July arrest. As part of his recovery, the 52-year-old was required to take 16 daily medications. While at an ICE field office in Baltimore, his court filings allege, he went two days without any medication before officials moved him to a New Jersey facility.
He was hospitalized three times while detained, complaining of chest pains — partly because, according to medical records and court documents, despite “countless requests,” the detention center did not provide all his medications. Hospital discharge papers cited by his lawyer show he received only eight of the 16 medications after his second hospital release.
“Can you please talk to the ICE facility to make sure they give him his medications?” his treatment providers wrote in medical records included in his court filings. “He was admitted last week for chest pain and today he was readmitted again for chest pain secondary to non compliance for medications.”
Several weeks later in August, he suffered a stroke while on a video call with his daughter, according to court filings. “He was struggling to breathe, and was pointing at his chest where he was again experiencing pain, and suddenly stopped speaking.” His daughter screamed for help through the video monitor, according to his petition. “Eventually an officer came in to assist him and cut the feed.”
The man lost his ability to speak for four days, the document states. He was returned to detention, where he remained until a federal judge ordered his release in November.
Cassandra Amador waits for the phone to ring every morning, desperate to ask her husband the question that has awakened her every night for months: “Did you get your medicine?”
Her husband, Pedro Javier Amador Gutierrez, 36, has high blood pressure and depends on the state-run Florida facility nicknamed “Deportation Depot” to administer the prescriptions that have kept him alive for years. Many mornings, he tells his wife he did not receive them.
When she talks to him, she said, he sounds weaker and more frightened every day, unlike the upbeat man who would take her kids out for ice cream.
“You can hear in his voice how he feels,” she said.
Now, she said, he’s considering returning to Cuba, which he fled due to political persecution, out of fear that he will die in detention without his medicines. Amador and her children would accompany him, she said, even though she was born in New Jersey, has never been to Cuba and doesn’t speak much Spanish.
He has already collapsed twice at the Baker Correctional Institution in Sanderson, Florida, his wife said. She’s terrified that next time, he won’t get up.
