ICE Deaths Reach Their Highest Level in Decades

From Sofia Leyba's 8-28-26 COUNTERPUNCH Op-Ed piece entitled “We’re Getting Awfully Used to ICE’s Abuses”:

Jose Chajon-Raxon, an immigrant from Guatemala, died this August at Delaney Hall, a controversial ICE facility in New Jersey. His death marks more than 50 deaths in ICE custody since President Trump took office last year.

Despite all the controversies, ICE keeps killing people — a sentence that should never feel normal. We should never find ourselves counting the days between deaths or waiting for the next headline. But somehow, we have.

Earlier this year it was Renee Good, then Alex Pretti. This summer it was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Before them were Silviero Villegas Gonzalez and Ruben Ray Martinez. Those are only the names we know— many others will never make national news [...].

In June 2026, ICE arrested more than 43,000 people, about 1,400 every day. By July, nearly 68,000 people were being held in immigration detention. The overwhelming majority of those arrested had no criminal convictions.

This includes over 6,000 children. Children who are spending their birthdays behind bars. Children who should be back in school, safe and protected. Many have been detained for 100 days or more — five times longer than the 20-day limit for detaining immigrant children.

They’re being held in facilities like Delaney and others, where human rights groups have warned repeatedly that dangerous conditions are leading to preventable deaths. ICE deaths reached their highest level in decades last year, and this year is on track to be no better [...].

No matter where you were born, what political party you belong to, or whether you support stricter immigration enforcement, no government should have the power to kill or imprison people with so little accountability. 

To read Leyba's entire article, click HERE. 

Surveillance and Harassment in Minneapolis

From Matt Sledge's 8-15-26 THE INTERCEPT article entitled "Secret ICE Agent Tried to 'Entice' Minneapolis Activists into Confrontational Tactics":

Organizers in Minneapolis long suspected they were being surveilled by the federal government during the height of the winter protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It was not until a court filing on Thursday, however, that the youth-led Sunrise Movement and other groups learned the depths of infiltration.

The Sunrise Movement has long preached nonviolence even as it pursues aggressive tactics, such as making a racket outside of the hotels where ICE agents sleep.

But the group’s public commitment to peaceful protest did not spare it from a months-long, aggressive campaign of government snooping that included ICE agents attending its meetings and protests undercover, subpoenas of its financial records, and at least one apparent attempt to entice an organizer into backing more confrontational tactics [...].

Shortly after federal agents killed Alex Pretti on January 24, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations opened two investigations it called “Operation Puppet Master” and “Project Whipple Shield,” the latter a reference to the federal building that was the site of many ICE protests.

Supposedly, those probes would focus on a network supporting “violent opportunists and agitators.” In reality, the investigative reports that the federal government has turned over to defense attorneys show that undercover ICE agents secretly recorded at churches, libraries, and schools even when organizers stressed the importance of nonviolence.

In the case of Sunrise, undercover agents were already targeting the group before the killings of Pretti and Renee Good [...].

One week after Pretti’s slaying, two undercover agents attended a Sunrise Movement Twin Cities training on “resistance skills” hosted at a public library.

The meeting included primers on deescalation at protests, and the ICE agent noted that it was “made clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused on ‘peaceful’ protests.”

That did not stop the undercover agent from making a private approach to one of the organizers, according to a report the agent produced. The agent told the organizer that he worked in construction and “could build items that might assist other groups with more ‘direct-action’ protests.” When the undercover agent declared that “going to jail did not bother him,” the organizer “acknowledged” the agent’s comments and took down his phone number, according to the report.

Kevin Riach, the attorney representing one of the defendants in the indictment targeting Minneapolis activists, said in a court filing this week that that report was one of several showing that ICE’s undercover agents “actively participated in organizing and directing the groups they were surveilling, at times working to entice people into discussing or committing crimes.”

To read Sledge's entire article, click HERE. 

In regard to the connection between organized surveillance and ICE, I suggest taking a look at this 1-4-25 CryptoPost entitled "Anti-surveillance Graffiti."