An Albanian man’s pain grew so unbearable, he said, he pulled out his own tooth as he languished for months in a New Mexico immigration detention center. A Honduran mother of two said she was hospitalized for a heart problem after she was denied blood pressure medications while held in Florida. A Venezuelan man said his leg grew purple and swollen from flesh-eating bacteria when staffers at a Vermont facility did not bring him to a scheduled doctor appointment.
Hundreds of detainees across at least 33 states allege in federal suits that immigration detention facilities are failing to provide adequate medical care, an investigation by KFF Health News and The Associated Press found. Detainees say they didn’t get medications on time — or at all — for conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and HIV. Requests for help went unanswered for weeks. Blood sugars rose. Infections festered. Cancers remained untreated. Detainees collapsed and had seizures.
U.S. jails and immigration detention centers have long struggled to meet the medical needs of the people in their charge. But the system is sagging under an influx of detentions since President Donald Trump returned to office: More than 75,000 immigrants were being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as of mid-January, up from around 40,000 a year earlier.
KFF Health News and AP analyzed thousands of court cases filed since Trump’s second inauguration that use a legal route known as habeas corpus to argue people are being held illegally by ICE. The records offer a rare window into how those detained say, often under penalty of perjury, ICE is handling their medical needs. Reporters also interviewed more than 50 detainees, family members, and lawyers.
The investigation revealed that medical neglect is alleged across the sprawling detention system, including in offices not designed to house people, county jails, and quickly staged sites with nicknames such as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
ICE custody is deadlier than it has been in two decades, researchers wrote in JAMA in April. The Department of Homeland Security reported 51 people had died in detention since the start of Trump’s second administration — with suicides spiking to an unprecedented number.
KFF Health News and AP asked DHS to respond to the findings six days before publication, but it did not provide comment. The department’s acting Chief Medical Officer Sean Conley has previously said “it is both policy and longstanding practice for aliens to receive timely and appropriate medical care from the moment they enter ICE custody” and that the agency recruits healthcare professionals to maintain high standards. “This is better, more responsive healthcare than many aliens have ever received in their entire lives,” he has said.
Individual facilities and private prison companies contracting with DHS that responded to requests for comment said they follow ICE standards and detainees receive medical care when it is required. Some said they were unfamiliar with the allegations outlined in court documents; others blamed some detainees for lapses in their medical care.
“I have never seen such disregard or medical neglect like this anywhere,” Vardan Gukasian, a political dissident and former paramedic who spent years behind bars in Armenia, wrote in a court declaration in March to contest his detention in Henderson, Nevada, as it stretched to 13 months despite health problems.
Madeleine Skains, a spokesperson for the city of Henderson, said medical care is always available at the facility and that the court had not ordered changes to his care.
Last June, as Gukasian experienced the symptoms of uncontrolled high blood pressure — dizziness, a nosebleed, and a headache — his cellmate banged on their door for help.
“When it did not arrive, the rest of the block banged on their doors,” he wrote. Gukasian was hospitalized that day.
‘Brazen Indifference to Really Obvious Problems’
The administration’s mass deportation effort has swept up hundreds of thousands of people during routine immigration check-ins, at traffic stops, at their homes, and in hospitals.
About 70% of detainees have no criminal conviction. Their immigration proceedings are civil, not criminal.
“I couldn’t understand why they treated me so harshly,” said a father of six in Georgia. He said he was injured while shackled in custody when the vehicle transporting him to an Atlanta facility jolted, throwing him out of his seat and into a metal armrest. His wound became infected with E. coli, he said, because he had to sleep on a dirty concrete floor amid leaking toilets.
Like other detainees interviewed, he spoke on the condition of anonymity; they said they fear for their safety, for the safety of their families, or that speaking out would jeopardize their immigration cases. The AP and KFF Health News are not naming anyone identified in court documents without their consent.
Staffers at Stewart Detention Center in rural Lumpkin, Georgia, didn’t adequately respond to that man’s request for medical help, a court filing says, until he passed out and was taken to a hospital about an hour away. There, he said, a doctor told him he’d narrowly escaped amputation of his left leg. Medical staff found no records of a case matching this description, according to Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, which runs the facility.
The 48-year-old, who moved to the U.S. from Guatemala more than two decades ago, was released in October and is now a legal permanent resident. But he is unsure if he’ll be able to return to his job in construction because, he said, he can no longer lift heavy things due to his injury.
A man in the Atlanta area was injured while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and developed an E. coli infection. “I couldn’t understand why they treated me so harshly,” says the father of six U.S. citizens, who is now a legal permanent resident but did not want to be named to avoid potential retaliation against his family. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
Some detainees or their lawyers said even basic care was denied: gauze to protect an open foot wound, prenatal care for a high-risk pregnancy, a pillow to ease the pain of sleeping with advanced stomach cancer, sanitary pads for postpartum bleeding.
“I would like to believe the government has the best interest of those it holds in detention for whatever period of time,” Judge Benita Pearson, a federal judge in Ohio, said during a hearing in October concerning a 70-year-old who alleged the government lost her glasses during her arrest. “If one is unable to see due to the loss of glasses when detained, that should be fixed.”
Dora Schriro, who worked for ICE and now serves as a special adviser to the American Bar Association, said case law requires the government to treat people in immigration detention with the same care it affords those in traditional jails awaiting trial. But administrators are granted discretion and medical care standards vary.
Detainees are frequently moved across the country, often without warning, interrupting treatment. A woman from El Salvador said she missed a week of HIV medication when she was transferred from Colorado to a county jail in Wyoming.
A Russian man wrote that, while detained in Texas, he saw a gastroenterologist about his painful gallstones 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 that even obvious disabilities, like legal blindness, are ignored.
A detainee who lost one eye and had severe glaucoma in the other required twice-daily drops to maintain what vision remained. But, he said, some days the drops never came.
“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 wrote that he was scared 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,” the man’s attorney, Brian Hoffman, said. “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 aren’t always enough. One California judge ordered the government to take a man showing signs of prostate cancer to a specialist for diagnosis and treatment. Records show they did not take him.
Lawyers representing ICE told the judge that officials missed the appointment because of an “internal scheduling error.” CoreCivic, which runs that facility, said it was unable to comment on active litigation.
A Surge in Cases
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 Trump’s second term, fueled by decisions last year to deny bond to many people held on immigration charges. Judges are split on whether that’s legal; the question appears headed to the Supreme Court.
Many habeas claims have been successful, but judges typically cite reasons unrelated to the medical neglect described in the petitions, such as detainees’ being held too long before being deported.
The more than 300 medical neglect claims found in this investigation represent a fraction of the problem. The details of habeas corpus cases are often hidden due to a federal rule barring the public from viewing such documents online. KFF Health News and the AP obtained some documents from courthouses and received records on 4,400 cases from Habeas Dockets, a project of the nonprofit Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative. But tens of thousands more remain largely inaccessible.
Some judges have written that the habeas process is not how to raise allegations of medical neglect and have declined to release detainees over those claims. Not every detainee who believes they experienced medical neglect files a habeas petition or cites their medical issues if they do.
Jose-Antonio Segismundo’s petition made no mention of being unable to see an oncologist for the cancer in his abdomen 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 about five weeks before his scheduled appointment with a cancer specialist.
His wife, Maria Jose Gonzalez, said he didn’t receive any treatment even though she sent his medical records and explained his condition to officials at Folkston. When his stomach pain erupted, often suddenly and intensely, she said, they gave him Tylenol.
Geo Group, which runs Folkston, follows ICE standards and provides healthcare and access to off-site medical specialists when needed, spokesperson Christopher Ferreira said.
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.
Maria Jose Gonzalez of Wimauma, Florida, holds a photo of her husband, Jose-Antonio Segismundo, who was detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for more than seven months in Florida and Georgia before being deported to Mexico. Medical records show he was arrested about five weeks before his scheduled appointment with a specialist to treat his abdominal cancer. (Chris O’Meara/AP)
Watching Loved Ones Deteriorate
Detainees receiving inadequate healthcare have little recourse. The Department of Homeland Security last year gutted the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. In early May, it shut the office entirely, arguing that Congress didn’t fund it.
Previously, ombudsman staffers could help facilitate medical care or look into complaints of neglect, according to Matt Boles, an immigration attorney in Georgia. Now, he said, there’s no one to call.
Meanwhile, detainees’ families said they feel helpless, making desperate calls to facilities, the government, and their legislators while watching their loved ones deteriorate.
Riya Khan saw her mother get sicker at the California City Detention Facility, which is owned by CoreCivic. When she visited a week after her mother arrived at the facility in the Mojave Desert, Riya said, the 64-year-old woman stumbled into her seat. She was shaking and her breathing was labored.
Masuma Khan came to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1997. She has no criminal history, her records say, and was detained in October when she showed up for her regular ICE check-in.
For the month she was detained, according to her daughter, she only intermittently received her medications for conditions including high blood pressure, hypothyroidism, and prediabetes. CoreCivic treats chronic conditions in line with applicable medical standards, Todd said.
“Nothing matters more to CoreCivic than the health, safety and well-being of the people in our care,” Todd said.
Khan said she got her asthma medication for the first time two days before she was released and that her eye drops for glaucoma never arrived. Staffers told Khan she needed to buy some of her 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.
Masuma Khan (center) waits in line with her attorney Laboni Hoq (left of Khan) to enter a federal building in Los Angeles for an appointment on April 21. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Khan (second from right in the front row) and her daughter, Riya (fourth from right in the front row), pose with supporters outside a federal building in Los Angeles on April 21. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Khan (right) came to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1997 and was detained for a month after she showed up for a regular check-in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in October. Here, she hugs her daughter, Riya (left). (Jae C. Hong/AP)
A “Welcome Home” balloon that was left at the front door of Khan’s apartment in Altadena, California, after she was released from an immigration detention facility. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Khan’s daughter says that her mother has nightmares and is scared to go outside after being held at an immigration detention facility for a month in 2025. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
A Stroke on a Video Call
Previously, detainees with serious medical needs would likely have been released on humanitarian parole, in part to avoid the cost of their care, Vermont attorney Andrew Pelcher said.
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. In May, Todd Lyons, then acting director of ICE, said at a conference that the agency had already spent “almost half a billion dollars” on detainee healthcare this year.
Now, under “mandatory detention,” people are staying locked up with serious — and expensive — conditions.
A Romanian citizen underwent several heart surgeries, including an emergency triple bypass in April 2025, before he was arrested in July. 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 facility in New Jersey.
He was hospitalized three times while detained, complaining of chest pains — in part, medical records and court documents say, because 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 release from the hospital.
“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 had 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 says. He was returned to detention, where he remained until a federal judge ordered his release in November.
Khan holds medication she takes daily. While detained, she says, she only intermittently received her medications for multiple conditions including high blood pressure, hypothyroidism, and prediabetes. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Impossible Choices
Cassandra Amador waits for the phone to ring every morning, desperate to ask her husband the question that’s woken her up 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 facility in Florida nicknamed “Deportation Depot” to administer the prescriptions that have kept him alive for years. Many mornings, he tells his wife he did not get them.
When she talks to him, she said, he sounds weaker and more scared every day, not like 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 because of political persecution, out of fear that he will die in detention without his medicines. Amador and her children would go with him, she said, even though she was born in New Jersey, has never been to Cuba, and doesn’t speak much Spanish.
But he’s already collapsed twice at the Baker Correctional Institution in Sanderson, Florida, his wife said. She’s terrified that the next time, he won’t get up.
Methodology
KFF Health News and The Associated Press sifted through thousands of immigration habeas corpus claims to find allegations of medical neglect from people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the second Trump administration.
Without a comprehensive, publicly available dataset of medical complaints by those in ICE custody, we used immigration habeas corpus claims to identify detainees’ healthcare-related allegations raised in federal court. Although the intended purpose of habeas corpus is to challenge the legality of a petitioner’s detention — rather than conditions of their confinement — these filings sometimes include detainees’ claims of inadequate healthcare.
But habeas corpus filings are not always publicly available. Federal rules restrict how members of the public can access habeas petitions filed by people in immigration detention. For most of these cases, court websites publish only court orders and dockets describing other filings. The initial petitions are available only through in-person visits to federal courthouses across the country. Habeas Dockets, a project of the nonprofit Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative, coordinates a nationwide network of volunteers to gather these petitions and make them available online.
KFF Health News and AP analyzed the dockets of roughly 33,000 cases filed by detainees from Jan. 20, 2025, through March 2026. The vast majority of cases had only basic procedural information, like dates of court filings and rulings. Only about 4,400 included the original petitions.
We also gathered a few dozen case files from courthouses, lawyers, and the Massachusetts federal district court website, which posts most petitions under a unique standing order.
We ran keyword and semantic searches of court records, including petitions, motions, and orders, for terms and phrases potentially related to medical neglect, such as surgery, medications, inadequate medical care, and treatment for chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
We found about 500 cases potentially alleging medical neglect. At least two reporters reviewed each case manually, yielding more than 300 cases containing specific allegations in sworn filings of delayed, denied, or deficient healthcare.
To be conservative, we excluded dozens of cases that alleged inadequate medical care but lacked specifics, for example a petitioner writing, “I have been sick and don’t get proper treatment,” or a judge noting a petitioner “complains that ICE is ignoring his medical problems.” We also excluded cases in which petitioners claimed only that they were denied special diets, exercise, or other accommodations that they said were key to managing their health conditions, such as a petitioner writing, “I suffer from Parkinson’s and cannot properly exercise,” or claiming that the food provided was unfit for a person with diabetes.
The cases we analyzed were neither randomly selected nor representative of immigration habeas filings nationwide. The claims were not independently verified. Many filings are not publicly available, and not all detainees raise medical concerns in court, so our account of cases represents a limited window into the landscape of claims, rather than a comprehensive picture.
Associated Press journalists Garance Burke, Valerie Gonzalez, and Tim Sullivan as well as KFF Health News correspondent Kate Wells contributed to this report.
This report is a collaboration between The Associated Press and KFF Health News.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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