A Mexican national being held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in Los Angeles was found unresponsive in his bunk on March 25 and later declared dead at a hospital, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said on Monday. The agency identified the man as Jose Guadalupe Ramos and confirmed his death raised the known toll to at least 14 deaths in ICE custody so far in 2026.
ICE said security staff discovered Ramos unconscious and immediately summoned on-site medical personnel. He was transported to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Ramos had been arrested by ICE in Torrance, California, on February 23, the agency said. Records cited by ICE indicate he was convicted in 2025 of possession of a controlled substance and theft of personal property. An initial health screening conducted when he entered custody recorded that he had diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension.
The agency noted that Ramos was held at Adelanto, and his death is the fourth fatality of a detainee at that facility since the president took office in 2025; ICE said the other three were also Mexican men.
Ramos’s death arrives against the broader backdrop of an expanding detention population. ICE reported that the number of people in custody reached what it described as record levels, with 68,000 individuals detained as of early February. Opponents of the agency say detention practices are overly punitive and may be lethal. At least 31 people died in ICE detention in 2025, the highest annual total in two decades, and the agency's current pace of fatalities in 2026 threatens to surpass that figure.
While ICE has not released official detention statistics for March, a person familiar with internal figures told Reuters that the number of people in custody dropped to about 60,000 as of last week. That source requested anonymity to share the internal figures.
The federal funding context is notable: a Republican-backed spending bill passed in 2025 provided a substantial funding increase for ICE. That legislation expanded the agency's authorized detention capacity, enabling it to detain more than 100,000 people at any one time.
The circumstances surrounding Ramos’s death and the trajectory of detention levels this year underscore continuing scrutiny of ICE operations. The agency's public statements provide the factual outline of the case: the arrest date, prior convictions, the medical conditions recorded at intake, the sequence of events leading to discovery by staff, and the subsequent hospital transfer and death.
Details remain limited to the information ICE has released, including the agency's count of facility-specific fatalities and the broader detention totals it has provided for earlier months.