Takeaways from AP-KFF investigation into allegations of medical neglect by detainees in ICE custody

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: Associated Press and KFF Health News

Takeaways from AP-KFF investigation into allegations of medical neglect by detainees in ICE custody

By RAE ELLEN BICHELL, CLAIRE GALOFARO, MAIA ROSENFELD, RENUKA RAYASAM, AARON KESSLER, BYRON TAU, ASSOCIATED PRESS and KFF Health News
Updated 9:57 AM EDT, June 2, 2026
Leer en español

An investigation by KFF Health News and The Associated Press has found that hundreds of detainees across at least 33 states allege immigration detention facilities are failing to provide adequate medical care.

Detainees allege they didn’t receive 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 asked the Department of Homeland Security to respond to the findings six days before publication but it did not provide comment. DHS acting chief medical officer, Sean Conley, 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 department 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.

{snip}

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/ice-detention-medical-neglect-takeaways-f3c6d9d0ac3332dca0419e543db6e955

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My tablet insists that this is from the Ah So Hated Press.

Hat tip, Joe.My.God.

https://www.joemygod.com/2026/06/ap-finds-widespread-medical-neglect-in-ice-gulags/

[Cirsium]

1. Really?

Privatized U.S. jails and immigration detention centers have long struggled to meet the needs of the shareholders. That means cutting healthcare for prisoners.

[NoSheep]

2. They're savages.

SAVAGES kidnapping for profit.

[Bayard]

3. Its no good having prisons that we pay billions of dollars for,

When there aren't enough employees to staff them--especially medical staff.

I would have a hundred dogs if I could, but I know I couldn't care for them. ICE just keeps dragging people in, even though they can't care for them. And treat them worse than dogs.

[pat_k]

4. What was already a national shame has become intolerable for any human with a conscience.

We must find ways to end the cruelty being perpetrated on our names.

I highly recommend this excellent article from more than 15 years ago

A Death in Texas
Where profits, poverty, and immigration converge.
Tom Barry

November 1, 2009

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/death-texas/?

Editors’ Note: In 2010 this story was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in public interest reporting. The article is included a BR Book, Border Wars.

County Clerk Dianne Florez noticed it first. Plumes of smoke were rising outside the small West Texas town of Pecos. “The prison is burning again,” she announced.

About a month and a half before, on December 12, 2008, inmates had rioted to protest the death of one of their own, Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32. When Galindo’s body was removed from the prison in what looked to them like a large black trash bag, they set fire to the recreational center and occupied the exercise yard overnight. Using smuggled cell phones, they told worried family members and the media about poor medical care in the prison and described the treatment of Galindo, who had been in solitary confinement since mid-November. During that time, fellow inmates and his mother, who called the prison nearly every day, had warned authorities that Galindo needed daily medication for epilepsy and was suffering from severe seizures in the “security housing unit,” which the inmates call the “hole.”

I arrived in Pecos on February 2, shortly after the second riot broke out. I had driven 200 miles east from El Paso through the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert.

Pecos is the seat of Reeves County in “far west” Texas and home to what the prison giant GEO Group calls “the largest detention/correctional facility under private management in the world.” The prison, a sprawling complex surrounded by forbidding perimeter fences on the town’s deserted southwest edge, holds up to 3,700 prisoners. Almost all are serving time in federal lockup before being deported and are what the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DHS) call “criminal aliens.”

Although the term “criminal aliens” has no precise definition, its broadening use reflects a trend in dealing with immigrants. With the post-9/11 creation of DHS and its two agencies—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—a wide sector of aliens increasingly became the focus of joint efforts by immigration and law enforcement officers. ICE’s Criminal Alien Program, working with local police, began targeting for deportation both legal and illegal immigrants with criminal records. And CBP’s Border Patrol began to turn over illegal border crossers to the justice system for criminal prosecution, instead of, as in the past, simply deporting them. Many criminal aliens are long-term legal residents of the United States and are also the parents, children, or siblings of U.S. citizens and lawful residents.
...

Much more

[Whip-poor-will]

5. Exact words matter

We call detention centers prisons or jails.

Call these concentration/ extermination facilities for what they are and what they do.

[perdita9]

6. Aliens?

What a dehumanizing way to refer to people.