Royer Perez-Jimenez, 19, died in ICE custody at Florida's Glades County Detention Center

In the early hours of March 16, 2026, a detention officer at the Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Florida, found Royer Perez-Jimenez, a 19-year-old Mexican national, unconscious and unresponsive in his cell at about 2:34 a.m. Staff began cardiopulmonary resuscitation and medical personnel determined he had no pulse; he was pronounced dead at 2:51 a.m. ICE said the death was a "presumed suicide," while stating that the official cause of death remains under investigation. The agency's public statement emphasized his prior criminal charges.

Perez-Jimenez had been arrested in Volusia County, Florida, on January 22, 2026, and charged with felony impersonation and resisting an officer. ICE placed an immigration detainer on him the same day, took him into custody on February 21, and moved him to the Glades County facility on February 26. ICE said that at intake he denied any behavioral-health concerns and answered "no" to all suicide-screening questions. The Associated Press reported that when it requested his arrest record from the Volusia County Sheriff's Office, the office said he did not appear in its system.

His death was the youngest in ICE custody since the start of the current administration and, by the Associated Press's count, at least the 13th of 2026 and the 46th since January 2025 — part of a documented spike in deaths in immigration detention. The Glades County Detention Center, a facility the Biden administration had shut down and the Trump administration reopened, carries one of the most extensively documented abuse records of any U.S. immigration detention center, including allegations of medical neglect and exposure to hazardous conditions — context bearing on the corrections-abuse mapping. The Mexican government called such deaths "unacceptable" and demanded a prompt investigation, and Perez-Jimenez's family publicly disputed the government's account of his death.