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Acting ICE Director Lyons acknowledged agency missed 48-hour death-notice requirement in two-thirds of in-custody deaths since 2025

On April 16, 2026, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told a congressional hearing that ICE had issued the required interim death notice within 48 hours in only 15 of 49 in-custody deaths since January 2025, after Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock flagged the shortfall in an April 13 letter to Lyons and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Lyons could not say how many staff remained in ICE's Office of Detention Oversight and submitted his resignation hours after the hearing.

Jurisdiction
Federal
Location
Washington, D.C.

Abuses documented

Actors

On April 16, 2026, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons testified before Congress that ICE had issued a required interim death notice within 48 hours in only 15 of 49 deaths in agency custody since January 2025, after Georgia Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had raised the shortfall in an April 13 letter to Lyons and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. "We are reporting. We are working on that timeline," Lyons told lawmakers, and when asked how many staff remained in ICE's Office of Detention Oversight, he said he could not provide a number. Lyons submitted his resignation hours after the hearing.

The hearing came as ICE recorded 29 deaths in custody so far this fiscal year, already surpassing the prior full-year record of 28 set in 2004, with roughly 60,000 people currently in immigration detention. DHS disputed that the death rate itself had risen, attributing the increase to record detention populations. The Ossoff-Warnock letter and Lyons' concession focused specifically on the delayed public reporting of deaths — a distinct accountability failure from the underlying death toll and the basis for this record: an agency required to report its own in-custody deaths within a fixed deadline failed to do so in two-thirds of cases even as deaths climbed to a two-decade high.

Why we recorded this

Congressional oversight of federal detention depends on agencies reliably reporting deaths in their custody so lawmakers and the public can track patterns of harm. ICE's own policy requires an interim death notice within 48 hours of an in-custody death, yet the agency met that deadline in fewer than a third of the 49 deaths recorded since January 2025 — and its acting director could not say how many staff remained in the oversight office meant to enforce it. When an agency does not meet its own reporting rules amid a record number of deaths in its custody, the accountability mechanism Congress and the public rely on to detect patterns of harm breaks down.

Sources

  1. Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump — NPR primary accessed July 18, 2026

See also