Austin Kocher has launched the ICE Detention Mortality Dashboard to track deaths in immigration detention, including four people who died in Arizona under the second Trump administration. The database is built from public records and is designed to let readers sort deaths by state, year and where they occurred from 2018 to 2026.
Kocher said, "I write about these deaths because I want the public to understand the context and consequences of the U.S.’s growing immigrant detention system and I believe in making this work legible to as much of the public as possible." The dashboard gives that work a public map at a time when more than 50 people have died in civil detention nationwide since Trump took office.
Arizona deaths in Florence and Eloy
The four Arizona deaths in the dashboard are Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Oscar Rascon Duarte and Emanuel Cleeford Damas. All four died at medical facilities after being held at local detention facilities, with operational sites in Arizona including the Eloy Detention Center and the Florence Correctional Center.
Damas was being held in Florence before he died this year of an untreated tooth infection. His death points to the kind of case advocates have long argued can disappear into a large detention system unless records are pulled together in one place.
ICE reporting and public records
The dashboard was built by Relevant Research and draws on public records. It can be filtered by state, year and where the death occurred, which gives readers a way to compare deaths across the detention system instead of looking at each case in isolation.
ICE is expected to post a detainee death notification on its website within two days of a death in custody and produce a detainee death report within 90 days. Those two reporting layers still leave room for cases that may not surface cleanly in public tallies, especially deaths that occur after release from detention.
Geraldo Lunas Campos in El Paso
The reporting gap is more visible in the case of Geraldo Lunas Campos. Immigration authorities initially said his cause of death at an immigration detention camp in El Paso in January was medical distress, but the medical examiner later classified his death as a homicide.
The Florence Project said in a March 2026 report that Arizona immigration facilities had inadequate prenatal care for pregnant women, shackling of patients hospitalized for serious illness and dismissal of detainees’ complaints about pain and other symptoms. Those findings sit alongside the dashboard’s four Arizona deaths and give readers a clearer picture of the medical and custody problems the numbers sit inside.
The database now gives families, lawyers and advocates a single place to check whether a death appears in ICE’s public record, and it raises one hard question the public can keep asking: how many immigration detention deaths have still not been captured in ICE’s reporting or the new dashboard?
