A photo of Brayan Rayo Garzon who died by suicide while in ICE custody in April 2025, is displayed in his mother's apartment in St. Louis, on Friday, May 1. AP-Yonhap
Brayan Rayo Garzon was distraught. Detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was on his fourth day of isolation in a Missouri jail as he battled the fevers and chills of COVID-19.
His request for mental health treatment had been put off, records show, and staff had forbidden Rayo from making his nightly call to his mother as a precaution intended to prevent the spread of illness.
He pleaded with his jailers in handwritten notes to arrange a conversation with her. “I feel in my heart that she’s very worried about me,” he wrote in Spanish.
A guard collected the note and walked away. Within an hour, jail records show, he was found unconscious in his cell. An autopsy determined he killed himself.
Rayo’s April 2025 death was the first suicide in a spike among ICE detainees that has alarmed public health officials and jail experts. They said the unprecedented number of suicide deaths is an indication that authorities are failing to properly oversee the detention of tens of thousands of immigrants swept up in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy.
An Associated Press investigation found that at least 10 detainees, all men, have died by suicide since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, a pace that far exceeds the growth in the detainee population, according to a review of ICE data, autopsy reports, coroner’s rulings, and police records. Since October, seven deaths have been classified as suicides, a number that is already the most for any fiscal year in the agency’s history. ICE has usually recorded one or no such deaths annually.
People place flowers on a fence outside Krome Detention Center in Miami, Saturday, May 24, 2025, during a vigil to recognize people who have died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as well as those affected by mass deportations. AP-Yonhap
“Something is going profoundly wrong from any kind of public health or mental health perspective,” said Dr. Sanjay Basu, a University of California-San Francisco epidemiologist who cowrote a study documenting the increase in mortality and suicide rates among ICE detainees. “This is one of those alarming, sudden increases.”
Nine of the deaths were of Hispanic men who had arrived in the U.S. from four countries, the AP found. One man was a Chinese citizen. Their average age was 32. While Trump has characterized those facing deportation as the “worst of the worst,” seven of the 10 had no record of violent crimes in the U.S.
Source: Korea Times News
