Washington – According to a report on doctors’ human rights, the report uses federal data and records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, based on the Trump administration’s use of solitary confinement in immigration detention.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement will place at least 10,588 people in solitary confinement from April 2024 to May 2025 Report discovery. Contributors also include experts from Harvard Peel Immigration Laboratory and Harvard Law School.
Researchers found that in the first four months of the current Trump administration, solitary confinement was on average twice as much as between 2018 and 2023, and more than six times as many as the last few months of 2024.
“Every month from February to May, this is the full calendar month for the new government, the number of lonely people [custody] “It’s really frustrating,” said Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical consultant and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Ice detention facilities use separate imprisonment as a form of punishment or protect certain high-risk immigrants. The agency and its parent company, the Department of Homeland Security, did not respond to a request for comment.
The United Nations says that the solitary imprisonment has been in 15 consecutive days for more than 15 days.
ICE defines vulnerable detainees as risk of harm due to sexual orientation or gender identity or abuse victims.
Among those classified as vulnerable, the report noted that in the first three months of 2025, separate incarceration lasted twice on average, and the agency began reporting these statistics compared to the first fiscal quarter of 2022.
This year, vulnerable detainees spent an average of 38 consecutive days in isolation, compared with 14 days at the end of 2021, the report said.
The report notes that the use of separate imprisonment has risen “at a startling rate” in immigration detention over the past decade, and billions of dollars authorized by Congress earlier this year may exacerbate the problem. It called on the federal government to terminate immigration against detained civil deportation procedures and required states and members of Congress to exercise supervision.
As of September 7, nearly 59,000 immigrants were detained. According to Traca non-partisan data research organization.
Researchers at Human Rights Doctors analyzed individual cases in New England and found “systemic use of solitary confinement for arbitrary and retaliatory purposes” such as requesting showers, sharing food or reporting sexual assault.
In California, detainees were placed in separate jail 2,546 times from September 2018 to September 2023, said Arevik Avedian, lecturer and director of the empirical research service at Harvard Law School.
Last year, ICE changed the way data was reported. ICE now reports the number of individuals, rather than counting the same person’s location multiple times in solitary confinement.
In California, she said, ICE reported that 596 people were imprisoned in isolation from April 2024 to May 2025.
She said that during the 2018-2023 period, two California facilities ranked the highest in the top five and had the highest number of solitary confinement locations, the Adelanto Ice Processing Center in San Bernardino County, and the Ota Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.
This year, the data reflects ICE’s investment in Republican-led states. According to the report, the loneliest incarceration facilities include the Moshannon Valley machining center in Pennsylvania, the Montgomery machining center in Texas, the Buffalo service machining center at the Ice Water machining center in South Texas, and the Eloy detention center in Arizona and the Central Louisiana Ice Processing Center.
Previous reports The same author found that between 2018 and 2023, ICE used more than 14,000 solitary confinement, including an Otay Mesa detainee who was detained for 759 days.
