Acting ICE Director Venturella Issues Memo Halting Public Reporting of Detainee Deaths After Release, Narrowing Death Count Transparency at Record-Pace Mortality Year
On June 4, 2026 — just four days into his tenure as acting ICE director — David Venturella issued an internal memo rescinding ICE's existing policy requiring the agency to publicly report deaths occurring within 30 days of release from custody. Under the new Venturella policy, ICE will only publicly disclose deaths that occur while a person is physically in ICE custody, at a medical facility under ICE supervision, or in transit to such a facility — deaths that occur after an individual has been released from custody will no longer be reported, regardless of how recently they were released or whether their death resulted directly from conditions or medical neglect during their detention. Critics, including former DHS officials, immigration advocates, and medical professionals, immediately characterized the policy change as designed to deflate ICE's official death statistics. The 30-day post-release reporting requirement had been specifically created to prevent ICE from circumventing accountability by releasing critically ill or near-death detainees — a practice documented in multiple DHS OIG investigations — so that their deaths would fall outside the official in-custody count. The timing drew immediate attention: the policy change came on the fourth day of Venturella's tenure as the first acting ICE director drawn from the private detention industry, as the agency was recording its most lethal year in history (18 in-custody deaths in the first five months of 2026 alone, surpassing FY2025's record of 24 full-year deaths), and just one month after ICE shuttered the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman (OIDO) — the last independent oversight body — on May 5. Advocates said the sequence — OIDO closed May 5, post-release death reporting ended June 4 — represented a systematic dismantling of the accountability infrastructure surrounding a detention system with a documented crisis-level mortality rate.