A Teenager Died in ICE Detention. His Family Doesn’t Believe the Government’s Story.

In late February, a 19-year-old Mexican national named Royer Perez-Jimenez entered the custody of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He had been arrested a month earlier in the Orlando, Florida area on the flimsiest of pretexts, for allegedly giving a false name to police, and the ever-popular “resisting an officer.” The Department of Homeland Security began deportation proceedings, and shuffled Perez-Jimenez around in the particular dance they so often seem to employ in disorienting their captives, sending him from detention facility to facility until he landed at the Glades County Detention Center in southern Florida, a facility with a long history of allegations of violence and sexual abuse. Three weeks later, in mid-March, he was dead. The government’s “investigation,” if that has in fact actually been carried out, assessed the 19-year-old’s death as a suicide, something his grieving family perhaps unsurprisingly denies. He became the youngest person to die in ICE custody to date during the second Donald Trump administration.

So far in 2026, at least 17 people have died in the custody of ICE, the news of which is first shared amidst the daily stream of ICE press releases in which the agency brags about how many human beings it has incarcerated or removed from the country. It is, as you might expect, a depressing place to monitor. As it is so fond of doing, the press release initially announcing the death of Royer Perez-Jimenez referred to him as a “criminal illegal alien from Mexico” who passed away, wording calculated to engender as little sympathy as possible for a dead 19-year-old. “Teenager passes away” has a rather different ring to it, one that DHS is desperate to avoid.

The father of Royer Perez-Jimenez, the teen who died in ICE custody in Florida, is asking for help to bring his son’s body home to Mexico.

“The hardest part now is bringing my son’s body here,” he says. “It’s not cheap.”

www.miaminewtimes.com/news/family-…

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— Alex DeLuca (@alexldeluca21.bsky.social) Apr 2, 2026 at 8:45 AM

The mark of 17 deaths through the first four months of 2026 puts ICE quite clearly on pace to surpass the 33 recorded deaths in immigration detention in 2025, a mark that was already a new record for the agency. Those 33 people who died last year include both those who pretty obviously passed away from natural causes/known health conditions, and instances that make the blood boil, like the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, since labeled as a homicide by the local medical examiner, or the mysterious passing of 41-year-old Jean Wilson Brutus, who was dead within five hours of entering ICE detention in New Jersey. Notably, it’s a number that is in all likelihood still missing other potential deaths, like that of the now seemingly forgotten Vicente Ventura Aguilar, who witnesses say was taken into ICE custody in October of last year before seemingly vanishing off the face of the Earth. With so many names, they all begin to blur together, another fact that the agency is no doubt relying on to obliterate American empathy with the sheer volume of its brutality.

The death of a teenager, though … that’s a different level of tragedy, even if a cynic would argue it is inevitable with the rising overall number of people in ICE detention amid its (possibly stalled) push to open more converted warehouse detention facilities. In the case of Royer Perez-Jimenez, he was moved to Glades County Detention Center on Feb. 26 and underwent an intake screening, where he was assessed to be in fine physical health and denied any behavioral or mental health issues, answering “no” to all suicidal ideation screening questions. About three weeks later on March 16, ICE reported that they found Perez-Jimenez in the early morning, “unresponsive with a cloth ligature around his neck connected to a fixture in the shower. Immediate lifesaving measures were initiated by deputies responding to the scene,” but Perez-Jimenez was quickly pronounced deceased by EMS. The agency provided no specific statement about Perez-Jimenez beyond the boilerplate they attach to any and every death: “ICE is committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.”

Royer Perez-Jimenez would be buried weeks later by family in Mexico, who told CBS News that the native of Chiapas had immigrated to the U.S. at 15 in order to “triumph and help his family.” They referred to the “impersonation” charges against him as “fabricated,” saying that the entire arrest stemmed only from Perez-Jimenez’s lack of fluency in English. “He was unjustly accused as a criminal,” said uncle Manuel Perez. “They fabricated a crime.”

19 years old Royer Perez-Jimenez is one of the youngest people to die in an ICE camp.

His arrest was unnecessarily violent and forceful.

He’s shoved to the ground while officers kneel on his back as he struggles to communicate.

A few weeks later, he was dead.

Abolish ICE

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— Kelly (@broadwaybabyto.bsky.social) Mar 28, 2026 at 1:27 AM

The family would likewise go on to say that they did not accept ICE’s finding on the cause of death: “What we want is a thorough investigation because, unfortunately, we do not believe suicide was the cause of his death, rater we suspect it was probably a homicide.”

Such “investigations” in cases like these, however, are entirely opaque, and it’s not even clear what the word actually means in the context of those who have died in ICE detention facilities. In the initial press release announcing the death, the agency notes that “He died of a presumed suicide; however, the official cause of his death remains under investigation.” This line tends to be parroted back by media reporting on stories of this nature, without anyone asking the obvious question of when/where the results of these “investigations” are made visible.

Is the official detainee death report that ICE is legally required to make public within 90 days meant to be the final word, and does it constitute the result of an investigation? Because if you can believe it, that report actually has less information in it than the initial press release did, and ICE has more recently taken to simply not including a cause of death in said reports, when they bother to actually issue the reports at all–at one point they stopped doing so for months, seemingly hoping that no one would notice. When the agency finally began issuing the reports again, they contained less detail than ever, and frequently feature a single paragraph of text involving how a death occurred. Repeated queries from Splinter to DHS about detainee death reports in our past reporting have gone unanswered.

Again: Is this supposed to be the result of an “investigation,” and if so, is that investigation being carried out by CSI teams, or by grade schoolers in Sherlock Holmes hats? I suppose it’s asking too much for answers to questions like “How is it that detainees at risk of suicide always seem to be furnished with ‘cloth ligatures’ and then left on their own?”

This is obviously a case where nothing can be said for certain, and you certainly can’t outright deny the possibility of suicide on the part of an emotional 19-year-old who is potentially being mistreated in U.S. immigration detention. The family of that teenager will no doubt believe what they choose to believe about the specific circumstances of his death, but we’re free to focus on the broader takeaway: this kid should not be dead. He shouldn’t have been in detention in the first place! What purpose could it possibly serve? Why was it necessary to imprison someone for months whose only crime was “giving a false name”? If the Department of Homeland Security was utterly intent on deporting him, why not allow it to go through the legal process while Royer Perez-Jimenez is living in his own U.S. home, where he posed no threat to anyone by the government’s own admission? Why instead imprison him at taxpayer expense, exposing him to the conditions that the government is effectively claiming drove him to take his own life? Why do any of it, other than for the sheer sake of cruelty? We’re left with the same logical conclusion as always, that the cruelty is the point.

The death of Royer Perez-Jimenez seemed to kick up only a modest response in U.S. media and among our elected politician class, despite being the youngest person to die in ICE custody so far under Trump 2.0. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA) at least took the time to share a short statement despite Perez-Jimenez not being one of her own constituents, saying that the young man was dead because “he could no longer bear the cruelty.” She may be right.

As Pressley put it: “Royer Perez-Jimenez died by suicide inside a detention center because he could no longer bear the cruelty. A testament to how this Administration & ICE are traumatizing our young people. ICE must be abolished & we will fight for the accountability Royer’s family deserves.”