Family Mourns as Deaths Under ICE Custody Continue to Rise

By Araceli Martinez

Above: Luis Beltrán Yánez Cruz died at the age of 68 in a hospital in Indio, California after being held at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico. (Image courtesy of Yánez family)

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Josselyn Yánez’ mind went blank the day she got the call. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent informed Yánez that her father had died in the hospital after falling ill at a migrant detention facility in Calexico, California.

His death in early January comes after the agency saw one of its deadliest years ever, with 32 people having died in ICE custody in 2025. Six people have died so far in 2026.

“I felt devastated. I kept asking myself a million questions, wondering if I could have done more,” said Yánez, who lives in Houston, Texas.

Luis Beltrán Yánez Cruz died at the age of 68 in a hospital in Indio, California after being held at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, just steps from the border with Mexico. A house painter, Yánez had emigrated to the US 26 years earlier from his hometown of Santa Rita Yoro in Honduras. He leaves behind three children and six grandchildren.

‘He was short of breath’

“ICE arrested him on November 16th on the streets of Newark, New Jersey, where he lived,” said his daughter. “He was leaving a McDonald’s after having breakfast at approximately 10 a.m. and stopped to chat with some farm worker friends. Unfortunately, ICE agents arrived and conducted a raid. They took five people, including my father.”

One week later, the elder Yánez was transferred from New Jersey to the Calexico Detention Center, more than 2,600 miles away. His family never saw him.

“Four days after arriving in Calexico, he complained of nausea and stomach pains when he ate. A week later, he told me he was short of breath and had chest pains,” his daughter recounted.

Luis Beltrán Yánez Cruz with his daughter, Josselyn. (Image courtesy of the Yánez family)

She asked him if he had already asked to see a doctor. “He told me that the request for medical care had to be made through a tablet and that it can take up to a week or more before being seen. A nurse only gave him pills to calm his stomach pain,” she said. “They medicated him without knowing where the discomfort came from.”

The last time Yánez spoke to her father was on Saturday, January 3rd, around 11 pm.

“We didn’t talk much because I had just gotten off work and was driving. He just told me, ‘I love you so much. Take care!’ My brother spoke to him on Sunday, January 4th, around four in the afternoon. My father told him that he was still feeling unwell.”

On Tuesday, January 6, Yánez says she woke up thinking about her father. Hours later, at noon, she received a call from a friend of her father who had been a fellow inmate at the Calexico Detention Center.

“He found out from another friend who was arrested that my dad had been taken to the hospital in an emergency because as he was walking, he started having trouble breathing,” she said.

A call from ICE

The conversation was interrupted when Yánez received a phone call from a private number. “When I answered, the person identified himself as an ICE agent. He asked me what my relation was to Mr. Luis Beltrán Yánez Cruz, and I replied that I was his daughter.”

That’s when he gave her the news she never wanted to receive. “I regret to inform you that your father has passed away,” the agent told her. He explained that on Sunday, January 4, Yánez’ father had been taken to the hospital because he was showing symptoms of cardiac arrest.

Yánez was stunned. She asked the agent why she hadn’t been notified the moment her father was rushed to the hospital. According to Yánez, the agent claimed not to have her father’s contact info. Which prompted her to wonder, how had they reached her then. “‘We looked in his call logs,’” came the agent’s reply. “Couldn’t you have done that before to warn me that he was very ill,” she asked. “‘There wasn’t time’” she was told.

Yánez’ father died on Tuesday, January 6, at 1:18 a.m. ICE notified her and the rest of the family at noon, almost 12 hours later. Two weeks after his death, she says they still haven’t given her the autopsy results.

“All I know is that he apparently died of cardiac arrest at John F. Kennedy Hospital in Indio,” she said, “but before that he was taken to the Regional Medical Center.”

Yánez has no doubt that if her father had received timely medical attention at the ICE detention center in Calexico, he would be alive today. “He didn’t have any illness,” she said. “He started feeling sick a few days after arriving in Calexico, and he had been like that for weeks. They didn’t pay any attention to him.”

Frustrated and saddened, she urged ICE not to be so indifferent to the suffering of detained immigrants. “Those people being arrested are human beings with families,” she said. “This is not how we wanted him to leave this world.”

Yánez says she is still waiting to receive her father’s body. A wake is planned in Houston before the family returns him to his native Honduras.

“We want him to rest in peace in his homeland,” said Yánez. “He won’t truly rest until justice is served. I want justice. But at least he’ll be in the place he would have liked his remains to rest forever.”

‘It breaks out hearts’

Yánez leaves behind three children and six grandchildren. (Image courtesy of the Yánez family)

TODEC Legal Center is a non-profit serving immigrants across the Inland Empire and Eastern Coachella Valley. Director Luz Gallegos says her organization got a call from an organizer in New Jersey informing them of Yánez’ passing.

“We realized he was from another state, and that he died alone at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio. It’s another death, and it breaks our hearts,” said Gallegos.

On January 16, TODEC held a mass at Our Lady of Soledad Catholic Church in Coachella, California to honor Yánez’ memory. His daughter joined the service virtually.

Medical negligence

Yánez’ death is the first in California this year. It is not the first tied to the facility in Calexico. On September 29, a Chinese immigrant, Huabing Xie, died at the Regional Medical Center after experiencing a seizure and losing consciousness while in ICE custody. He had been transferred from the same site where the elder Yánez was held.

On Sept. 22, 2025, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old DACA beneficiary, died at Victor Valley Global Medical Center in Victorville, California. He had been among the nearly 2,000 immigrants detained at the Adelanto Detention Center in San Bernardino County.

One month later, on October 23, 2025, Gabriel García-Avilés, 56, died after being detained in Adelanto for only a week. Both deaths remain under investigation.

Pastor Guillermo Torres is director of the migration program at Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE). He has been visiting the ICE Detention Center in Adelanto since 2011 and says deaths there have always been related to medical negligence.

“The lack of medical care is something that continues… and will continue to cause deaths in Adelanto and other centers,” he said. “The guards are indifferent and dismiss [detainees’] complaints; they don’t believe them or they ignore them.”

Torres cited the case of a 20-year-old woman of Arab origin, who suffered from a urinary tract infection for four months.

“She almost died because they kept her on Tylenol instead of giving her the antibiotics that would have quickly resolved her health problem,” he recalled. “Another immigrant complained for weeks of a toothache, and they didn’t pay attention to him until his face swelled up.”

Record numbers in ICE detention

Torres says he is very concerned about what is happening in detention centers, which he says are fuller than ever, leaving immigrants exposed to medical neglect and psychological abuse.

As of January data show more than 70,000 people are being held in ICE custody.

“Recently, the wife of an immigrant from Turkey called me because her husband was so depressed that he wanted to take his own life in Adelanto,” said Torres. “So, between the lack of healthcare and the horrors they are subjected to, it doesn’t surprise me that there may be more deaths from medical negligence or suicides.”

The 32 deaths of immigrants in ICE custody in California in 2025 do not include Jaime Alanis Garcia, who died while trying to flee from agents during a raid on a marijuana ranch in Camarillo on July 10.

Nor do they include the death of Roberto Carlos Montoya, a 53-year-old Guatemalan day laborer who died while fleeing an ICE raid at a Home Depot in Monrovia, California, in August.

A January 2026 letter signed by 12 members of Congress also revealed that 17 immigrant deaths occurred under Customs and Border Patrol custody during the first twelve months of the Trump administration.

This story was produced as part of Aqui Estamos/Here We Stand, a collaborative reporting project of American Community Media and community news outlets statewide.