A second man being held at a US immigration detention facility in Texas has died in two weeks, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said on Monday.
Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, originally from Nicaragua, was found “unconscious and unresponsive in his room” on 14 January at the Camp East Montana detention facility in El Paso, ICE said in a press release.
“They immediately notified contract medical staff on site to conduct life saving measures,” it said, adding that emergency medical technicians arrived to the facility but could not revive Diaz, who was pronounced dead just after 4pm. ICE asserted that Diaz “died of a presumed suicide” but that the “official cause of his death remains under investigation”.
Diaz was detained on 6 January during the Trump administration’s controversial deportation blitz in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He initially entered the US through the Mexican border in March of 2024, when border patrol agents picked him up and he was given a court date with an immigration judge, then released on parole. On 26 August of last year an immigration judge ordered Diaz’s removal “in absentia”. ICE detained him on 12 January in order to deport him.
The extensive tent facility is located on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso.
Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, the highest number of fatalities in two decades. At least five people have reportedly died in ICE custody this year.
Human Rights Glance
Multiple Israeli strikes across Gaza kill up to 15 Palestinians. Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan says the killing of commander Mahmoud al-Holi is an attempt to derail the ceasefire amid other violations. Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon kill two.
A US federal judge in Boston on Friday gave the Trump administration three weeks to “rectify the mistake” it made by deporting a college student to Honduras while she was traveling home to visit her family for Thanksgiving as he recommended it issue her a student visa.
One-year-old Mohammed Bassiouni died of exposure to the cold on Tuesday. It was his first birthday.
The death of a man who was being held at a federal detention camp in Texas in early January may be investigated as a homicide after the local medical examiner reportedly found the preliminary cause was “asphyxia due to neck and chest compression”.
US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, arrested at age 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks’s similar but more famous act of defiance, died on Tuesday at age 86.





























