The Word from Solitary Watch for January 2026

This commentary is the latest in “The Word from Solitary Watch,” our series of dispatches by Solitary Watch staff and contributors.

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The spectacle of Americans being gunned down by masked ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis has, rightly, shocked the nation and the world, and may even bring about a turning point in U.S. domestic politics. 

But shortly before the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, another man was brutally killed by ICE. His name was Geraldo Lunas Campos, and he was a 55-year-old Cuban national held at Camp East Montana in El Paso, the largest ICE detention facility in the nation. The massive tent camp on the grounds of an Army base has been called “a human and civil rights catastrophe” by the ACLU and other groups, who visited the facility and alleged that “detained immigrants are subject to beatings and sexual abuse by officers, as well as medical neglect, hunger and insufficient food, and denial of access to attorneys.”

On January 3, Lunas Campos, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was medicated for depression, died during an altercation with guards after he had been placed in solitary confinement. An autopsy report released on January 21 by the El Paso County Office of the Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide, and listed its cause as “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” 

According to an interview with the Washington Post, Santos Jesus Flores, who was in the solitary confinement unit when Lunas Campos died, “said he saw at least five guards struggling with Lunas Campos after he refused to enter the segregation unit, complaining that he didn’t have his medications.”

Flores said “he saw guards choking Lunas Campos” and heard Lunas Campos saying, “‘No puedo respirar’…He said, ‘I cannot breathe, I cannot breathe.’ After that, we don’t hear his voice anymore and that’s it.’” 

Just as they did after the Minneapolis killings of Good and Pretti, representatives of the Trump administration told lies and attempted to blame the victim. Initially they said that Campos’s death was a suicide. Then Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement: “Campos violently resisted the security staff and continued to attempt to take his life. During the ensuing struggle, Campos stopped breathing and lost consciousness.” In other words, ICE had to kill Campos in order to save him. 

The homicide of Lunas Campos was reported on by some in the mainstream press (notably by Douglas MacMillan of the Post). But it inspired none of the uproar that followed the killings of Pretti and Good, or even of the other six people shown to have been killed by ICE or other DHS agents since Trump took office for his second term, according to a valuable new database published by the American Prospect.  

Even less attention was given to the deaths of at least 20 other people held in ICE custody from January through October 2025, according to the database. Some were deaths by “natural causes,” in which medical neglect sometimes played a role. A disproportionate number were suicides. The psychological distress of being in detention, combined with despair about the future and a lack of mental health care, have driven some people imprisoned by ICE to take their own lives, and many more to attempt suicide or engage in self-harm. Just days after the death of Lunas Campos at Camp East Montana, Nicaraguan national Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, who had been picked up during the Minneapolis ICE crackdown, died of a “presumed suicide” at the same facility.

This relative lack of outrage in response to deaths in custody comes as no surprise to those of us who cover the U.S. carceral system. Preventable deaths in prisons and especially in local jails long ago reached epidemic proportions, with suicides accounting for at least 30 percent of all jail deaths. A disproportionate number of these suicides take place in solitary confinement. The increased risk of death among the incarcerated was also chillingly evident during the COVID pandemic, when 6,000 people died in prisons in the first year, at 3.4 times the rate of the free population. The federal government is by law supposed to track deaths in custody, but the data is incomplete and unreliable, and the crisis of unnatural and unnecessary deaths among incarcerated has largely failed to take hold as a major issue.

The welfare of incarcerated people has never received much attention in the world of American politics—as if the fact that an individual has been convicted of a crime justifies whatever may happen to them subsequently, up to and including death. Increasingly, detained migrants, who have been similarly subject to dehumanization, have joined incarcerated people in this crucible of willful disdain and neglect. As grieving families, advocates, and journalists do what they can to bring recognition to this travesty, the first step may be simply to say their names.

Genry Ruiz Guillen * Serawit Gezahegn Dejene * Maksym Chernyak * Brayan Rayo-Garzon* Nhon Ngoc Nguyen * Marie Ange Blaise * Abelardo Avelleneda-Delgado * Jesus Molina-Veya * Johnny Noviello * Isidro Perez * Tien Xuzn Phan * Chaofeng Ge * Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas * Oscar Rascon Duarte * Ismael Ayala Uribe * Santos Reyes-Banegas * Norlan Guzman-Fuentes * Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez * Huabing Xie * Leo Cruz-Silva * Geraldo Lunas Campos * Victor Manuel Diaz

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Read selected earlier dispatches:

• What, to the Incarcerated American, Is Your Election Day?
• Trusted Sources: Why Mainstream Media Needs Incarcerated Voices
• Why Counting Everyone in Solitary Confinement Matters
• Prisons Are Where America Buries Its Problems. Solitary Confinement Is Where Prisons Bury Theirs.
• When Solitary Is Used to Silence
• Dismantle Prisons or Improve Conditions? As Someone Inside, I Know We Must Do Both
• Torture Before Trial
• The “Voiceless” Do Have Voices. Are We Listening?
• The Myth of Safety Through Punishment

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Banner photo: Aerial view of the Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss in El Paso, on September 7, 2025. By Paul Ratje for The Texas Tribune.