News

source: Austin Kocher 

Mamuka Artmeladze, a 43-year-old man from the Republic of Georgia, died in ICE custody at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, on June 4, 2026. Artmeladze is the 19th person to die in ICE custody in 2026 and the second person to die at Winn after Alejandro Cabrera Clemente died in the same facility on April 11. Artmeladze is the first person to die in ICE custody in 37 days, the longest streak without a reported tragedy after ICE’s deadly start to 2026. I first learned about this latest detention death from Andrew Free.

ICE’s press release does not say much about what happened to Mamuka. He was reportedly found “unresponsive” by detention facility staff, who administered emergency medical care and transported him to a nearby medical facility. He died less than an hour after he was initially found. As reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN has found, this version of events is far from complete and does not take into account the litany of ways that DHS’s systematic indifference towards immigrants’ lives in detention mirrors the president’s and his proxies’ dehumanizing language and translates into understaffing and negligence at facilities across the country. As I’ve written about before, this administration’s abdication of moral responsibility extends not only to immigrants, but to citizens, as well, and exacerbates a longer history of politicians in the US and around the world treating immigrant lives as expendable.

Who was Mamuka and why was he in ICE custody in the first place?

Using publicly available data through the Deportation Data Project, we learn several things that are essential to how we understand the real-life consequences of anti-immigrant propaganda and how we conceptualize the preventability of this latest death.

Not only does ICE not allege any criminal history in the press release, ICE doesn’t actually allege any immigration violations. ICE typically includes a paragraph or more of immigration and criminal history in their death announcements. In this press release, Mamuka is described as having been paroled into the United States in September 2022, then taken into custody by ICE in February 2026 after he was found to have “no lawful status to remain in the United States.” It’s not unlawful to be paroled into the country and, as we’ve seen time and again under this administration, “not having a lawful status to remain” has been used to detain an enormous number of people who have, in fact, never broken the law. This could include people who are currently actively pursuing humanitarian protection, including through the asylum process, or people who have temporary protections that have been terminated on a case-by-case basis without any apparent justification other than to crank up deportation numbers. Simply not having lawful status to remain—i.e., not positively having an immigrant or non-immigrant status—is not the same as having broken any laws, criminal or civil. Just ask Mahmoud Khalil. This is one of the most convoluted and contested aspects of immigration law.

Most people in detention centers like Delaney Hall have no criminal history, but Mamuka’s case paints an even starker contrast between rhetoric and reality as someone who would, under normal circumstances, never be detained at taxpayer expense in ICE custody. ICE’s own data confirms that he has no criminal history—but there’s more. Using the new field on “apprehension type” (see my previous explanation) we can see that Mamuka was actually never the target of an ICE arrest in the first place; he is listed as being arrested through the controversial “collateral arrest” method that basically means snatching up anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of a targeted arrest. Thomas Homan has said many times that he doesn’t care whether someone is a collateral arrest or not, but this more expansive view of ICE’s arrest powers raises questions for legal scholars who doubt the legality of many of these arrests. And besides, Americans who are increasingly frustrated with the deportation-mania of this administration are likely to find collateral arrests even less legitimate than targeted arrests.¹

Mamuka spent 119 days in detention, about four months, but under normal circumstances, he should have been released. He was arrested on February 5 in Alabama, where he was detained for five days, then moved to Winn where he spent another 114 days before dying in custody. Unless something changed between the middle of March and early June, he did not have a final removal order so ICE couldn’t move him—instead, Mamuka had a case pending before an immigration judge this entire time, and may have still been waiting on a final hearing when he passed. He was classified as the lowest risk level in detention, he had no mandatory detention flag, he was not a known terrorist or a suspected gang member (problematic as those categories are), and he never had a prior detainer, so it’s unlikely that he ever had a run-in with police. All of these factors, combined with the nature of his arrest, support a straightforward conclusion that he should not have been in detention in the first place. Using the national ICE detention average daily rate of $150, the US taxpayer spent $17,850 detaining this single person without any evidence that it served the interests of public safety or national security.

Mamuka Detained Under “ICE Wall” Enforcement Program of Dubious Value

So how was Mamuka arrested in the first place? His arrest took place under an ICE operation called ICE Wall FY26, a joint operation between ICE and state law enforcement agencies across the US South and Midwest to target truck drivers. Mamuka’s press release refers to this when it includes the language “during an operation targeting commercial vehicle drivers who posed public safety risks.” ICE’s complete lack of evidence that Mamuka represented such a “public safety risk” betrays the political and nativist motivation behind this enforcement program that can be traced back to President Trump’s April 2025 executive order titled “Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers.” Naturally, I believe in keeping our roadways safe. But as is so common, using the category of “immigrant” as a proxy for “dangerous” is a way of overlooking statistically serious risks and concentrating limited resources on ethnic and racial minorities.

The enforcement data shows how indiscriminate the dragnet is. Of the more than 1,350 arrests tagged to “ICE Wall”, roughly seven in ten were of people with no criminal record, the same classification ICE gave Mamuka. Here’s my understanding of how it works. As Clark Kauffman is doing a great job of reporting, state troopers deputized under ICE’s 287(g) program stop trucks that bypass a weigh station and route the drivers to federal officers waiting on site, a process that picks up whoever is behind the wheel. The nationalities swept up bear this out, with Indian, Uzbek, and Russian drivers near the top and Georgians like Mamuka also well represented, a profile that tracks the immigrant long-haul workforce. Those arrests are now drawing federal lawsuits from work-authorized drivers and asylum seekers who say they were detained without due process.

Q. Is ICE Hiding Detention Deaths? A. It Certainly Wants To.

I know many people have expressed concerns that the lack of announcements of ICE deaths means that the agency is hiding deaths rather than reporting. I find that generally unlikely, simply because most detained deaths at this point leak to the public through family and media before they make it into official record. But that’s not to say that ICE is committed to transparency. The same day Mamuka died, acting ICE director David Venturella signed an internal memo ending the agency’s requirement to report and review deaths that occur within 30 days of a person’s release from custody, a safeguard the Biden administration created in 2021 precisely so ICE could not dodge accountability by discharging critically ill detainees just before they died.

DHS confirmed the change and called it “common sense,” insisting the agency is “not responsible when an individual passes away weeks after leaving their custody.” It made that claim only days after announcing that no one had died in ICE custody in May, the first death-free month since November, without mentioning that it was at that very moment narrowing what counts as a reportable death. Dr. Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist who has reviewed more than 270 ICE deaths, told the Associated Press the policy will “make the mortality statistics appear lower without any actual improvement in care,” because the weeks right after release are when neglected conditions, missed diagnoses, and interrupted medications finally take a life. Mamuka died inside custody, so for now he is still counted—but others might not get counted or investigated. (For more on this issue, read my previous post: Beyond the Official ICE Detention Death Count.)

List of ICE Detained Deaths in 2026

I compiled a list of all ICE custodial deaths from 2026 below with links to ICE announcements. (See Wikipedia list, too.)

1. January 3, 2026. Geraldo Lunas Campos. Camp East Montana TX. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 55. ICE announcement.
2. January 5, 2026. Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres. Joe Corley Processing Center TX. Nationality: Honduras. Age: 42. ICE announcement.
3. January 6, 2026. Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. Imperial Regional Detention Facility CA. Nationality: Honduras. Age: 68. ICE announcement.
4. January 9, 2026. Parady La. Federal Detention Center Philadelphia PA. Nationality: Cambodia. Age: 46. ICE announcement.
5. January 14, 2026. Heber Sanchaz Domínguez. Robert A. Deyton Detention Center GA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 34. ICE announcement.
6. January 14, 2026. Victor Manuel Diaz. Camp East Montana TX. Nationality: Nicaragua. Age: 36. ICE announcement.
7. February 16, 2026. Lorth Sim. Miami Correctional Facility IN. Nationality: Cambodia. Age: 59. ICE announcement.
8. February 16, 2026. Jairo Garcia-Hernandez. Larkin Community Hospital Behavioral Health Center FL. Nationality: Guatemala. Age: 27. ICE announcement.
9. February 27, 2026. Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes. Adelanto ICE Processing Center CA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 48. ICE announcement.
10. March 1, 2026. Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi. Merit Health Hospital Natchez MS. Nationality: Iran. Age: 59. ICE announcement.
11. March 3, 2026. Emmanuel Damas. Florence Correctional Center AZ. Nationality: Haiti. Age: 56. ICE announcement.
12. March 14, 2026. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal. Parkland Hospital Dallas TX. Nationality: Afghanistan. Age: 41. ICE announcement.
13. March 16, 2026. Royer Perez-Jimenez. Glades County Detention Center FL. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 19. ICE announcement.
14. March 27, 2026. Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano. Adelanto ICE Processing Center CA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: unk. ICE announcement.
15. April 1, 2026. Tuan Van Bui. Miami Correctional Center IN. Nationality: Vietnam. Age: 55. ICE announcement.
16. April 11, 2026. Alejandro Cabrera Clemente. Winn Correctional Center LA. Nationality: Mexico. Age: 49. ICE announcement.
17. April 12, 2026. Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt. Federal Detention Center Miami FL. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 27. ICE announcement.
18. April 28, 2026. Denny Adan Gonzalez. Stewart Detention Center GA. Nationality: Cuba. Age: 33. ICE announcement.
19. June 4, 2026. Mamuka Artmeladze. Winn Correctional Center LA. Nationality: Georgia. Age: 43. ICE announcement.