More than 30 people died while being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2025, marking it as the deadliest year for those held in custody by the agency in two decades. At least five of the detainees who died were Asian nationals: Chaofeng Ge, Nhon Ngoc Nguyen, Tien Xuan Phan, Kaiyin Wong and Huabing Xie. So far their deaths have received little public attention, even as ICE increases raids, expands capacity at its facilities and accelerates deportations across the country.
As I grieve these deaths, I’ve also witnessed ways that mass deportations have induced palpable fear throughout the Asian American community. Like the Hispanic and Latino communities, as well as other migrant groups across the U.S., Asian families live under constant threat of unlawful detentions, family separations, neglect, abuse and trauma at for-profit prisons.
In August, ICE guards found 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge hanging in a shower stall at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg. Although investigators ruled Ge’s death a suicide, the autopsy report stated he was found with his hands and feet tied behind his back.
Despite these troubling circumstances, the federal government has yet to release the full records regarding Ge’s death to his family. Ge’s brother filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in November seeking transparency and accountability, and complained that the prison provided no Mandarin interpretation, leaving his brother isolated and possibly without access to medical care or mental health care while in custody.
Seven detainees at the California City Immigration Processing Center have made similar claims, accusing ICE of inhumane conditions inside its network of for-profit detention centers, including delayed medical care, inadequate food and water, and limited access to interpreters. Things are likely to only get worse unless the corporate profiteering that drives mass detention ends now.
Ge’s death points not only to the dangerous conditions inside ICE facilities but also to the wider climate of terror that mass deportation policies have instilled in large segments of our community. Currently, one in seven Asian immigrants living in the U.S. are undocumented and under imminent threat of removal, and undocumented Asian students represent a significant share of the population, accounting for approximately 16.5% of those eligible for DACA benefits.
The use of deportations as a form of international segregation persists today as politicians rehearse old stereotypes to scapegoat and expel migrants. Once again charged as “criminal” and “invading armies,” a wide range of Asian groups face racialized deportation practices that deny them their rights and fracture families.
The five deaths of Asian nationals in ICE custody in 2025 are not just isolated tragedies. They reveal a system that has expanded faster than oversight can follow. Language barriers, delayed medical care and a lack of transparency inside detention centers have already had fatal consequences. This broken system does not make America safer but instead strikes fear throughout entire communities. ICE’s racial profiling and punitive enforcement practices do not bring about security but instead inflict lasting traumas on families and on generations like mine.
Ge’s passing demands justice — not only for his family, but for the end of for-profit prisons, of family separation and of the racist and violent enforcement of deportations. Each is a cruel and unusual punishment; together they constitute a morally bankrupt immigration system.
