WASHINGTON, DC — Today, Hip Hop Caucus condemned the Trump administration’s decision to eliminate the requirement for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to report deaths of detainees occurring within 30 days of their release from custody. Announced in an internal memo issued by Acting ICE Director David Venturella on June 4 2026, this policy reversal is not a bureaucratic adjustment. It is a deliberate act of concealment at a moment when detention deaths are surging to levels not seen in decades. 

“Transparency is not shifting the blame or hiding the bodies. For years, Hip Hop Caucus has fought to ensure that people who die in government custody are counted — pushing the Department of Justice to mark death certificates so these lives are never erased from the record. Now, ICE is releasing people who are severely ill and refusing to account for what happens to them the moment they walk out the gate. This policy deliberately undoes that progress. The government should not be allowed to make people disappear — in custody or out of it.” 

– Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., CEO and President

Multiple outlets have reported that the change rescinds a 2021 Biden administration policy implemented to prevent ICE from dodging accountability by releasing critically ill detainees just before death. Nearly 50 people have died in ICE custody under the Trump administration. 

“As an Afro-Latina immigrant from Colombia, I know personally what it means to live in fear of what the government can do to your body, your future, and your life. When the state takes someone into its custody, it takes on a moral obligation that does not end at a gate — releasing a dying person is not accountability, it is erasure. This administration is not just burying a policy; it is burying people, and hoping the rest of us look away.” 

– Aura Vasquez, Senior Director of Campaigns and Advocacy

Hip Hop Caucus has long been engaged in this fight to end death in custody. Through our NAACP Image Award-nominated podcast Official Ignorance to petitions driving over 300,000 actions targeting the U.S. Department of Justice, we have demanded that the government accounts for the full scope of who dies while in custody and why those deaths occur. This work includes a push to have a checkmark added to the U.S. death certificates of people who die in custody to better track the manager and cause of death. These campaigns have mobilized thousands of people committed to holding the federal government accountable. 

Hip Hop Caucus stands in solidarity with the families of those who have died in ICE custody, and with the human rights advocates and public health professionals sounding the alarm on this blatant coverup.