WASHINGTON — Three members of the US House of Representatives — Steve Cohen of Tennessee, Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California and Bobby Scott of Virginia — on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, introduced the Death in Custody Reporting Reform Act, a bill to force complete, public counting of every death in law enforcement and immigration custody in the United States. The bill, filed as H.R.10909, would amend the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 to require reports to go to the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The sponsors say the current system undercounts the dead: in immigration detention alone, ICE's own records list 36 detainee deaths in fiscal 2026, up from 24 the year before, The Daily Letter reported.
Source: The Daily Letter, Oct 27, 2026
The argument behind the bill is about the record itself. The 2013 Act already requires deaths in custody to be reported to the Justice Department, but the sponsors say reporting is incomplete — deaths that happen in healthcare settings, in temporary detention facilities, or in immigration detention centres can fall outside the count, and the data that does exist is scattered and hard for the public, families and lawmakers to use. Their bill is built to close those specific gaps, and several other House members joined as original cosponsors, according to the sponsors' release.
What the bill would change, piece by piece
According to the sponsors' release, the proposal would do five things. First, it would expand reporting to cover deaths in healthcare settings, temporary detention centres and immigration detention centres — the settings the sponsors say the current count misses. Second, it would move data collection to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Justice Department's statistical agency, and the bill text filed in Congress describes its core amendment as requiring reports to be submitted to the Bureau's Director. Third, it would require a checkbox on death certificates identifying a death in custody, so a death cannot disappear into general mortality paperwork. Fourth, it would mandate annual public reporting. Fifth, it would create an expert review panel. The lawmakers and endorsing groups said in the release that the measure is intended to improve transparency, accountability and the policy response to custody deaths.
The deadliest year in ICE detention on record
The bill lands at the end of the deadliest fiscal year in the history of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Bloomberg Law investigation concluded that 37 people died in ICE custody between October 2025 and September 2026 — fiscal 2026 — making it the deadliest year since the agency was founded in 2003. Trackers cited by Human Rights Watch put the human sequence behind that total: the previous record, 28 deaths in fiscal 2004, was passed by mid-April 2026, and at least 60 people had died in ICE custody since January 2025 by the count of Relevant Research, a group that tracks detainee deaths.
Human Rights Watch's June 2026 report, Dying in Detention, measured the rate as well as the count, because ICE now detains far more people than it used to — about 73,000 in mid-January 2026, the first time the detained population passed 70,000. HRW found the mortality rate in ICE custody was about 140 percent higher in the year from January 2025 to January 2026 than in the year before, while the detained population rose by 77 percent: deaths have outrun the growth in detention. The same research record notes that independent physicians who reviewed deaths in ICE detention from 2017 to 2021 judged 95 percent of them preventable or possibly preventable — a historical finding about those years, cited here as background, not as a verdict on any individual fiscal-2026 death.
Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, 56, a lawful permanent resident and father of three, was found unconscious in his bed on Saturday, October 17, 2026, at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Laredo and later pronounced dead, the Texas Tribune reported. ICE had detained him on June 26 as he returned to Texas from Mexico through the Laredo port of entry, saying he had failed to disclose a prior arrest on his 2004 green-card application. His daughter, Estefani Andrade, told the Tribune he had disclosed his record and was approved, and she said staff refused him his medication and brushed off his complaints of a cough, difficulty breathing and chest tightness; he had a heart condition, diabetes and high blood pressure. ICE said in a statement that he received proper medical care. His cause of death was still unknown in the reporting, and he had an immigration court hearing scheduled for November 2.
Why the counting itself is the fight
Even the headline number shows the problem the bill targets. The sponsors' figure, drawn from ICE's own records, is 36 deaths in fiscal 2026. Bloomberg Law's investigation counted 37 in the same fiscal year. A one-death gap between the agency's own list and an independent newsroom's reconstruction is exactly the kind of discrepancy the sponsors cite: if the official count and the verifiable count do not match, families cannot know the record is complete, and Congress cannot write policy from it. The existing law's structure contributes to the fog — ICE's public death lists do not cover Customs and Border Protection custody, and different agencies report through different channels, which is why the bill moves the whole count to a single statistical agency and adds the death-certificate checkbox.
What is solid
- Reps. Steve Cohen, Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Bobby Scott introduced the Death in Custody Reporting Reform Act (H.R.10909) on October 27, 2026, amending the 2013 Act to route reports to the Bureau of Justice Statistics Director (sponsors' release; congressional bill listing).
- The bill would expand reporting to healthcare settings, temporary detention and immigration detention centres, add a death-certificate checkbox, mandate annual public reporting and create an expert review panel (sponsors' release).
- ICE's own records list 36 detainee deaths in fiscal 2026, up from 24 the year before (The Daily Letter, Oct 27).
What is only claimed
- The fiscal-2026 ICE death total: 36 by ICE's own records as reported by the sponsors, 37 by Bloomberg Law's investigation — the one-death gap is itself part of the sponsors' case.
- Why individual detainees died: in the Laredo case the family alleges medication and symptoms were ignored, while ICE states proper medical care was given; the cause of death was not yet determined in the reporting. No finding has been made.
What this means for immigrant and Punjabi families
Immigration detention is not an abstract system for this site's readers. Punjabi and other South Asian detainees pass through the same national network — including the Northwest detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, and centres in California and Texas — and when a detained person becomes seriously ill or dies, the official record is often the only tool a family has: it is what lawyers, journalists and members of Congress can demand to see. A law that names immigration detention centres explicitly in the national death count, checks the custody box on the death certificate itself, and publishes the total every year would make each such death harder to lose between agencies. This report is information only, not legal advice; a family with a detained relative who is ill should press for medical records and legal help immediately, not wait for any reporting law.
What happens next
Introduction is only the first step. H.R.10909 now begins the committee process in the House, and the sponsors' release lists endorsing groups and original cosponsors but no scheduled vote; no response from ICE or the Department of Homeland Security appeared in the release or reporting reviewed for this story. The underlying numbers will keep moving either way: fiscal 2027 began on October 1, detention remains at record scale, and every new death will be counted — or missed — under the system this bill is trying to replace. Whether the count becomes law is a question for Congress; whether the current count is complete is the question the sponsors have put on the record, with the agency's own figure of 36 deaths in a single year as their Exhibit A.