67 people died in ICE custody during Obama's presidency. That's not the full story

In January 2026, posts on social media sites such as Facebook claimed that during former U.S. President Barack Obama's eight years in office, 67 people died while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The claim appeared as many Americans protested President Donald Trump's mass deployment of ICE and other federal agencies in cities including Minneapolis. 

The posts sharing the claim alleged that the number of deaths under Obama meant people were protesting not because they objected to ICE's use of force but because the protesters "just Hate Trump," as one Facebook post said.

Snopes readers wrote in asking us to investigate the claim that 67 people died while in ICE custody during Obama's administration. We've rated it true after cross-referencing public records released by the agency with secondary sources of information.

That said, posts sharing the claim failed to acknowledge that more people have died in ICE custody during Trump's five years (and counting) as president than during Obama's eight. 

The posts also did not acknowledge that protests against Obama's immigration policies did occur during his time in office, although they were not as large as anti-ICE protests under Trump.

ICE data

Since 2018, according to ICE's website, federal law requires that the agency publicly disclose the death of anyone in its custody within 90 days. The agency's website contains a list of such deaths from April 2018 onward. 

Information about deaths while in ICE detention prior to 2018 does exist elsewhere. Snopes found a table listing detainee deaths from Oct. 1, 2003, to June 5, 2017, in ICE's FOIA library, a publicly accessible repository of documents the agency has furnished in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Presidential terms begins on Jan. 20 the year after a president is elected, meaning Obama was president from Jan. 20, 2009, to Jan. 19, 2017. Therefore, that table includes all detainee deaths reported by the agency during Obama's presidency. According to the table, there were indeed 67 people who died while in ICE custody during that period. 

The table noted the location and causes of each death. Snopes broke down the causes of death of the 67 detainees as follows:

• 22 deaths were due to complications from chronic illnesses, including cancer, organ failure, hypertension, diabetes and COPD, among others.
• 12 deaths were due to acute events, like heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms and seizures, among others.
• 11 deaths did not have enough information to classify. This category included causes of death listed as "undetermined" and "pending," as well as deaths due to "shock" and "natural causes."
• 10 deaths were due to infectious diseases or complications of those diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, pneumonia, staphylococcus, rabies and sepsis. 
• Five deaths had multifaceted complications — generally, a chronic illness creating a predisposition to some sort of acute event.
• Five deaths were due to suicide by hanging.
• Two deaths were due to substance abuse disorders.

Secondary sources

Snopes also double-checked the figures against secondary sources of information, in case the ICE data was not a complete representation of the facts.

It was impossible to directly compare the data because those secondary sources only counted the number of deaths by year. Anyone who died between Jan. 1 and Jan. 20, 2009, in a secondary source would therefore be incorrectly counted as a death during Obama's tenure, even though the president at the time was still George W. Bush.

Still, the totals roughly matched the figure of 67 found in the claim, confirming that the ICE data provided a full picture.

The National Immigrant Justice Center released a report in February 2016 counting 56 deaths during Obama's presidency, equal to eight deaths a year. Using that figure as an average over a full eight-year term produced an estimate of 64 deaths in ICE custody.

A 2026 article from The Guardian contained a chart with statistics dating back to the agency's founding in 2003, and found there were 69 deaths between 2009 and 2016. (The ICE data reported two deaths between Jan. 1 and Jan. 20, 2009, which can be removed from the count to arrive at 67 deaths during the Obama administration.)

The Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, tabulated 72 deaths between Oct. 1, 2008 (the beginning of the 2009 fiscal year) and Sept. 30, 2016 (the end of the 2016 fiscal year) in a 2020 article. That date span did not exactly match Obama's time in office, but the numbers reflected the ICE totals for the given period of time.

In other words, ICE's figure of 67 deaths during Obama's tenure was accurate according to ICE's own data, and other sources generally confirmed that number. 

More detainee deaths under Trump in 5 years

Although the posts claimed the number of detainee deaths under Obama was evidence of unfair bias against Trump, they did not include a number of deaths under Trump for comparison. The available numbers showed that more detainees have died in only five years under Trump so far than in Obama's entire presidency.

Although there was a gap of 11 months between the dates covered by the table in ICE's FOIA library and the data on its website at the time of this writing, Snopes calculated that at least 74 people have died while in ICE custody during Trump's five years in office, as of early February 2026. 

We started by counting ICE news releases announcing the death of a detainee. There were 32 in 2025. No news releases from before the beginning of Trump's second term were available. Then, we added the 36 deaths reported between April 10, 2018, and Jan. 20, 2021 (when Trump first left office) available on ICE's website. Finally, the FOIA library table we used to calculate deaths during the Obama administration also included six entries for detainees who died during Trump's first term.

Even without the 11 months of data between May 2017 and April 2018, the numbers revealed that during Trump's five years in office, a minimum of 74 people died while in ICE custody — more than the 67 deaths under eight years of Obama. 

According to the Guardian article, ICE reported 10 detainee deaths in 2017 and 12 in 2018. The Cato Institute calculated 12 deaths in 2017, 10 in 2018 and eight in 2019 in its January 2020 report.