Brayan Rayo Garzón was distraught. Detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he was on his fourth day of isolation in a Missouri jail as he battled the fevers and chills of Covid.

His request for mental health treatment had been put off, records show, and staff had forbidden Rayo from making his nightly call to his mother, as a precaution intended to prevent the spread of illness.

He pleaded with his jailers in handwritten notes to arrange a conversation with her. “I feel in my heart that she’s very worried about me,” he wrote in Spanish.

A guard collected the note and walked away. Within an hour, jail records show, he was found unconscious in his cell. An autopsy determined he killed himself.

Rayo’s April 2025 death was the first suicide in a surge among ICE detainees that has alarmed public health officials and jail experts. They said the unprecedented number of suicide deaths was an indication that authorities are failing to properly oversee the detention of tens of thousands of immigrants swept up in the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy.

An Associated Press investigation found that at least 10 detainees, all men, have died by suicide since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, a pace that far exceeds the growth in the detainee population, according to a review of ICE data, autopsy reports, coroners’ rulings and police records. Since October, seven deaths have been classified as suicides, a number that is already the most for any fiscal year in the agency’s history. ICE has usually recorded one or no such deaths annually.

“Something is going profoundly wrong from any kind of public health or mental health perspective,” said Dr Sanjay Basu, a University of California-San Francisco epidemiologist who co-wrote a study documenting the increase in mortality and suicide rates among ICE detainees. “This is one of those alarming, sudden increases.”

Nine of the deaths were of Hispanic men who had arrived in the US from four countries, the AP found. One man was a Chinese citizen. Their average age was 32. While Trump has characterized those facing deportation as the “worst of the worst”, seven of the 10 had no record of violent crimes in the US.

The suicides account for nearly a fifth of the 51 deaths in ICE custody since January 2025. The majority of those deaths were from natural causes and experts say many of them would have been preventable with timely medical care.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acting assistant secretary Lauren Bis said suicide deaths in ICE custody remained “extremely rare”.

Bis said detention staff follow protocols to protect detainees who show signs of self-harming and that ICE requires annual suicide prevention training. She said detainees receive comprehensive healthcare, including mental health services.

Reacting to AP’s investigation, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, wrote on Wednesday in a post on X that the country’s foreign ministry should issue a formal protest regarding Rayo’s death and that the US government should “reflect on how its immigration policy is killing Americans and Latin Americans.”

ICE becomes responsible for detainees’ wellbeing when they enter detention, and experts say well-run lockups should have few, if any, suicides. That’s because staff can take steps to mitigate the chances that detainees harm themselves by identifying those at risk, getting them care and monitoring them closely, the experts said.

AP’s investigation found that ICE detention centers have repeatedly fallen short in ways that violate ICE’s own standards.

An examination of the 10 suicide deaths found the men died across ICE’s detention network, including at centers long run by private contractors and county jails that recently became ICE partners. AP found that staff in the facilities ignored signs of distress, delayed mental health treatment and failed to monitor detainees who were already deemed at risk. They also permitted detainees to have access to materials that could be used for self-harm, according to AP’s review of ICE inspection reports and death records.

In some cases, they jailed distressed detainees in isolation, which can exacerbate feelings of humiliation and helplessness, according to experts.

ICE has repeatedly asserted that it screens detainees within 12 hours of arrival for medical, dental and mental health conditions.

At least three of the nine facilities where ICE detainees died by suicide have struggled to meet that standard, according to ICE inspection reports and jail records.

Dr Homer Venters, former chief medical officer of New York City jails who previously consulted with ICE on preventing detainee deaths, called the rise in suicides terrifying.

The increase “reflects failures in how the system’s being operated, and particularly failures in how the first stages of coming into detention are happening so that people aren’t being assessed adequately,” Venters said. “And then if that receiving screening picks up red flags, they’re not acted on in a way that reduces the risk of them having preventable death.”

Among those who took their own lives was a 19-year-old from Mexico who had been detained following a misdemeanor traffic stop while riding his scooter.

Another was a 36-year-old restaurant worker who lost contact with his relatives in Nicaragua after ICE detained him in Minnesota and sent him to a crowded camp in Texas. A third was a 45-year-old who had repeatedly crossed the US-Mexico border illegally and had a long criminal record.

Rayo, who took his own life after pleading to talk to his mother, was a veteran of the Colombian military who had worked as a street vendor in his home country. A week after he turned 26 in 2023, his family crossed the US border in California. He was detained for three months before being permitted to settle with family in St Louis, records and interviews show.

In March 2025 he was arrested on suspicion of a crime, court records show, and he died in the in the Phelps county jail in Rolla, Missouri, about 100 miles from St Louis.

Five of those who died by suicide were in centers run by longtime ICE detention partners CoreCivic and the GEO Group. A sixth died at a camp operated by an inexperienced contractor that ICE has since replaced. Three died in jails run by sheriffs, and one at a federal prison.

“We are deeply saddened by and take very seriously the passing of any individual in our care,” a CoreCivic spokesperson, Brian Todd, said.

A GEO Group spokesperson, Christopher Ferreira, said the company trains staff on suicide prevention and seeks “to maintain a safe and secure environment in compliance with the standards and requirements set by the federal government.” Officials at the three jails either declined comment or didn’t return messages.

Other suicides have occurred in ICE custody at facilities including Missouri’s Ste Genevieve county jail, the Moshannon Valley processing center in Pennsylvania, and Camp East Montana, Texas.

• In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org