The Detained

Arelis Coromoto Villegas had her daughter's killer's sentence before she had her daughter's body. The killer got twenty-three years. The body went somewhere else entirely. In the two years that a mother in a town in western Venezuela — a country with no diplomatic ties to the United States, a home with no internet — believed her murdered daughter's remains were resting in a Dallas morgue awaiting the money to bring her home, the body had already been declared abandoned, frozen, thawed, leased to a medical-device company for a four-day training course, partially cremated, partially retained, used again to train students, and buried in pieces in an unmarked field among strangers. The county had her phone number the whole time. There is no record anyone ever called it.

SECTION ONEThe Border Through the Vacuum

Each of the three previous installments of this series documented a population for whom the consent function had been transferred to an institution. The prisoners of Part I, whose statutory next of kin were never asked. The children of Part II, whose parents had been displaced by a court order or a federal apprehension. The unclaimed dead of Part III, for whom a county office decided, without review, that no one was coming.

The detained population is all three of those things at once, with one feature none of the others possess: an international border running through the middle of the consent vacuum. The person dies in United States custody. The family is in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, India, Cuba. The body is on one side of a line; everyone with standing to claim it is on the other. The notification that the architecture is supposed to perform must now cross a border, a language, a currency, a consulate, and in some cases the absence of any diplomatic relationship at all. Every point of friction the previous parts documented is multiplied by the distance.

And the friction is the operation. A family that cannot afford an international phone call, that has no internet, that does not speak English, that lives in a country whose government the United States does not formally recognize, is a family that cannot contest a determination made in a county office in Texas. The determination — "abandoned," "unclaimed," "next of kin unreachable" — is rendered against people who were never reachable by the standard the office applied, and who in many cases were frantically reachable by any standard the office cared to use.

This installment documents two things. First, that people are dying in U.S. immigration custody at the highest rate in two decades, and that the system responsible for them has documented, audited gaps in exactly the functions — medical care, autopsy, notification — that the architecture requires to remain open. Second, that the bodies of detained and migrant people have already entered the disposition pipeline documented in Part III — that the chain connecting the border to the dissection table is not theoretical, because it has already happened to a named young woman whose mother is still praying for her remains to come home.

SECTION TWOThe Deadliest Year

The population in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody reached record levels through 2025. By mid-December, ICE was holding roughly 66,000 to 68,000 people; by some counts the figure exceeded 68,000 in early 2026. The detained population is overwhelmingly civil, not criminal — people awaiting immigration hearings, including asylum seekers, sometimes held for years. Of those detained in the December surge, by one analysis nearly three-quarters had no criminal convictions at all.

As the population rose, so did the deaths. By the count maintained across multiple news organizations and detention-monitoring groups, 2025 was the deadliest year in ICE custody in more than two decades. The Guardian's tally reached 32 deaths in 2025 — matching the previous record set in 2004. CBS News reported 31, calling it a two-decade high. December 2025 was the single deadliest month: seven people died.

The pace did not stop at the calendar's end. Within the first month of 2026, six additional deaths in ICE custody were reported, three of them by suicide, according to a congressional letter documenting the toll. In a November 2025 letter, 43 members of Congress led by Representatives Dave Min and Judy Chu wrote to the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Acting Director of ICE noting that the agency had publicly reported 25 detainee deaths since January 23, 2025 — almost 64 percent as many in-custody deaths in just the first nine months of the administration as occurred during its entire first term.

The deaths span the full range of the population. Citizens of Cuba, Canada, Mexico, Guyana, India, Vietnam, Ukraine, Honduras, Haiti, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Bulgaria. A 75-year-old Cuban man with heart disease who told his former partner he was having chest pains and could not get his medication. A Ukrainian who told his wife and cellmate he had been refused immediate care before the stroke that killed him. An Afghan refugee who had helped U.S. forces. A 19-year-old Mexican man who died by presumed suicide. The names accumulate in the agency's own death notices.

SECTION THREEThe Audited Gaps

The architecture this series documents requires three functions to remain weak: medical care (so that deaths occur), autopsy (so that cause is not independently established), and notification (so that the family cannot contest the disposition). The detained population is the one for which all three weaknesses have been formally audited, by name, in a federal-records investigation.

In June 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union, Physicians for Human Rights, and the investigative nonprofit American Oversight published Deadly Failures: Preventable Deaths in U.S. Immigration Detention — a 76-page report examining the deaths of 52 people who died in ICE custody between January 2017 and December 2021. The report was built on more than 14,500 pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, public-records requests, and litigation, reviewed by six independent medical experts whose affiliations included Columbia, Yale, and UT Health San Antonio.

The central finding is the one that should be read slowly. Of the 52 deaths examined, the medical experts concluded that 49 were preventable, likely preventable, or possibly preventable with clinically appropriate care. Only three were deemed not preventable. By the report's framing, 95 percent of the deaths examined could have been prevented if ICE had provided adequate medical care.

The Autopsy Gap

The report also documented what the architecture requires: that cause of death not be reliably, independently established. ICE, the 2024 analysis found, lacks protocols for how and when to conduct autopsies after a detainee's death. The consequence is illustrated by the case of Ronald Cruz, a 39-year-old Honduran who died in 2018 at the South Texas Port Isabel Detention Center. ICE did not initially order an autopsy. Only when Cruz's family said they would pay for one did the agency reveal that he had died of bacterial meningitis. Whistleblowers called his care "grossly negligent." A correctional-health specialist who reviewed the evidence concluded that with antibiotics or a timely emergency-room transfer, Cruz likely would not have died.

An autopsy that occurs only because the family demands and offers to pay for it is the autopsy gap functioning exactly as the architecture needs it to. The default is no independent examination. The exception requires a family with the knowledge, the money, and the standing to force it — precisely the resources that a detained person's overseas family is least likely to have.

The Notification Gap

ICE has had, on paper, a detainee-death notification policy since October 2009, updated in 2021 as Notification, Review, and Reporting Requirements for Detainee Deaths. The policy requires notification of next of kin, consular officials, and members of Congress. The existence of the policy is not the question. The history of its observance is.

The same 2009 ACLU FOIA litigation that first pried loose ICE's death records produced a finding that should anchor every claim in this section. As reported at the time, the government disclosed that one in ten immigration-detention deaths had been omitted from a list submitted to Congress — and that the agency had, in some instances, discharged detainees shortly before they died, reducing the number of deaths counted as occurring "in custody." The record-keeping itself was structured to undercount. The closing of the record began before the body was cold.

In early 2026, the documented failures continued. A congressional letter noted that ICE had reportedly failed to pay any third-party medical providers for detainee care since October 2025 — with the result that some providers began denying services to detained people, deepening the medical-care gap that the Deadly Failures report had already found to be fatal in 95 percent of the deaths it examined.

SECTION FOURThe Conflicting Account

The clearest contemporary illustration of how the closing of the record operates at the moment of death is the case of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old citizen of Cuba who died in ICE custody on January 3, 2026, at Camp East Montana, a detention facility on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.

An autopsy report found the cause of death to be homicide due to asphyxia. Lunas Campos died after an encounter with multiple guards. When the Department of Homeland Security initially announced his death, according to the congressional letter documenting it, the agency's account did not match what the autopsy would later establish. The case became, in the words of that letter, an example of the "lack of transparency and the conflicting accounts of deaths in custody."

The point is not that every death in custody is a homicide. It is not. The point is structural: when the custodian controls the body, the initial narrative, and the internal review, and when the family is separated from all three by an international border, the conditions for independent verification do not exist by default. They have to be forced into existence — by a medical examiner outside the agency, by a family with resources, by a journalist, by a member of Congress. The Lunas Campos homicide finding exists because an external autopsy was performed. The architecture does not guarantee that it always will be.

SECTION FIVEThe Body's Journey Home

For the families who do establish that their relative has died in U.S. custody, a second architecture begins: repatriation. It is expensive, slow, document-bound, and structured in a way that, at every step, increases the chance that a body will be disposed of domestically before the family can bring it home.

Repatriating remains from the United States to a home country costs, by various estimates, somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000 or more — a sum that requires embalming, consular documents, certified translations, customs clearance, airline cargo arrangements, and coordination across two governments. For a Guatemalan family, the cost of repatriation runs roughly $6,000 to $8,000; the Consulate General of Guatemala in Maryland alone receives 15 to 20 repatriation-information requests per month, with about three families monthly applying for economic assistance they often cannot get.

The friction compounds. An Indian national who died in ICE custody could not be repatriated for more than two weeks because Indian authorities required a physical passport — and the passport was in ICE's custody. The family had a digital copy; it was not accepted. The body waited while the document the agency was holding became the obstacle to the body's return.

And the delay is not neutral. Every week a family spends fundraising, navigating consulates, and assembling documents is a week during which the body sits in a county or institutional facility that is itself under financial pressure to dispose of unclaimed remains cheaply. The repatriation timeline and the disposition timeline run against each other. When the disposition timeline wins — when a county declares a body abandoned before a family completes the paperwork to claim it — the body enters the pipeline documented in Part III.

Which is exactly what happened to Aurimar Iturriago Villegas.

SECTION SIXAurimar

Aurimar Iturriago Villegas left La Villa del Rosario, Venezuela, in 2022, at twenty-one, intending to reach the United States, find work, and send money home so her mother could build a new house and treat her failing eyesight. She crossed the Darién Gap — the stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panamá where many migrants die — and texted her mother when she emerged: Mami, we're out of the jungle. She celebrated her twenty-first birthday in Guatemala. In early September she crossed the Rio Grande into Texas, turned herself in to border authorities, was released from a detention center, and went to stay with a former neighbor near Dallas.

On October 28, 2022, she was in the back seat of a car in a Dallas suburb when a man named Shardrel Webb fired a gun into the rear window in what police and court records describe as a road-rage incident. She was killed by a single gunshot to the head. She had been in the country roughly two months. She had spoken to her mother hours before she died.

What happened next is the architecture, performed in full, on one young woman's body.

The Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office took custody. Its file recorded the contents of her pockets — a lighter and $8.18 — and sealed her in a body bag tagged No. 3440146. By protocol, the search for next of kin began. The office had her mother Arelis's phone number; it was written in the file. Nothing in the documents obtained by reporters indicates anyone at the office ever called it.

Instead, the former neighbor, Alexis Moreno, was recorded in the file — over the family's account of events — as Aurimar's legal next of kin, granting him authority over the body, without Arelis signing anything. Arelis says she only wanted Moreno to help coordinate the body's return to Venezuela, not to take over legal decision-making. Moreno then offered Aurimar's body to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, was sent donor-consent forms with an eight-hour deadline, and never returned them. Six weeks after her death, because no one had completed arrangements, the Medical Examiner's Office declared Aurimar's body "abandoned." That same day, December 15, 2022, her body was delivered to the Health Science Center's freezers.

Legally, the report notes, it no longer mattered that Arelis had never signed donation papers. The "standard procedures" for an abandoned body had taken over.

In May 2023 — while Arelis, who could reach the U.S. only through WhatsApp and could not afford to call American landlines, was emailing the Health Science Center begging for information about her daughter's body — workers placed Aurimar's torso on a table in the center's BioSkills laboratory. The biotechnology company Relievant Medsystems had paid the center $35,672 to host a four-day training course and needed eighteen torsos to train surgeons on its Intracept back-pain procedure. A few months later, the biotech giant Boston Scientific acquired Relievant for $850 million. Boston Scientific said Relievant had not known the center was supplying unclaimed bodies, and that it had since updated its policies to require consent. Its spokesperson offered the family condolences: "No family member should have to experience something this tragic."

The Health Science Center was not finished. In July 2023 a portion of Aurimar's body was sent to a crematory; that September her ashes were delivered to the county, as the medical school's contract required. But her legs were retained. On January 23, 2024 — after the rest of her had been cremated — her legs were used to train students studying to become physician assistants. The center's spokesperson would not answer whether it was routine to hold onto parts of a body after other portions had been cremated.

Aurimar was one of about 2,350 bodies sent to the Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with two Texas counties — agreements that brought the center about $2.5 million a year and saved the counties hundreds of thousands of dollars in cremation and burial costs. Her cremated remains were buried in an unmarked plot at Laurel Land Memorial Park, in the Dallas County indigent section, among strangers.

Her mother learned what had happened in October 2024 — not from any agency, but because her son was scrolling Instagram and saw a Noticias Telemundo post listing names of unclaimed Latino bodies sent to a Texas medical school. One of them was his sister's.

"It's a very painful thing. She's not a little animal to be butchered, to be cut up." — Arelis Coromoto Villegas, Aurimar's mother

This is the architecture running end to end, through a single person. Aurimar was the border (Part IV): a migrant who crossed, was detained, was released. She was the unclaimed determination (Part III): declared abandoned by a county office that had her mother's number and never called it. She was the market (Part VII): torso and legs assigned dollar values, leased to a company later acquired for $850 million, the consent vacuum monetized at $900 and $703. And she was the closing of the record: cremated in part, retained in part, buried unmarked, her mother told nothing until a stranger's social-media post crossed an ocean her own government's notifications never did.

SECTION SEVENThe Architecture, Applied

The detained population demonstrates the architecture's defining principle more completely than any other in the series: the consent vacuum is widest where the distance between the body and the family is greatest. The border is not incidental to the harm. The border is the mechanism by which the harm is made administratively invisible.

The repatriation cost — the $6,000 to $10,000 a grieving family must assemble across two countries — is not a separate misfortune. It is the timer. Every week it adds to the family's effort is a week the disposition pipeline runs in the other direction. The architecture does not need to defeat the family. It only needs to be faster than them, and it has been engineered, through every point of friction this section documents, to be exactly that.

SECTION EIGHTThe Constitutional Throughline

The legal claim is, once more, the next-of-kin property interest in a decedent's body protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the doctrine of Newman v. Sathyavaglswaran, 446 F.3d 1090 (9th Cir. 2006), that anchored Parts I and III. But the detained population raises the doctrine's hardest and most important question: does the Constitution's protection of a family's interest in a relative's body extend to a family that is not in the United States, and in some cases not from a country the United States diplomatically recognizes?

The Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause protects "persons," not citizens, and the Supreme Court has long held that its protections extend to non-citizens physically present in the United States. The body of a person who died on U.S. soil, in U.S. custody, is within U.S. jurisdiction. The property interest in that body — the interest Newman recognized — does not obviously evaporate because the person who holds it lives in Venezuela. A county that declares a body abandoned without a constitutionally adequate effort to reach a reachable family has, on the logic of Newman, taken a protected interest without due process — and the inadequacy of the effort is more glaring, not less, when the file contains the family's phone number and no record of a call.

That claim has not been litigated to a conclusion on behalf of an overseas family in Aurimar's situation. The practical barriers are formidable: a plaintiff who cannot afford an international phone call is not positioned to retain U.S. counsel and file in federal court. But the barrier is practical, not doctrinal. The interest exists. The taking is documented. What is missing is a plaintiff with the resources to assert it — which is, once again, the architecture's design: it operates on precisely the population least able to challenge it.

CLOSINGWhat Remains

The detained dead are where the architecture is most complete, because the border supplies, for free, the separation between body and family that the other populations require machinery to produce. The prison had to bypass a next of kin. The foster system had to displace a parent. The county had to declare a body unclaimed. For the detained, the distance does the work: the family is already an ocean away, already unreachable by the standard the office chooses to apply, already unable to afford the call that would contest the determination.

None of it is hidden. ICE publishes its death notices. The Deadly Failures report is public. The Dallas County file recorded Arelis's phone number. The UNTHSC invoices, the $35,672 course, the $900 torso, the unmarked grave at Laurel Land — all of it is documented, in records obtained by reporters, in a published investigation. The closing of the record, here as everywhere in this series, is not concealment. It is the simple, engineered fact that the people with standing to ask are the people least able to.

Arelis Coromoto Villegas still kneels each night at a candlelit memorial in the corner of her house in Venezuela. Her prayer has changed. She no longer asks God to protect her daughter on the journey north. She asks God to bring her daughter home. The architecture has already answered. It buried Aurimar in a field among strangers, in pieces, and sent the rest to train surgeons for a company worth eight hundred and fifty million dollars, and it never made the phone call that was sitting in the file the entire time.

Part V — The Patient — will examine the living: the psychiatric and research institutions where the consent vacuum operates not on the dead, but on people whose capacity to consent has itself been placed in another's hands.