US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) put more than 10,500 people in solitary confinement between April 2024 and May 2025, and use of the practice has quickly increased under Donald Trump’s administration, according to new research.
A report from Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), the Peeler Immigration Lab, and Harvard Law School experts, published on Wednesday, sheds light on what’s happening inside US immigrant detention facilities and how increasing numbers of vulnerable people are being subjected to solitary confinement for longer periods of time.
The United Nations has found that solitary confinement, which is defined within the report as keeping people in small cells without “meaningful human contact” for at least 22 hours a day, amounts to psychological torture when such placements last longer than 15 days.
The report spans a period of time that includes the Biden and the second Trump administration, but shows a spike in the use of solitary confinement in recent months. It comes comes as the president enacts his mass deportation agenda and rapidly expands US immigration enforcement activities and detention facilities.
“We certainly have seen an increase in solitary confinement over the last years, but we’ve seen a significant increase from month to month during Trump’s first four months,” said Arevik Avedian, a Harvard law school lecturer and one of the authors of Cruelty Campaign: Solitary Confinement in US Immigration Detention.
The research reveals that in the first four months of Trump’s second term, the use solitary confinement grew by an average of 6.5% each month; more than six times the average monthly increase seen during the final months of Joe Biden’s administration.
Meanwhile, the number of vulnerable people placed in solitary confinement, such as those with health problems or mental health conditions, rose by 56% in fiscal year 2025 when compared with 2022. Of people with vulnerabilities, placements “lasted more than twice as long as they did in the first fiscal quarter of 2022”.
“Perhaps one of the worst findings was that people with vulnerabilities are being placed in solitary confinement twice as long as they would be placed when I started providing this data back in 2021,” Avedian said. “It’s a lot worse conditions, despite all the policies to only put people with vulnerabilities in solitary confinement when there’s no other choice.”
Since Trump took office in January, authorities have arrested more than 210,000 people and deported more than 216,000, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection published by the Guardian. The number of detainees climbed to a record high this summer, with nearly 60,000 people still in custody across the country as of 8 September.
The figures underpinning the report come from the government’s own statistics on the use of solitary confinement from publicly available Ice data as well as from public records requests. The researchers were aided by new federal reporting requirements, implemented last December, that offered an “unprecedented window into the scale and scope of solitary confinement” in US immigrant detention centers, but the authors warn that the report ultimately likely understates the true scope because of Ice’s “flawed data and reporting systems.”
US immigrant detention capacity is set to rapidly expand as Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, signed into law in July, dedicated $170bn for immigration and border operations, and made Ice the largest and most heavily funded federal law enforcement agency.
“This massive expansion of resources for a system already characterized by torturous conditions, combined with little to no oversight, creates the conditions for catastrophic human rights violations on an unprecedented scale,” the authors write.
The report also includes an in-depth analysis of facilities in New England, where researchers found that almost three out of four solitary confinement placements were 15 days or longer and that people, on average, were isolated for about a month. The analysis of individual cases found the “systemic use of solitary confinement for arbitrary and retaliatory purposes”, such as punishing people who had filed grievances or reported sexual assault, and requested basic needs such as showers.
The lingering effects of solitary confinement can be disastrous, including “severe and often irreparable psychological and physical consequences”, according to the UN, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, lasting brain damage, hallucinations and increased suicide risk.
Researchers highlighted the case of Charles Leo Daniel, who died in Ice custody last year after spending more than 13 years of his life in solitary confinement in different prison facilities, including his final four years in Ice detention. The 61-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago, who died of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, had served one of the longest periods in isolation in Ice custody since 2018, according to a report from the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington.
The authors of Cruelty Campaign issued a series of recommendations for the federal government policymakers, such as ending solitary confinement and stopping the expansion of immigration detention centers.
The issue is not new, said Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser with Physicians for Human Rights and one of the report’s authors, but it is getting worse in terms of the numbers and the “callousness and impunity with which it’s being carried out” while protections are being rolled back.
“I just hope the public understands the duality of worsening policies and procedures and actions in the context of decreased oversight,” Peeler said. “These are people who are coming to our country seeking help, who are contributing to our economy, who are our neighbors, who play soccer with our kids, and it’s important to recognize that humanity and treat people accordingly.”
The Guardian has contacted the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Ice, for comment.
