By December, federal immigration authorities had bound for their home country during the first year of the Trump administration.
Delvin Rodriguez was not among them. But it wasn’t for lack of trying: In late October, a month after he was arrested during a traffic stop on his way to a construction site near Dillon, the 39-year-old Colorado resident, who did not have permanent legal status, agreed to leave the country. Two of his sisters recalled that Rodriguez had spoken with a lawyer, who told him fighting his case would be expensive and likely unsuccessful, in part because he’d been arrested by immigration authorities when he first entered the country in 2018.
At first, through phone calls from the detention center in Aurora, he’d assured his sisters that he was only on vacation. After he met the lawyer and decided to stop fighting his removal, he was calm, his family remembered.
“I said that it was OK. I respected his decision,” remembered one sister. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation by ICE. “Everything’s in God’s hands. Either way, he was going home.”
But Rodriguez did not go home. Before Christmas — more than two months after he first entered the detention system — he was dead in Mississippi, one of a growing number of immigrant detainees who’ve died in custody over the past 18 months.
Rodriguez was the first person arrested in Colorado to die in immigration custody in eight years, according to a review of the agency’s official releases, and he was the 32nd immigrant to die in federal custody under President Donald Trump’s second administration. In the seven months since his death, that total has increased to 55.
His death was ruled a suicide by a Mississippi medical examiner, according to an autopsy report obtained through a public records request. At least nine other detainees have died by suicide since January 2025, amid the federal government’s efforts to rapidly increase arrests while gutting the independent agencies charged with scrutinizing the country’s rapidly expanding immigrant detention network.
In the months since, his family and a Colorado advocacy group have pressed for answers on the circumstances of his death and why he was still detained. With the help of a U.S. senator, some details have emerged only in recent days.
After his arrest, Rodriguez spent 66 days in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Aurora detention facility, according to ICE detention records analyzed by The Denver Post. He was briefly logged at a holding room in Arizona before moving again, on Dec. 1, to one of the nation’s largest detention facilities, housed in a private prison in Mississippi.
When he arrived, Rodriguez called his sisters. He told them he had not eaten much because there wasn’t enough food, they recalled. He was anxious about why he hadn’t left the country yet.
Two days later, he was isolated in an open-door cell after he exhibited behavior that “concerned” staff at the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, said Alex Sánchez of Voces Unidas, an advocacy group working with Rodriguez’s family. Sánchez was present for a briefing about Rodriguez’s case last week by U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet’s office. The cell’s open door would allow staff members to monitor him “at all times,” and Sánchez said the setting sounded akin to suicide watch.
His sisters remembered talking to Rodriguez on the phone. They said he still seemed calm.
On Dec. 4, the day after he was moved to the cell, Rodriguez was found unresponsive around 4:15 p.m. On-site staff gave him CPR, and paramedics arrived at roughly 4:40 p.m., according to statements from ICE and CoreCivic, the company that operates the prison. He spent the next 10 days on life support in a nearby hospital, where .
Officials from ICE and from CoreCivic have released little additional information about his case.
“Where was the staff (who) were in charge? Were there cameras, what truly happened?” his sister said earlier this year in an interview with The Post, before the family was provided details about his placement in a special cell. She spoke Spanish and communicated through an interpreter. “We want a test of justice for him.”
It’s unclear when the center’s staff members last checked on Rodriguez before he was found unresponsive, or why he was able to attempt suicide in a setting that seemed designed to prevent it.
“It was the middle of the day, so where were they?” Sánchez said of the staff members who were supposed to monitor Rodriguez. “How does it happen in the middle of the day, especially when it sounds like staff did some kind of intervention (the day before)?”
, detainees at risk of suicide “may” be placed in a “suicide-resistant cell with constant (one-to-one) monitoring” that must be documented every 15 minutes. The cell must be free of “objects or structural elements that could facilitate a suicide attempt.”
ICE denied a records request seeking documents about Rodriguez’s case, citing an ongoing law enforcement investigation. An unnamed agency representative did not respond when asked about the investigation, instead referring The Post to .
Suicides in detention centers face scrutiny
In a May investigation into detainee suicides, 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 detainees died in facilities that had 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, the AP found. Rodriguez used items in his cell to hang himself, according to the autopsy report, an ICE statement and information gleaned by Sánchez during the briefing by Bennetap office. Several other detainee deaths have involved similar means, according to a Post review of ICE fatality reports.
“Someone should not be able to kill themselves in a detention center or a prison,” William Lopez, a public health professor at the University of Michigan who studies incarceration and deportation, told The Post. “… One should not be able to kill someone else in one of these facilities; one should not be able to harm someone else. The fact that itap been happening, again, points to ineptitude.”
When ICE announced Rodriguez’s death, the agency said he had received a mental health screening two days before he was found in his cell and that he was cleared for the general population. The report does not mention that staff members were concerned about his behavior or that they had placed him in a cell for closer monitoring.
Last week, Rodriguez’s family learned more about the circumstances surrounding his death from Bennet’s office, which had been briefed by officials from the Department of Homeland Security.
In a statement, Bennet spokeswoman Sophie Ulin said agency officials had explained “the timeline of events and outlined the procedures that were followed.”
ICE did not respond to questions about the briefing. In a March statement, ICE spokeswoman Angelina C. Vicknair said that all detainees are “provided comprehensive medical care from the moment they enter ICE custody … (including) a medical, dental, and mental health intake screening within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility, a full health assessment within 14 days of entering ICE custody or arrival at a facility, and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.”
CoreCivic also did not respond when asked about the family’s briefing. In an April statement to The Post, spokesman Brian Todd said the incident had been thoroughly reviewed.
“We adhere to all applicable federal detention standards in our ICE-contracted facilities, including our Adams County Correctional Center,” he wrote. “Our immigration facilities are monitored very closely by our government partners at ICE, and they are required to undergo regular review and audit processes to ensure an appropriate standard of living and care for all detainees.”
As of April, the Mississippi facility was the second-largest ICE detention center in America by average daily population, at Syracuse University. A said it had five mental health observation cells, 202 detention officers and six mental health providers for a facility capable of housing more than 2,100 detainees at a time.
Brandon Riches, an immigration attorney in Mississippi who previously conducted legal training for detainees in the facility, said the detention center was one of the nicer ones he’d been in. But it still felt like a “maximum-security prison.”
“Locks on the doors, push the button to get through, the whole nine yards,” he said.
Still, like many other detention centers, the facility has a checkered history.
In May, that the facility had failed to properly review and document staff members’ use of force.
In 2012, three years after Adams County opened its doors, immigrant detainees launched a deadly riot over the facility’s conditions. An affidavit by an FBI agent, first reported by the , said detainees rioted over “inadequate or substandard food, medical conditions and disrespectful staff members.” Hostages were taken, and one correctional officer was killed.
Nine years later, in 2021, that a sick detainee died in the facility after staff failed to send the patient to the hospital. Federal inspectors also criticized the facility’s communication between detainees and staff, as well as its grievance standards.
‘He had been through a lot’
In his final conversations with his sisters, Rodriguez told them the facility was crowded and that he wasn’t receiving enough food.
He’d supported his sisters and mother since he began working at age 18. He’d served in the Nicaraguan military, then worked in construction in Costa Rica before traveling to the United States, where he applied for asylum.
“He had been through a lot before relocating to the U.S.,” said Karen McCarthy, an attorney who represented Rodriguez during his prior immigration proceedings. They also lived in the same neighborhood in Summit County. “He struck me as an honest person. I enjoyed getting to know him. He was always very cordial and polite, and somebody you wanted as a neighbor.”
When ICE announced Rodriguez’s death, the agency said he had been scheduled to fly home on Dec. 13 — the day before he was removed from life support.
The Mississippi prison to which he was moved is a short drive from a major airport in Alexandria, Louisiana. A sort of reverse Ellis Island, Alexandria is one of the primary departure points for deportation flights, particularly for those heading to Nicaragua, , a nonprofit group that defends immigrants’ and refugees’ rights. There were 10 flights to Managua, the country’s capital, in November, and nine more in December.
Why Rodriguez wasn’t on any of those flights is unclear.
Federal agencies have declined to provide specific information about his case, and he did not have a lawyer for most of his time in detention. His family said he had signed papers with ICE to stop contesting his removal. ICE records indicate his deportation order was signed Oct. 24.
Rodriguez told his sisters he was missing some sort of travel document, though his family had his passport. To maximize efficiency, ICE often keeps people from the same country detained until it can fill an entire flight, according to several immigration attorneys who spoke generally about ICE practices. Deportation timelines vary based on factors that are often opaque, those attorneys said.
“People don’t actually get deported rapidly all the time,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a national advocacy group. “There are a lot of cases in which individuals can languish in detention for days, weeks, even months prior to deportation. Thatap because the actual act of deportation itself requires coordination inside the government.”
Rodriguez’s missing travel document may have slowed his deportation, attorneys said. Hans Meyer, an immigration attorney in Denver, said Rodriguez may have had “horrifically bad luck, and he got disappeared into a horrible black hole.”
On the day that Rodriguez died, there were more than 68,400 people in immigration detention centers across the United States. That was an all-time high, .
“That is just the reality of the system,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “People get caught in it and fall through the cracks and end up not being deported, even though they desperately are asking to be.”
