By the time Presly Nelson and his mother arrived at a Scottsdale hospital at the beginning of March, his brother, Emmanuel Damas, was already on a ventilator. Nelson remembers a big metal chain attached to plastic cuffs binding Damas’ hands and feet to his hospital bed.
“He was just laying there, flat, he could barely open his eyes,” Nelson said. “I thought that was very mean-spirited for somebody that's dying — there is no chance, could not even open his eyes — to be handcuffed.”
Nelson says his mother asked that the cuffs be removed. Officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement eventually obliged her request.
Damas died about 30 minutes later.
The 56-year-old Haitian asylum seeker had been in ICE custody since being arrested on domestic violence charges last September in Boston. ICE picked him up before he faced those charges in court and sent him to the Florence Correctional Center south of Phoenix.
On calls to the family in February, Nelson says Damas began complaining about intensifying tooth pain. They told him to ask the facility’s medical clinic for help.
“And, I guess he went, and he got Ibuprofen, but he kept going back, he kept going back. The pain would not go away,” Nelson said.
Nelson says he learned from another detainee that Damas had been transferred to the hospital on Feb. 19, after his mouth became so swollen that he could no longer talk.
That began the family’s days-long effort to find out where he was and what condition he was in. They arrived in Phoenix on March 1 after finally being cleared by ICE to come see him. He died the next afternoon.
All told, according to ICE, Damas spent 11 days at three different hospitals before he died in Scottsdale. Medical staff there told his family he died of septic shock likely due to the infection that began in his tooth.
Nelson says he can’t wrap his head around how this all happened.
“Was it on purpose? Was it lack of management or oversight? If it was negligence, proactive action needs to be taken and the protocols need to be reviewed,” he said.
A lot of other families have similar questions about how their loved ones are being cared for by ICE.
Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year nationwide, according to agency data, marking a two decade high. And 2026 is shaping up to be worse — Damas is one of at least 15 people to have died in custody so far.
Meanwhile, Congress has spent months negotiating funding for ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, with some lawmakers demanding reforms like requiring ICE agents to take off their masks and wear body cameras.
But behind the scenes, ICE detention is expanding. And the mechanisms that used to monitor it are crumbling.
Expanding detention, shrinking oversight
Adam Isacson is the director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America. He says U.S. statute requires a group of internal DHS offices to provide oversight for ICE and Border Patrol.
“You know, they did have a lot of people working there, who were trying hard, but often were not able to get anything even close to accountability for the victims, for many structural reasons,” he said.
Then, two months into the new Trump administration, in March 2025, mass firings were announced.
”These agencies, particularly the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office at DHS and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman at DHS, had just about every single member of their personnel fired,” he said.
Then-Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the offices were being shuttered because they were “roadblocks to enforcement.”
Staff reported being placed on administrative leave effective immediately and told not to contact anyone about the firings — including groups and individuals with complaints they were actively investigating. They were fired by May.
That’s the subject of a recent report from Isacson’s group and the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, Mexico.
Their findings shows the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office — the body responsible for investigating rights complaints — had a workforce of about 147 people. By the end of 2025, just two full-time employees and about 30 contractors remained.
Advocates have warned that past findings from the office have also been removed from DHS’ website — the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight created a database of more than 160 investigative memos of alleged abuses published by the oversight office that no longer appear on DHS’ site.
Isacson says similar purges happened at the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman — which handles systemic issues inside ICE detention.
“Maybe you were not getting your medications. Maybe there were worms in your food. Maybe some guards were actually really being cruel to you. You couldn't get access to your attorney, all these basic, basic things,” he said.
That office, according to the report, has seen a roughly 96% reduction — shrinking from a workforce of 118 to just five today. Isacson says the office no longer takes complaints by phone or email — meaning a lot of detainees are shut out.
“Even as the detained population is nearly doubled and we're up to about 220 facilities around the country, that's one officer for every 40 facilities,” he said.
In an email to KJZZ, a DHS spokesperson denied the agency had purged any data from past investigations and said it’s “streamlining oversight,” but that the civil rights office is still performing its legally-required functions.
Lilian Serrano, director of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, says groups, including hers, have tried to submit complaints to the rights office since the firings took effect last year.
“The law calls for actual investigations on complaints,” Serrano said. “It's ridiculous to think that the very small amount of staff can actually look into all of the violations of policies and rights that the agents are deploying on the ground and that are being recorded through complaints.”
Serrano’s group filed one such complaint with the civil rights office last year after an ICE operation at a San Diego restaurant last summer. Video shows agents carrying assault-style weapons and detonating flash-bang grenades at protesters.
Serrano says the first and only email from the office came months later, acknowledging that they had received the complaint, and would not be investigating.
“For us, that was the warning sign prior to what we all saw in Minneapolis,” she said. “We raised the alarm, we went through the proper channels — the channels that Congress created precisely to stop some of this violence — but there was nobody to even read the complaint.”
Congressional oversight efforts
Serrano says her group is speaking with lawmakers and asking for them to advocate for restoring the DHS oversight offices.
Democratic Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari of Arizona says at least right now, those efforts are not part of the DHS funding negotiations happening in Washington.
“We’re unfortunately so far away from any real accountability,” she said.
Ansari says that’s especially true for ICE detention. More than 60,000 people are in immigration custody nationwide, according to the agency’s April data, the vast majority in ICE facilities.
She and other lawmakers have been attempting to conduct oversight at detention centers in Arizona.
During a recent visit to the Florence Correctional Facility where Damas — the Haitian asylum seeker — was being held, she says detainees told her he’d repeatedly asked to see a doctor for his tooth pain.
“It took a couple of detainees essentially protesting outside of his cell for ICE and CoreCivic to say, ‘OK, we’re going to send him to the hospital now,’" she said. “I don’t think it would take too much for somebody who was independently investigating this, to recognize that this was preventable.”
Ansari and other lawmakers have called for an independent investigation of his death.
CoreCivic, the for-profit prison company that runs Florence, has directed questions about Damas to ICE.
In a statement four days after his death, the agency said Damas was transferred to the hospital after complaining of shortness of breath. It does not mention his toothache and says his cause of death has not been determined.
This was the final installment of a two-part series on DHS accountability and reform efforts.
