Kamel Maklad fled Syria and asked the United States for asylum. He has no criminal record. He spent a cumulative five months in solitary confinement at the Eloy Detention Center before his release in December 2025, and he's still working to recover from it. Jordano Casanova, a Cuban asylum seeker, spent four cumulative months in isolation during eight months at the same facility. Charles Daniel was held in ICE detention for almost four years — and spent virtually the entire time in solitary, despite documented serious mental health issues. Denny Adan Gonzalez, a Cuban man held at Georgia's Stewart Detention Center, died there in 2026 by apparent suicide while in solitary confinement — the fifth suicide among 18 known ICE custody deaths that year alone. ICE's own written policy describes solitary confinement as a last resort. Nothing about these four cases looks like a last resort.
How Often It's Being Used
Documented fact: Reporting citing federal detention data found more than 835 people held in solitary confinement in immigration detention on a monthly basis, and more than 10,500 total instances of solitary confinement over the 14 months ending in May 2025. From February to March 2025 specifically, the number of detainees placed in solitary increased by an average of 6.5% per month — more than six times the average monthly increase recorded from April through November 2024, under the prior administration.
The Facilities Where This Happens
The entrance to a CoreCivic-operated facility in Appleton, Minnesota, shown in 2015 when it was under consideration for ICE detention use. Photo: Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
How Long It's Lasting, and What International Standards Say About That
Documented fact: Among detainees identified by facilities as seriously ill, suicidal, or on hunger strike — categories where isolation carries particular risk — the average period of uninterrupted solitary confinement was 63 days during the winter quarter covered in this reporting. People with documented vulnerabilities (disabilities, mental health conditions, or heightened risk of violence due to sexual orientation or gender identity) were held in solitary for more than twice as long, on average, during the first three months of 2025 as during the same three months in 2022. For context: UN experts define anything beyond 15 consecutive days in isolation as amounting to torture. A separate, earlier Physicians for Human Rights analysis of 2018–2023 data found the average stay already exceeded that 15-day threshold at 27 days — before the increases documented above.
Confinement, Physically
Razor wire and security fencing surrounding a detention-style facility. Photo: Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Five months for a man with no criminal record. Nearly four years for another. The barbed wire in this design isn't decorative — it's the same visual language as the segregation-unit realities documented above. One of our more pointed Anti-Authoritarian Stickers.
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Why People Stop Reporting How Bad It Gets
Documented fact: Solitary Watch has documented immigrants held in isolation while on suicide watch, with diagnoses including PTSD, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia — and found that detainees have become reluctant to report suicidal ideation specifically because doing so gets them placed in solitary rather than given actual mental health care. On the record: Dr. Katherine Peeler, a co-author of Physicians for Human Rights' "Endless Nightmare" report, put it plainly: "Many people seeking asylum and other immigrants come to the United States seeking safety only to be forced into a claustrophobic cell for weeks, months, or even years." Denny Adan Gonzalez's death illustrates exactly the failure mode Dr. Peeler and Solitary Watch are describing: a system that responds to a mental health crisis with the one intervention most likely to make it worse.
What ICE's Own Policy Says
Interpretation: ICE detention standards describe solitary confinement (termed "segregation" in agency documents) as reserved for last-resort circumstances, such as immediate safety risks, rather than routine population management or a response to someone disclosing suicidal thoughts. The scale, duration, and named cases documented above describe a widening gap between that stated last-resort standard and documented practice — similar to the medical-care gap covered in the previous piece, and exactly the kind of gap our fact-check on "detention meets standards" claims digs into further.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is solitary confinement ever appropriate in immigration detention?
ICE's own policy allows it for specific safety-related circumstances; this piece isn't arguing it should never be used, only documenting how far current practice — including using it on suicidal detainees instead of mental health care — has moved from the "last resort" framing in the agency's own stated standards.
Has any court or oversight body formally ruled on whether this constitutes torture?
The "torture" characterization is currently an advocacy-organization and medical-expert argument, measured against a UN-defined 15-day threshold, rather than a U.S. court's adjudicated finding using that specific legal label.
Does oversight of solitary confinement connect to the broader oversight cuts covered earlier in this series?
Yes — the same March 2025 staffing reductions at DHS's civil rights oversight offices, covered in our piece on who investigates ICE, are cited in some of this reporting as a contributing factor to weaker monitoring of segregation practices specifically.
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A man who fled Syria spent five months in an isolation cell with no criminal record attached to his name. This Anti-Fascism pack is about as close as a sticker gets to just saying Fuck Ice and meaning it.
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Related Reading
Detained Isn't Convicted: Why Immigration Detention Isn't a Prison Sentence: the "civil, non-punitive" framework that solitary confinement, a criminal-justice tool, sits awkwardly inside.
Medical Care Inside ICE Detention: What the Standards Require vs. What Inspectors Find: a parallel gap between written standards and documented practice.
Rapes and Deaths in ICE Custody: What the Records Show: the fuller 2026 death toll Denny Adan Gonzalez's case is part of.
Sources: Physicians for Human Rights, "Endless Nightmare: Torture and Inhuman Treatment in Solitary Confinement in U.S. Immigration Detention," Sept. 2025, featuring Dr. Katherine Peeler and the cases of Kamel Maklad and Jordano Casanova; Physicians for Human Rights, "The 18th Death — and Fifth Death Attributed to Suicide — in ICE Custody This Year Spotlights Harms of Solitary Confinement," on Denny Adan Gonzalez; Solitary Watch, reporting on suicide-watch avoidance and the case of Charles Daniel; ICIJ, "Solitary confinement in ICE detention spiked during early months of the Trump administration, report finds," Sept. 2025; Solitary Watch, "Fact Sheet on Solitary Confinement in Immigration Detention in 2026," updated May 2026.
About Quietly Loud Prints
Quietly Loud Prints designs original parody, activist, educational, and political stickers inspired by history, humor, and grassroots movements. Our goal is to create thoughtful designs that help people express ideas through everyday objects.