Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly suspended a rule last summer at a large private lockup in Adelanto, Calif., that requires immigrant detainees receive a comprehensive health assessment within two weeks of arrival, according to a previously undisclosed ICE report obtained by Scripps News.
Since the start of the immigration crackdown, at least four detainees have died while in custody at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center. The attorney representing their families has said medical negligence is a factor in all of the cases.
The Department of Homeland Security says it is longstanding practice to provide immigrants with a “full health assessment within 14 days of entering ICE custody or arrival at a facility,” but the new report says ICE waived the two-week deadline at Adelanto in July 2025 to deal with a backlog of medical cases as the detained population surged.
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DHS has not answered questions about the suspended health checks, including whether they remain in place at Adelanto and other ICE detention centers.
The finding is part of a March 2026 mortality review by ICE that examined the death of 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe who died of a skin infection that worsened at Adelanto, a facility owned at the time by The GEO Group under government contract. The company has since sold the detention center to DHS.
The ICE mortality review says the care Ayala-Uribe received at Adelanto “deviated beyond safe limits of practice.”
Ayala-Uribe, who came to the U.S. from Mexico with his family at age four, was arrested by ICE last year at the California car wash where he worked for 15 years. He had lost DACA protection after two DUI convictions.
The ICE document outlines a series of failures by Adelanto medical staff, beginning with Ayala-Uribe did not receiving the comprehensive health assessment that should have occurred within 14 days of his arrival at Adelanto.
About a month later, Ayala-Uribe began complaining of pain in his left buttock. An autopsy found it was an abscess.
Medical staff overseen by the GEO Group took two days to diagnose the infection, the report said. A doctor, who diagnosed Ayala-Uribe over the phone, initially mistook the abscess for a hemorrhoid, it said.
Nurses then failed to perform the twice daily wellness checks ordered by the doctor.
By the time medical staff transferred Ayala-Uribe to a hospital, it was too late to save him and he died.
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The mortality review found four violations of national detention standards at Adelanto related to medical care, supporting claims by Ayala-Uribe's family that he did not receive proper care while detained.
“Honestly for me it was medical negligence,” his mother Lucia Uribe told Scripps News in an interview this past May. “He said no one was attending to him. He said mom I can’t take it anymore. I can’t.”
The GEO Group, which owned Adelanto before the U.S. government bought it this month, told Scripps News to send inquiries to ICE.
DHS, which answers questions for ICE, would not respond to questions about the findings in the newly obtained report.
The Adelanto ICE Processing Center had an average daily population of more than 1,800 detainees as of July.
