Guards Pepper-Sprayed 1,330 Detained Immigrants Asking Food and Care, ICE Records Show They Suffered Injuries

Inside America's immigration detention network, requests for basic necessities were too often met not with answers but with chemical force. Newly disclosed internal records show guards used pepper spray, restraint tactics and physical takedowns on more than a thousand detainees, many of them men simply demanding food, medical attention or access to their belongings.

A Washington Post exclusive investigation based on confidential ICE 'Daily Detainee Assault Reports' found that during the first year of President Donald Trump's second term, detention staff used force 780 times across 98 facilities. The number of detainees subjected to those actions climbed to 1,330, a 54 per cent increase on the previous year.

Complaints Turned Into Chemical Confrontations

One of the starkest episodes unfolded at the Anchorage Correctional Complex in Alaska, where detainees had been complaining that they were locked in cramped windowless cells and denied access to personal property. Pedro Cantú Ríos, then 68, said he was eating lunch when guards stormed the communal area carrying launchers that fired pepper balls into the room.

Plastic pellets burst into orange chemical dust. Cantú Ríos, who has a lung condition, said he could barely breathe.

'I thought I was going to die,' he recalled, in an interview with the Post.

What makes that account especially troubling is what was missing from the official justification. The staff sergeant's incident report noted that detainees were shouting, refusing orders and demanding their belongings. It did not state that any of them had turned violent or were on the verge of attacking staff, the threshold ICE's own detention standards say is supposed to trigger force as a last resort.

The same pattern appears elsewhere.

At Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, 35 detainees refused to return to their cells because they said they had not been seen by medical staff. Guards eventually pepper-sprayed the group to 'gain compliance and control of the pod.' In New Mexico, 65 detainees at Torrance County Detention Facility were sprayed during what witnesses described as a hunger strike tied to poor food and intermittent water shutoffs.

Again and again, the conflict starts with detainees asking for legally required care, and ends with officers treating those complaints as a security threat.

A Detention Boom Followed by a Force Boom

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) insist officers are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary and are regularly instructed in de-escalation. Officials also maintain that detention standards prohibit punishment and require force only when safety is genuinely at risk.

The reports cover January 2024 through February 2026, spanning the last year of the Biden administration and the first year of Trump's return. During that Trump year, use-of-force incidents rose by 37 per cent while detainee populations increased by 45 per cent. Overcrowding alone does not explain everything, but it reveals the climate. More bodies, fewer safeguards, thinner staffing and a corrections mindset create exactly the sort of pressure cooker where compliance starts replacing care as the governing principle.

At least 106 detainees were documented as injured in these incidents, suffering broken arms, head trauma, eye injuries, seizures and dislocated shoulders. Even that figure is probably conservative because some reports listed no injuries despite emergency medical calls indicating otherwise. One Arizona case was recorded internally as injury-free, yet a 911 call obtained by investigators captured an ICE officer reporting that a detainee was having seizures after pepper spray exposure.

Hidden Facilities, Thin Accountability

The records illuminate a detention world the federal government has spent years shielding from sustained public scrutiny. ICE facilities are closed institutions, surveillance footage is rarely released and many centres are operated by private prison contractors responsible for hiring and training their own security staff. Those contractors insist force is used only when necessary. The detainee narratives tell a far harsher story.

The Washington Post found the reports themselves became less descriptive after Trump returned to office, shrinking from fuller narratives to clipped formulaic summaries that often omitted key context. Less detail means less traceability and weaker accountability.

Even with 1,460 reported incidents since early 2024, investigators say the numbers are likely incomplete because around 140 ICE-linked facilities do not appear in the reporting logs at all. One fatal January struggle involving 55-year-old Cuban detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos was absent from the database despite an FBI investigation now under way.

That omission says plenty about the opacity here.

ICE still describes immigration detention as 'non-punitive.' Yet these records show a system functioning with the instincts of a prison block, where men asking for medicine, water or a doctor can end up coughing through pepper spray instead.