“In these screenings, immigrants must prove there is a significant possibility that they have a valid fear of persecution or torture in their home country. It’s the first step in a long process to gain protections in the US, one that has come under scrutiny from Trump administration officials,” BuzzFeed News continued. “ICE officials kept her in custody at a facility in Oklahoma. The agency has detained thousands of immigrants who have passed their initial asylum screenings, a practice that in the past generally led to them being released from custody.”

Frustrated asylum-seekers have taken drastic, life-threatening measures and launched hunger strikes in protest of their prolonged detention. NPR reported last year that at one Louisiana facility alone, as many as 150 people were refusing to eat. In another widely reported hunger strike that year, ICE force-fed people at a Texas facility in a torturous process that left some with “nasal and rectal bleeding and vomiting.” Two asylum-seekers, cousins Jasvir and Rajandeep Singh,”described the thrice-daily force-feeding process as painful and dehumanizing,” Texas Monthly reported.

Conditions in ICE facilities are unsafe because ICE has made it that way. Reuters reported earlier this month that officials at one New Mexico facility consistently failed to provide transgender people in their custody with adequate medical attention and treatment in hundreds of instances, forcing the few who had resources to pool their money together and buy medication instead from the prison commissary. Instead of releasing them, ICE transferred them to other facilities, which immigrant rights advocates criticized as a move that “only shuffled the problems to other facilities,” Reuters noted.

The name of the woman who reportedly died while in ICE custody this past weekend is not yet known. “We don't know is if she was Indigenous, but if so she may have had language barrier in accessing medical care and advocating for herself,” journalist Daniel Alvarenga tweeted. “It's been mostly Indigenous Maya children who've died in ICE custody.” Among the indigenous Guatemalan children who have lost their lives after being taken into federal immigration custody is Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez, who died from flu complicated by pneumonia and sepsis. He was just weeks away from turning 17.