Pedro Pascal and Madonna Signed a Letter to Shut Down an ICE Facility But 14 People Have Already Died in Custody This Year

Pedro Pascal wants you to know he thinks children shouldn’t be locked in detention centers. Madonna agrees. So does Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Elliot Page, Jane Fonda, John Legend, and a parade of other celebrities who have signed an open letter demanding the federal government shut down the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas.

“Children belong in schools and on playgrounds, not in detention centers,” the letter reads. It cites court filings detailing abuse: no clean water, rotten food contaminated with worms, medical neglect, sleep deprivation, denial of legal counsel, families separated, children held for months in conditions that violate basic standards of health and dignity.

Ms. Rachel, the children’s entertainment figure who has become an unlikely advocate, described a video call with a nine-year-old boy detained at Dilley. “It was unbelievably surreal to see this sweet little face and feel like I was on a call with somebody who’s in jail,” she told NBC News. “It broke me. We’re trying to get a child out of jail to do a spelling bee. I just never thought those words would go together.”

It is a horrifying image. A child. A detention center. A spelling bee conducted over a video call because the child cannot leave.

And yet, as these celebrities put their names to paper, as the letters are drafted and the press releases are sent, something else is happening. Something that makes the Dilley facility seem almost like a distraction, a single tree in a forest that is actively burning.

The Death Toll They Don’t Want You to Count

On March 25, 2026, a Mexican immigrant named Jose Guadalupe Ramos was found unconscious and unresponsive in his bunk at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. Security staff found him. On-site medical personnel tried to save him. He was transported to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Ramos had diabetes. He arrived at Adelanto with a list of pre-existing conditions: hyperlipidemia, hypertension, diabetes. A conviction for possession of a controlled substance and theft trailed behind him. ICE had arrested him on February 23. During intake, he received a health screening. For weeks, staff gave him daily medication. None of it saved him, and then he died.

This was not an isolated tragedy. According to Reuters, Ramos marks at least the 14th death in ICE custody in 2026. We are only three months into the year. Fourteen people have already died. In 2025, at least 31 people died in ICE detention — a two-decade high. The current pace threatens to eclipse that number before summer.

Ramos was the fourth detainee to die at Adelanto since Trump took office. The other three were also Mexican men.

The official ICE press release describes the death with the cold, bureaucratic language of a corporation filing an incident report. “A criminal illegal alien passed away,” it begins. The phrase “criminal illegal alien” appears three times. It is repeated like a mantra, as if the classification somehow explains or justifies the outcome. As if a man with diabetes who was denied adequate medical care is less dead because he was once convicted of theft.

Final Thoughts

When do immigrant detention centres become internment camps, and when do they cross into something far darker? Many would argue that the line has already been crossed. The link may be gone, but the reality remains. This is why people are protesting. Conditions in ICE custody have proven deadly. People are being denied due process, deprived of medical care, and some are dying.

It should be unacceptable for officials to describe a death in such dehumanising terms. Referring to someone as “a criminal illegal alien who passed away” strips away their humanity. A man named Jose Guadalupe Ramos died because the system responsible for holding him failed to keep him alive. He is not the first, and there is little reason to believe he will be the last.

Every individual who sustains or enables this system bears responsibility for what it has become. The anger people feel is not abstract. It is rooted in what they are witnessing happen in real time.

Public figures can issue statements, sign letters, and post messages, but those gestures remain symbolic. Until detention centres are emptied, until deaths are investigated with the seriousness of potential crimes rather than recorded as statistics, and until the language used to describe detainees is confronted for what it does, those gestures will not be enough.

Children remain in detention. Families continue to suffer loss. And while that continues, statements and signatures alone cannot change the reality.