Los Angeles, California – Every weekend, Lucia Uribe makes a trip that has become a ritual: to the edge of the California desert to visit her son, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, in immigration detention.
Ismael was among the hundreds of thousands of people swept up in US President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.
Born in Mexico and brought to the United States as a child, he was arrested on August 17 while working at a car wash. Since then, he had been held by immigration authorities, first at a local jail and later at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Adelanto, California.
But one Saturday was different. Lucia remembers that Ismael's hands looked paler, his eyes were bloodshot, and his fever was rising.
"Mom, I'm not going to make it," Lucia recalls Ismael telling her. She could only try to reassure him.
"I told him: 'Oh son, try to hold on as long as you can,'" Lucia said. "When I said goodbye to him, I felt something in my chest, a tightness, that made me want to cry."
It was the last time she saw her son alive. Two days later, Lucia's fear was confirmed by a knock at the door. Police informed her that her son had died at 2:32am on September 22, 2025.
Ismael was one of more than 50 people who died in ICE detention facilities during the first 500 days of Trump's second term.
A report by the coroner's office of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department in Southern California determined the cause of death was complications from an abscess in the pelvic region.
However, Ismael's family believes inadequate medical care in ICE facilities turned a preventable infection into a fatal one.
Over several months, Al Jazeera's documentary series Fault Lines interviewed people detained in ICE facilities and the families of those who never returned, to understand the conditions that can lead to deaths like Ismael's.
The findings show that 2025 – the year Ismael died – was the deadliest year in history for people in ICE detention. But experts fear 2026 could match or surpass that record.
