Nov 6
2025
Detainees allege shoddy medical care at ICE Batavia
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The entrance to the Batavia ICE facility. Photo by J. Dale Shoemaker.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and staff have administered what experts say was shoddy medical treatment to at least a dozen detainees at its Batavia facility in the past two years, Investigative Post has found.
Serious injuries went untreated, medications were denied or scaled back, and needed medical appointments were delayed at the ICE detention center.
In one case, a Nigerian migrant arrived in February at the detention facility suffering frostbite. A doctor who provided emergency care ordered that he see a specialist within a week before releasing him into immigration custody. Agents in Batavia never took him to the appointment. By the time he saw a doctor, it was too late to save his fingers; parts of six were later amputated.
In another case, a Gambian man with numerous heart issues was detained by ICE in February after he showed up for a routine check-in appointment. The man went two weeks without his medications. He suffered a stroke-like syndrome as a result, according to a doctor.
Attorneys and other detainee advocates told Investigative Post that the cases documented by this reporting are indicative of a wider problem. And a 2023 investigation by NPR found similar problems across ICE’s network of detention centers.
Sophie Dalsimer, an attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest who has studied medical treatment in ICE facilities in New York, said the agency’s treatment of detainees amounts to “medical neglect in a legal sense.”
“The lack of medical care, and with ICE being deliberately indifferent to people’s medical needs, could, in many of these instances, rise to the level of a constitutional violation,” she said. “It certainly appears to be a violation of ICE’s own detention standards.”
Those standards include providing prescribed medications, timely responses to medical complaints, and hospitalization as needed.
The Batavia facility lacks a doctor and dentist working on-site. That’s for a 650-bed detention center that’s been overcapacity for months due to the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants.
A Department of Homeland Security inspector general report published in June noted that “staffing shortages caused delays in dental and off-site specialty care.” Between September 2024 and February 2025, the report said, ICE had a 150-person backlog of detainees who required outside medical treatment and were waiting for appointments.
That problem was noted previously in a 2018 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigation into medical care at Batavia. That audit gave the facility a passing grade but also found “several examples of detainees waiting for various specialty health care services for more than a month.” In one case, a detainee waited 168 days for an endocrinology appointment. In another case, the auditor found that a detainee requested an outside doctor appointment for blood in his stool, but that ICE deleted the request from its internal system.
“It’s just freak luck that no one has died in Batavia in the last two years,” said Aaron Krupp, the regional coordinator at Justice for Migrant Families. “But the way that they have treated people, people really easily could have died.”
This story is based on a review of nearly 600 pages of court filings from seven lawsuits, medical records, and other documents, as well as interviews with a dozen people including detainees, attorneys and other experts. Neither ICE nor DHS, its parent agency, responded to detailed questions and requests about each case in this story.
Injuries Go Untreated
Chidi Nwagbo moved from Nigeria to the U.S. in 1988, living for 37 years as a “model resident” with no criminal history, according to his attorney. When Donald Trump took office in January, he said in a July interview, “things just went helter-skelter, like raids everywhere, and I didn’t know what to do.”
He made a plan to move to Canada to live with his brother and paid a smuggler $2,000 to shepherd him and three other migrants into Quebec. The final leg of the journey required them to cross the border on foot, but Nwagbo said he was unprepared for freezing temperatures and waist-deep snow. He and a woman in his party eventually called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to rescue them.
A portion of Nwagbo’s medical records.
After a hospital stint, he was released into federal immigration custody on February 10 with orders from a doctor that he see a specialist at Kessler Burn and Trauma Center in Rochester to treat his frostbitten fingers within a week. ICE never took him to the appointment, according to Nwagbo’s medical records, which he shared with Investigative Post. By the time he saw a different doctor at a different practice 16 days later, his fingers were too far gone. Amputations would be necessary, the doctor told him. He’s now missing portions of six fingers.
“I shouldn’t have lost my fingers,” he said.
The case of Tim, another Nigerian, is similar.
In April this year, Tim, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution against his family, was days away from finishing a federal prison sentence for a fraud conviction when he fell down a set of stairs. He suffered a major concussion and was taken to a Massachusetts hospital. Upon discharge, he was prescribed nine drugs, ordered to attend in-patient physical therapy, and transferred to the Batavia detention center. Once at the detention center, he went at least a month without medication and received only two physical therapy sessions before being deported this summer. By that point, Tim required a walker.
“I’m very traumatized at the moment,” he said during an interview with Investigative Post in May, several weeks after his injury. “I suffer a lot of mental health issues. I cannot sleep. I am on zero medications.”
Reached recently by email, Tim said his condition has only deteriorated since his return to Nigeria.
He wrote, “I am dire need of a comprehensive mental health/neurological treatment in order to get my life back to where it used to be before my detention in the United States.”
Medications denied
ICE, in some cases, denied detainees access to needed medications. In other cases, the agency allowed lapses in their medication schedules.
That was the case with Sering Ceesay, the Gambian man with heart conditions. He was detained by ICE in New York City on February 19 after what he expected to be a routine immigration appointment.
Instead, ICE placed him in shackles and chains and transported him to Batavia. He went two weeks without his medications. On March 4, he attended a legal clinic hosted by attorneys from the legal advocates at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, who quickly realized Ceesay needed medical attention, according to court filings.
“I was feeling very weak, and my entire body just hurt,” Ceesay said in a filing. “I felt like when I had my heart attacks.”
U.S. District Judge Lawrence Vilardo later ordered Ceesay released, but not before he was diagnosed with a stroke-like syndrome because he had missed so many days of his medicine.
“Without … strict adherence to these medications, [Ceesay] is likely to suffer from recurrent heart attacks, worsening peripheral artery disease and strokes and increasing his risk of further disability and avoidable premature death,” Dr. Joseph Shin, a physician and professor with Weill Cornell Medicine, wrote in a letter submitted as part of Ceesay’s lawsuit.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomIn Owen Simms’s case, ICE provided him with medication but lowered his dosages, he said, leaving him at risk of a seizure.
An extensive immigration and criminal history landed Simms in the Batavia detention center last March, where he remained until he was transferred to an out-of-state ICE facility in October. During a previous deportation to his home country, Jamaica, Simms was struck in the head with a machete, he and his wife testified in immigration court filings, which left him suffering from seizures. An immigration judge later ruled that he should not be deported due to the likelihood he’d be attacked again if he returned to Jamaica.
In an interview, Simms said his detention by ICE caused him to miss several days of his anti-seizure medication. He said the agency then lowered his daily dosage from 1,500 mg to 1,000 mg. He now worries he’ll suffer another seizure, which in the past has put him in a coma.
“My seizures come on to me when I’m sleeping, and if you’re not next to me, you can’t even know that I am having a seizure,” he said. “It’s scary, like it’s really scary.”
Five other detainees have claimed that ICE denied or delayed them receiving prescribed medication. ICE’s standards call for all detainees to be provided prescribed medications, including a week’s supply before a deportation.
- In March 2024, an ICE transfer from Florida to Batavia caused Raheem Fulton, a Jamaican immigrant suffering from end-stage renal disease, to miss a regularly scheduled dialysis appointment. He went five days without the treatment and had to be rushed to the Erie County Medical Center. A spokesperson for RFK Human Rights said ICE caused additional lapses in his dialysis treatment in the past and delayed other medical appointments too. Attorneys for the group are currently suing ICE and have alleged the agency has delayed other treatments Fulton needs, including a cardiology appointment. (Fulton’s lawyers are appealing to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after a Buffalo judge dismissed it in January, agreeing with the government’s argument that the court lacked jurisdiction.)
- In October 2024, ICE attempted, unsuccessfully, to deport Naim Qasemi to his native Afghanistan. Against its protocols, ICE failed to provide Qasemi with medications for his diagnosed bipolar disorder, his attorneys allege in a lawsuit to stop his deportation. Qasemi, they wrote, “was unmedicated and was not receiving any kind of therapeutic treatment in advance of his removal.” In court filings, Justice Department officials did not address Qasemi’s claim. A judge dismissed the case last month after Afghanistan cleared Qasemi’s return, paving the way for his deportation.
- In a July letter to ICE officials in Batavia, advocates with Justice for Migrant Families wrote that a Honduran man was not receiving a prescribed medical cream to treat a skin condition. The man also suffers from chronic pain, and ibuprofen was no longer working, Jennifer Connor, the organization’s executive director, and Krupp wrote. They demanded ICE take the man to a specialist and administer a different pain medication. Krupp said that hasn’t happened.
- Arzou Hami, an Iranian woman suffering from “serious mental health issues” was detained in June, as part of a sweep of Iranian migrants shortly after the U.S. bombed Iran. Matthew Borowski, her attorney, alleged in court filings that her detention has prevented her from receiving medications. She was detained by Buffalo ICE agents at the Niagara County Jail before being transferred to Texas where “she is being denied adequate mental health care,” Borowski wrote in a court filing. In an interview, he said his client has now gotten “some medication, but it’s not the same thing that she was on before.” Officials have not responded to those claims in court yet; the case was transferred to Texas last month.
- In a fifth case, a detainee known only as K.U. in court filings alleged he has not received proper medical care for “numerous life-threatening health conditions.” His lawsuit states an independent physician reviewed the man’s case and “expressed extreme concern that he is ‘not receiving the standard of appropriate medical care.’” Officials have yet to address his medical claims in court, and a judge ordered him released in August.
In yet another case, a Jordanian named Mohammed Saleh had treatment for a massive brain tumor and a chronic eye condition delayed by ICE between the fall of 2023 and his deportation later that year
He arrived in Batavia in September 2023 following a federal prison sentence for his involvement in a failed bombing plot in the 1990s and began complaining of “tingling sensations in his fingers and toes” several weeks later. An MRI and a CT scan revealed the tumor. Krupp, of Justice for Migrant Families, said Saleh eventually attended follow-up appointments for his tumor but was only given ibuprofen and Tylenol as treatment. Saleh also had a prescribed injection for his eye condition delayed by three months.
Harmed While in Custody
Some detainees were not properly treated for an injury or illness they suffered while detained.
Lansine Sidibe, a Malian man, alleged he was beaten by seven guards at the Batavia facility in February 2024 after he refused to sign some paperwork. According to a human rights complaint his attorneys filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in December, he alleged the guards broke his fingers, a claim an ICE doctor denied, according to the complaint. Nonetheless, it took a month before the agency agreed to X-ray his fingers.
Renny Arcaya-Ventura, a Venezuelan man, said in an interview that he suffered a severe allergic reaction and body pains after he was booked into the ICE facility and didn’t receive adequate medical care.
“I am in intense pain every day,” he said. “Every day I have a fever, pains in my body [and] I can’t even walk. I have even lost a lot of weight.”
His attorney, Guanlin Yang, shared photos of Arcaya-Ventura that appear to show swelling in his hands and rashes on his arms.
Arcaya-Ventura was deported in August.
Dalsimer, of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, has studied medical care at the Orange County Jail — the second largest ICE detention facility in New York. Through her research and legal work, she’s concluded that medical care offered by ICE is “almost always subpar.”
“The abuses are consistent,” she said, “across all the facilities.”
