Washington Attorney General Nick Brown has joined a coalition of 22 other attorneys general in pressing the Trump administration to reverse a newly adopted ICE policy dealing with the deaths of immigration detainees. The group is asking federal officials to roll the change back and return to the standard that was in place before, framing the dispute as a test of how openly the government accounts for people who die in connection with its custody.
At the center of the fight is what the new policy removes. Under the change, the agency would no longer be required to investigate the deaths of detainees who have only recently been released from ICE custody, closing off a layer of scrutiny that previously applied to those cases. The shift narrows the circumstances under which a death tied to detention would automatically trigger an official review.
The policy also ends the public reporting of those deaths, meaning that cases which once would have been disclosed could now pass without any announcement. For the attorneys general, that combination of fewer investigations and less disclosure is the core of the problem, because it allows information about deaths linked to detention to stay out of public view.
The move rescinds a policy adopted in 2021 that had been designed specifically to hold the agency accountable in situations where a detainee fell ill and died after being released. That earlier rule was meant to ensure that a death occurring shortly after someone left custody would still be examined, rather than treated as beyond the agency's responsibility once the person was no longer formally detained.
In a letter addressed to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, the attorneys general argued that the change reduces transparency and accountability at a time when scrutiny of detention conditions is intensifying. Brown underscored the coalition's position in a statement, writing that everybody, including people who are detained, should be safe, healthy, and treated with decency, and the group called on federal officers to go back to the previous reporting standard.
The Department of Homeland Security has defended the policy as a matter of common sense, saying it simply reflects that ICE is not responsible for monitoring people who are no longer in its custody. That argument sets up a direct clash with the attorneys general, who contend that drawing the line at the moment of release is precisely what risks letting deaths connected to detention go uncounted and unexamined.