Thursday, American Oversight filed suit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for records to determine whether the Trump administration is meeting its obligation to provide adequate medical care to people in ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody after disrupting the longstanding system used to pay for offsite medical, dental, and pharmacy care.
The records sought could shed light on how the breakdown in claims processing affected medical care for people in ICE and CBP custody, as well as ICE officials’ efforts to address the crisis with the contractors brought in to fill the gap. For decades, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) processed medical claims and reimbursed offsite healthcare providers on ICE’s behalf. But after the VA suddenly terminated that arrangement last fall, ICE warned of an “absolute emergency,” explaining that the loss of VA’s support would “delay critical medical care” and put the “health, welfare, and lives” of people in ICE and CBP custody “significantly at risk” and result in “medical complications or loss of life.”
In Oct. 2025, ICE awarded multimillion dollar no-bid contracts to Acentra and Ardent to fill the sudden void left by the VA. Yet offsite providers have still not been paid for care provided on or after Oct. 1, 2025 — despite Acentra reportedly receiving nearly $45 million — and payments to providers may not begin for months. Publicly available government contracting information indicates ICE is seeking new vendors to assist with claims processing despite these previous $110 million awards. The records requested could shed light on the scope of ICE’s contracts with Acentra and Ardent, including what services, if any, the contractors have provided to date.
“ICE and CBP cannot take people into custody and then fail to provide them with adequate medical care. They have a legal obligation to protect the health and safety of people in their custody, and the public has a right to know whether they are meeting that obligation,” said Chioma Chukwu, Executive Director of American Oversight. “As the administration rapidly expands immigration detention, ICE must turn over records that could reveal whether those in its custody have been denied or forced to wait for critical lifesaving care — including cancer treatments, dialysis, or prenatal care. The public also deserves to know why the administration has spent millions in taxpayer dollars on contracts that have yet to fix a crisis of its own making.”
We submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in March 2026, seeking records that could reveal the extent and impact of the claims processing breakdown. The requests seek information about outstanding and unpaid claims, as well as the number of providers that have stopped accepting new prescription requests or denied medications to detainees amid reports that ICE’s failure to pay medical bills has led some providers to stop paying for these services. We are also seeking reports and analyses supporting ICE’s statements that the disruption “has severely hindered” the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) mission, records concerning the VA’s role in supporting the transition to new claims processing contractors, and communications among ICE leadership.
Last week, we released new records that raise urgent questions about how the Trump administration is ensuring people in immigration detention receive timely, adequate medical care as healthcare providers who have provided offsite services remain unpaid for those services since last fall. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the records offer new details about the serious healthcare needs that often cannot be met in detention facilities, providing a snapshot of the thousands of medical conditions requiring treatment by offsite providers.
The records we obtained include previously undisclosed data documenting more than 233,000 claims processed by VA on behalf of ICE and CBP last year. This includes claims associated with treatment for serious medical conditions including heart attacks, strokes, traumatic brain injuries, acute kidney failure, mental health crises, infectious diseases like tuberculosis and HIV, pregnancy-related care, dehydration, heat stroke, starvation, suicide attempts and suicidal ideation, and physical and sexual abuse, among others. We also released the previously undisclosed interagency agreement between VA and ICE, as well as the VA’s August 2025 notice to ICE that it would terminate its claims processing support in order to reallocate resources to other programs.
The number of people held in immigration detention has skyrocketed under the Trump administration, nearly doubling between January 2025 and January 2026. A recent report on detention in California noted that the interruption in claims processing “has caused widespread disruption in the provision of appropriate medical care” at facilities in the state. Members of Congress recently opened an investigation following reports that people died while in ICE custody after not receiving appropriate offsite care. Experts warn that delayed care has already contributed to the growing number of deaths in detention.
Previously, we partnered with the ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights to release “Deadly Failures: Preventable Deaths in U.S. Immigration Detention,” which revealed that 95 percent of deaths in ICE custody during the first Trump administration were preventable or potentially preventable with proper medical care.
