Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Thursday that her government intends to pursue criminal charges over the deaths of 17 Mexican nationals in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Associated Press reported that Sheinbaum’s administration will submit a request “to state prosecutors’ offices and the US Department of Justice, asking them to consider criminal charges against those responsible for the deaths.” The request, according to AP, “will be accompanied by civil lawsuits against the companies that operate the detention centers in an effort to put an end to human rights violations in those facilities.”

Sheinbaum said her government decided to urgently move forward with its likely doomed push for accountability after an ICE agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston earlier this week. Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national, had been living in the US for more than three decades.

Mexico’s president called the killing “sad and regrettable,” arguing that it “appears to have been targeted.”

“We are going to do everything in our power, because we cannot stand silent,” Sheinbaum said Thursday. “We cannot turn a blind eye to the Mexicans who have died.”

According to a recent report by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, “the mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody is at its highest level in over a decade and has more than doubled since [US President Donald] Trump’s second term began.”

“The rate is nearly four times that of the Biden administration, and more than two and a half times as high as that of the first Trump administration,” the report found, noting that a record 71,000 people were in immigration detention in January 2026. “The surge in deaths is much worse than what one would expect even considering the much higher number of people in detention.”

Deaths in ICE custody have drawn international alarm, with the United Nations high commissioner for human rights saying last month that “the lack of transparency and clarity surrounding the circumstances of these deaths in custody undermines accountability for them.”

“I call for prompt, independent, impartial and effective investigations into all deaths in ICE custody," said Volker Türk. “Those responsible for violations of the law must be held to account, and the rights of the victims’ families to truth, justice and reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence must be upheld.”

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