Hundreds of people gathered Saturday for the burial of a young Mexican man who died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, with family members denouncing the “fabricated” charges that led to his detention and death.
Royer Perez Jimenez, a 19-year-old from the municipality of San Juan Chamula in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, died on March 16 at a detention center in Florida.
After the family received his body on Thursday, his uncle, Manuel Perez, said Royer was a “hard worker” who immigrated at 15 to “triumph and help his family.”
He was arrested in January on suspicion of resisting arrest and giving a false identity to law enforcement, but Perez insists he was confused because he was not fluent in English.
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“He was unjustly accused as a criminal. … They fabricated a crime,” Perez told AFP, while also expressing the family’s doubts about the circumstances of his death.
ICE officials said Royer died of an apparent suicide but the official cause of death remained under investigation.
“What we want is a thorough investigation because, unfortunately, we do not believe suicide was the cause of his death, rather we suspect it was probably a homicide,” Perez said.
According to ICE, Perez Jimenez was evaluated by medical staff when he arrived at the immigration detention center in late February and answered “no” to all suicide screening questions, CBS News Miami reported.
Luis AGUILAR /AFP via Getty Images 
At least 14 migrants of various nationalities have died in ICE custody in 2026, according to officials, amid President Trump’s ongoing immigration crackdown. In 2025, 31 ICE detainees died, a two-decade high, according to a CBS News analysis of ICE records.
Fourteen Mexican nationals have died after contact with U.S. immigration authorities since Mr. Trump began his second term in January 2025.
The rising death toll comes as ICE’s detention population hit record highs amid Mr. Trump’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration. As of early February, ICE was holding more than 68,000 people in detention centers across the U.S., agency figures show.
But even after accounting for the number of people in detention each year, 2025 still had the highest death rate — 5.6 people per 10,000 detainees — since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a CBS News analysis found.