World Health Network Statement on Detention Practices and Protection of Life

The World Health Network exists to protect life and health. That obligation applies regardless of nationality, legal status, or political context.

Detention in facilities that lack enforceable standards of medical care, safety, transparency, and accountability poses a high and foreseeable risk to human life and health. When individuals are deprived of liberty, the detaining authority assumes full responsibility for their survival, wellbeing, and protection from harm.

Current detention practices associated with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including the use of for-profit detention facilities, have resulted in preventable illness, injury, and death. The confinement of children in such settings poses significant physical and psychological health risks including interference with education, and violates established standards of health protection, ethics, and duty of care.

In addition to confinement conditions, practices that involve taking people without warning or meaningful recourse from their daily lives — including from homes, public places, workplaces, or schools — create foreseeable and severe health harms. Sudden removal under conditions of fear and uncertainty causes acute trauma, separates families without safeguards, and undermines trust essential to individual and societal functioning. Individuals removed without warning may be unable to bring medications, medical devices, or other supplies necessary to preserve health and life, or to coordinate the care of children, elders, or other family members who depend on them. These practices amplify harm beyond those directly detained, affecting families, workplaces, schools, and communities..

Deaths in custody are not administrative errors, nor are they isolated incidents. They reflect systemic failures in conditions of confinement that public health has a responsibility to confront. Detention environments characterized by inadequate medical access, poor infection prevention, fear-based control, limited oversight, and lack of accountability are inherently dangerous and incompatible with the protection of life.

From a public health and ethical standpoint:

• Children should never be held in detention environments that place them at risk of physical or psychological harm.
• No system that profits from detention can be relied upon to safeguard health without strict, enforceable standards, and independent oversight.
• Any form of detention must meet non-negotiable requirements for medical care, infection prevention, transparency, and independent oversight.
• Practices that foreseeably result in serious harm or death are not tenable under any circumstances.

This statement is not about immigration policy, enforcement priorities, or political affiliation. It is about the basic conditions required to protect human life and health. Public health cannot remain silent when institutional practices place people in harm’s way, especially when those affected have no ability to protect themselves or seek recourse.

The World Health Network calls for the immediate establishment and enforcement of minimum health and safety standards in all detention settings, full transparency regarding conditions and outcomes, and the cessation of practices that endanger lives.

Protecting health is not optional. It is a moral and professional responsibility grounded in public-health ethics and duty of care.