Nery Isabel Lemus came back to Honduras on a US removal flight at the start of 2025. On 7 February, gunmen on a motorcycle shot Lemus dead in El Porvenir, Copán, and wounded Lemus's mother. Three days earlier Luis Galdámez, 63, flown out of Texas on a 31 January removal flight, had been found dead in a river at San Francisco de Yojoa. Four days later David Navarro, deported about two weeks before, was intercepted and shot in La Ceiba. Three people the United States had just deported were dead in one country inside a week, they were in the USA because they were not safe in Honduras.

No US agency records any of this, ICE publishes a report when someone dies in its custody, and its count stops at the aircraft door. So we went looking in the press of the countries people are deported to, country by country, and read every case by name.

The ICE List now holds 31 people who were killed or died after the United States removed them, between February 2025 and September 2026, in seven countries. 23 of the 31 have a confirmed link to the deportation in the local reporting; the rest are marked probable or unclear, and stay marked. Honduras alone has 14.