The state of Article 25 rights in the U.S. immigration system in early 2026 can only be described as catastrophic. A record 73,000 people are held in a detention system that has nearly doubled in size in one year, where 31 people died in 2025 and six more in the first month of 2026 — including one death ruled a homicide. Over 1,000 credible reports of human rights abuses have been documented across 28 states, encompassing every dimension of the Article 25 right: medical care, food, water, shelter, and security.

The system’s design reveals its purpose. Discretionary releases have fallen 87%, creating a ‘no release’ regime where 14 people are deported from custody for every one released. Arrests of people with no criminal record have surged 2,450%. People are detained at check-ins, court hearings, green card interviews, and while driving to school. Conditions are deliberately harsh: tent camps without adequate food or medical care, overcrowded facilities where detainees sleep on floors, and remote locations where access to counsel is practically impossible. This is not a system designed to adjudicate legal status — it is a system designed to break people into accepting deportation.

The cases of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the Venezuelan CECOT deportees represent the furthest extreme: people deported without due process to a foreign mega-prison described by a federal judge as designed to deprive detainees of food, water, and shelter. When the U.S. government exports its detention obligations to a facility that, by judicial finding, violates every Article 25 standard, it has moved beyond inadequate conditions into deliberate cruelty. The question for 2026 is whether any institution — the courts, Congress, international bodies — can impose accountability before the system’s trajectory produces even greater harm.