What the postmortem says—and does not establish
A postmortem report says Ayaz Ahmed was brought dead to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad by FIA officials at 11:43 a.m. on July 31, about 14 hours after the flight from the United States landed in Pakistan. ABC7 Chicago, which reported on the document, said doctors recorded no signs of torture, assault, strangulation or hanging. The institute gave its final reports on the cause of death to FIA officials, and FIA officials paid Ahmed’s burial expenses in Karachi, ABC7 reported. These details do not establish the cause of death.
Ahmed’s children learned of his death on August 3, when relatives in Pakistan called them, ABC7 reported. ICE said it had no insight into what happened after Ahmed arrived in Pakistan and lacked authority over people after they were transferred to their home government, including access to medical or official records. His children are seeking answers, according to the station.
Accounts of the journey conflict
A GlobalX flight chartered by ICE left Fort Worth, Texas, at 7:25 a.m. on July 29 and reached a Pakistani Air Force base at 9:41 p.m. on July 30, after a 38-hour journey with stops in Maine, Iceland, Bulgaria and Georgia, according to flight data analyzed by ABC7 Chicago.
People who traveled on the plane told ABC7 that Ahmed’s condition worsened during the flight. One witness reported that Ahmed had urinated himself by the Iceland stop; another said he fainted after passengers got off the plane in Pakistan and received no medical attention. Those are witness accounts reported by the station, not independently established findings in this article.
ICE disputed claims of neglect or mistreatment while Ahmed was in its care. A spokesperson told ABC7 that no medical emergencies or signs of distress occurred during the flight, no one needed hospitalization, and Ahmed received his scheduled medications.
Detention and the family’s concerns
Federal immigration agents detained Ahmed in the Morton Grove area on June 3 for overstaying a visitor’s visa, ABC7 reported. Ahmed, 61, had moved from Pakistan to the Chicago suburbs in 1997 and had owned several local businesses. The station reported that he had no criminal history. He was held at the Clay County Justice Center in Indiana; county officials confirmed to ABC7 that he was in medical isolation.
Ahmed’s family told ABC7 that he had chronic health conditions, including type 2 diabetes, and needed daily medication. They said he was detained for about two months, offered to buy his ticket to Pakistan to speed his removal, and could not find him on ICE’s detainee locator for eight days.
The family’s attorney, Hashim Siddique, told ABC7 that questions remained about Ahmed’s medication and whether he received medical help during a possible emergency. John Sandweg, a former ICE general counsel and acting director, told the station that pressure to carry out removals can lead officials to make decisions they might otherwise avoid.
Other reporting on deaths and medical care
KFF reported 33 deaths in ICE custody or detention in 2025, compared with 11 in 2024. Its analysis found that 32 of 46 reported deaths between January 2025 and March 2026 involved people with existing medical conditions whose health appeared to worsen in custody, according to KFF. Human Rights Watch reported that 52 people died in ICE custody during the 500 days from January 20, 2025, to June 4, 2026, and said the mortality rate was at its highest level in more than a decade.
The San Francisco Chronicle tracked 48 deaths since the inauguration and reported that, among 32 cases with available documents, doctors reviewing the records found at least 17 people died after medical staff delayed or failed to provide critical care that might have saved them. In 23 cases, the agency’s inspectors found that detention medical staff deviated from safe-practice standards.
Earlier reporting also raised concerns about care during deportation flights. A 2020 Guardian investigation reported that ICE staff discussed failures to provide adequate medical care on flights more than 100 times in internal meetings from 2016 to 2019, and that field offices had been reprimanded at least a dozen times since 2016 for failing to provide medications to detainees being transported by air. More recently, ProPublica reported that current and former GlobalX flight attendants said they had not received clear instructions for evacuating shackled detainees; one recalled a girl on a deportation flight with an oxygen saturation of 70 percent and a temperature of 102.3 degrees.
