Newspapers this week reported four deaths in less than one month in the U.S. immigration detention centers. As members of Congress vote to spend tax money to add thousands more immigration detention beds, news about the government's failure to properly care for the current detention population is troubling.

The Washington Post reported on three of the deaths:

The dead were a pregnant Mexican woman who lost consciousness at a facility in El Paso, a Mexican AIDS patient whose condition steadily deteriorated in a San Pedro, Calif., prison and a Brazilian whose family implored authorities to give him medicine for his epileptic seizures in Rhode Island, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and published reports.

With the exception of the pregnant woman, Rosa Isela Contreras-Dominguez, 38, those who died were illegal immigrants being processed for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a Department of Homeland Security division known as ICE. The two others were identified as Edmar Alves Araujo, 34, of Brazil and Victoria Arellano, 23, of Mexico.

An ICE spokesman, Marc Raimondi, acknowledged the deaths and called the demise of any detainee "a sad occurrence." He said his agency cannot be held responsible for the deaths of Contreras-Dominguez and Araujo. He declined to comment about the Arellano case.

ICE spends more than $98 million a year to provide "humane and safe detention environments" to nearly 30,000 detainees, Raimondi said.

A fourth death was reported August 9 in the San Antonio Express-News. An immigrant detainee at a Del Rio, Texas, detention center died of an undiagnosed illness that also killed a criminal inmate and had sickened two other immigrant detainees.

Two months ago, The New York Times brought to light 62 other deaths that have occurred in immigration detention in recent years.

The descriptions of these men and women's lives and deaths in detention are chilling. Arellano died shackled to a hospital bed, after spending weeks in deteriorating health being cared for by fellow inmates because her AIDS treatment had lapsed once she was taken into custody. Family members of Araujo, who suffered from epileptic seizures, say they pleaded with officers to take Araujo's medication when he was arrested, but the officers refused.

The deaths highlight the government's failure to provide adequate care and housing to its growing detention population. The detention centers and county jails that house immigrant detainees are not designed to provide long-term housing for immigrants, many of whom suffer from mental or medical health problems when they are taken into custody.

Until The New York Times article ran in June, detention reform advocates were aware of less than 20 deaths nationwide. The lack of transparency in the immigration detention system had kept more than 40 other deaths from public knowledge. When it comes to dealing with non-citizens, the U.S. government is not held accountable for a system that is seriously flawed. Continued coverage of these deaths by the media is necessary to awaken Americans to the human rights abuses taking place right in our own back yards.

Read more about the National Immigrant Justice Center's work to reform the U.S. immigration detention system.