Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, 56, from Mexico, died in ICE custody on Saturday. Staff at the GEO Group's immigration detention centre in Laredo, Texas, found him unresponsive in his cell at about 10am during a security check, started CPR and called an ambulance. He had lived in Dallas for decades, painted apartments and townhouses for a living, and had three adult children born in the United States. ICE picked him up at the border in June after a bus trip back from Mexico and held him in Laredo for four months. His family learned he was dead from the Webb County medical examiner. By Sunday no federal agency had contacted them, and ICE has still not announced the death.
He is the 91st person to die in the custody of U.S. immigration enforcement, or at the hands of its agents, since Donald Trump took office on 20 January 2025. That number comes from the ICE List, the public record kept by the Crust News team, which counts every death from four independent sources matched one person at a time: ICE's own detainee death list, Human Rights Watch's register, our volunteers' press verification and the ICE List's own sourced pages. Of the 91, 69 died in custody and 22 were killed by an ICE or Border Patrol agent or during one of their operations. Thirty-two of them are not on ICE's list at all. ICE's public register of deaths in its detention still ends on 23 August, two months and at least four deaths ago, and the agency's rule that it publishes a notice within two business days of a death has been broken for Andrade-Covarrubias as it was for Julian Curo-Churata in Louisiana on 29 September. Our full count, with every name and a spreadsheet, is kept current.
His daughter, Estefani Andrade, told the Texas Tribune that her father had a heart condition, diabetes and high blood pressure, that staff would not give him his medication, and that when he reported a cough, trouble breathing and a tight chest, "they would just ignore him." He had been in hospital with COVID-19 in 2021. The autopsy is with the Webb County medical examiner. Rep. Henry Cuellar confirmed the death and went to the facility on Sunday afternoon to ask what happened.
He is the seventh person to die in ICE detention in Texas this year and the second in Laredo, after Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, 63, died at the Webb County Detention Center on 19 June. The first Texas death of the year, Geraldo Lunas Campos at Camp East Montana, was ruled a homicide by the El Paso medical examiner after guards held him down until he stopped breathing. A man with a heart condition was held for four months over a bus ticket, and his children heard he was dead from a coroner. The agency's answer so far is silence, which is the one part of this that is routine.
