Second ICE Death in Laredo This Year Draws Scrutiny to Detention Oversight

A 56-year-old Mexican man was found unresponsive in his cell at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Laredo, Texas, during a security check at around 10 a.m. on Saturday, October 17, 2026, according to U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo. Staff performed CPR and called emergency services.

Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias is the seventh person to die while detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas this year, and the second to die in an ICE facility in Laredo in 2026. Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, a 63-year-old Mexican man, died in ICE custody on June 19, 2026, after he was found unresponsive at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo.

The first ICE detainee death in Texas this year was Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death was ruled a homicide by the El Paso Medical Examiner's office in January. That ruling applied to Lunas Campos's death, not to Andrade-Covarrubias's.

The death adds to a pattern of fatalities in ICE custody in Texas and Laredo specifically, intensifying scrutiny of detention conditions, medical care, and oversight at federal immigration facilities. It also follows reporting that ICE is expanding detention capacity by acquiring warehouses, raising questions about whether new facilities will be adequately staffed and regulated. Federal immigration officials have reportedly acquired an East Side San Antonio facility to hold immigrant detainees and are scouting warehouses across the United States to transform into detention and processing facilities.

Two deaths in one Texas city in a single year do not by themselves establish a systemic failure, and the evidence does not yet show that Andrade-Covarrubias's death was preventable or caused by negligence. But the sequence — a second Laredo death in four months, a homicide ruling in the year's first Texas case, and an expansion of detention capacity into converted warehouses — makes the conditions and oversight at these facilities a live question rather than a settled one.