A 56-year-old man died in immigration detention in Laredo, Texas, this weekend — the seventh death of a person held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the state this year — and his family says he had been denied the medication he depended on.
Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias was found unresponsive in his cell at the Rio Grande Processing Center on the morning of Saturday, October 17, according to The Texas Tribune, which interviewed his family. Staff discovered him during a security check at around 10 a.m., performed CPR and called emergency services, the Tribune reported. The circumstances of his death were not clear, and the Webb County Medical Examiner conducted an autopsy. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Estefani Andrade, and by U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents Laredo.
Andrade-Covarrubias had lived in Dallas for decades and worked as a contractor, painting apartments and townhomes, his daughter told the Tribune. He had three adult children, all born in the United States, and had been traveling between the U.S. and Mexico while working on a house there; his daughter said he eventually hoped to move back to Mexico. He was detained at the border in June after returning from Mexico by bus.
The family’s grief has been compounded by how they learned of his death.
Estefani Andrade, 29, said no federal agency contacted the family; instead, relatives found out what had happened through the Webb County Medical Examiner, the Tribune reported. The family planned to go to the detention facility that Monday to collect his belongings. Andrade said her relatives were struggling with the loss, especially her mother.
Andrade said her father had a heart condition, diabetes and high blood pressure, and that he had his medication with him when he was detained — but she alleged that staff at the facility would not give it to him. She said he had been feeling unwell and had developed a cough, and that he complained of breathing difficulty and tightness in his chest. He sought help from medical staff, she said, but told her “they would just ignore him.”
She was especially worried, she said, because her father had been hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2021, an illness she said left lasting effects on his health. During video calls while he was detained, she noticed he had changed. “He lost weight because he didn’t look the same as when we were doing, like, the video calls with him,” she told the Tribune.
The GEO Group, the private company that operates the Rio Grande Processing Center, referred questions from The Texas Tribune to ICE, and officials with the Department of Homeland Security had not immediately responded to the newspaper’s requests for comment.
Representative Cuellar said he planned to visit the facility to ask about the circumstances of the death and the medical care available to people held there. “I’ll ask the basic questions: What happened? What were the conditions? [Was] there medical? Is there anybody ill? I’m gonna talk to the medical folks there,” he said.
Andrade-Covarrubias was the seventh person to die in ICE custody in Texas in 2026, according to The Texas Tribune, and the second to die this year at an immigration facility in Laredo. In June, Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, a 63-year-old Mexican national held at the Webb County Detention Center, died after being found unresponsive, ICE said; his death was reported at the time as among the highest detention death tolls the agency had recorded nationally in a single year. The first of this year’s Texas deaths, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was ruled a homicide by the El Paso Medical Examiner’s Office in January.
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Source: The Texas Tribune
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