The warnings began circulating on Facebook groups in Laredo, Texas, two days before Mexican authorities confirmed them. Relatives of detainees at the GEO Rio Grande detention center spoke of sickness, neglect and a man who had allegedly died after more than a month without proper medical care.
“People of Laredo, please help me share this; it’s urgent! The people at the GEO Rio Grande facility are in poor health.”
“It’s true. My son is sick in there. He’s been ill for days and they ignore him.”
“Girls, check on your relatives who are at GEO; my father just called me to say a man died. He had been sick for more than a month and they didn’t treat him. The name of the deceased is Emiliano Covarrubias Andrade. Dormitory H5A.”
“My husband says they took the body without even examining it and they want this to be kept quiet.”
Those messages were confirmed on Monday, when Mexico’s Foreign Ministry announced that it will file a complaint over the death of another Mexican national in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center operated by GEO Group. With Andrade’s death, 18 migrants have died in the custody of U.S. immigration authorities since Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Emiliano Andrade Covarrubias was 56 years old. He came from a small town in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo and had lived in Dallas for decades. His three children were born in the United States. He worked as a painter and hoped eventually to return to Mexico, where he was building a house, which is why he frequently traveled back and forth between the two countries, his daughter, Stefani Andrade, told Texas Tribune. On his return from one of those trips by bus in June, he was detained at the border.
He had been in ICE custody ever since. During video calls with his family, he appeared increasingly thin. “We believe he did not receive the medical attention he desperately needed,” his daughter wrote on a GoFundMe page set up to help cover funeral expenses. “My father was more than just a name. He was a father, a loved one, and someone whose life meant so much to our family. He deserved to be treated with dignity, compassion, and care.”
This is not the first account of poor conditions inside migrant detention centers in the United States. Since Trump renewed his immigration crackdown, families have repeatedly denounced a lack of medication, inadequate food, limited access to basic hygiene, insufficient protection from the cold, and abuse and mistreatment.
The Mexican government has also stepped up its legal response, saying it has already filed 20 criminal complaints with prosecutors in the states where the deaths occurred. In August, Mexico’s Deputy Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco acknowledged that authorities had received responses in only four cases. The Foreign Ministry has not provided an update on the status of those complaints since then.
The report Dying in Detention, which examined the 52 deaths of detainees in ICE facilities during the first months of Trump’s current term through June, found failures in medical care even in serious cases, unsanitary conditions inside detention centers and a lack of accountability among those responsible.
The investigation, produced by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, found that deaths in ICE custody had more than doubled during Trump’s second term and that the mortality rate had reached its highest level in a decade.
Emiliano’s family did not learn of his death from ICE, but from the medical examiner’s office. On Monday, they traveled to Laredo to recover his belongings. “His passing has left our family devastated, heartbroken, and struggling to come to terms with such an unexpected loss,” wrote his daughter, Stefani Andrade, 29.
At her morning press conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated that her government, through Mexico’s consular network, would provide legal assistance to Mexican nationals in the United States: “We are against any form of racism, especially when it involves our fellow Mexicans in the United States.”
Andrade’s story is also the story of tens of thousands of Mexicans who built lives through hard work in the United States and now face an intensified immigration crackdown. In Laredo alone, he is the second migrant to die this year in an ICE facility. In June, Félix Alcorta Rodríguez, 63, died after being found unconscious, according to ICE; it did not give details on the cause of death. Another six Mexicans have died this year amid these roundups.
The youngest was Royer Pérez, who was just 19. The oldest, José Guadalupe Ramos and Lorenzo Salgados, were only 52. They came from Veracruz, Chiapas and Guanajuato. Most had spent decades doing the jobs that often fall to working-class immigrants in the United States, working in construction, laundries, and restaurant kitchens.
They were detained while having breakfast, on their way to work, or for driving without a license. The migrant who survived the longest in ICE custody did not last more than three months. Héber, 34, survived only a week. Several were ill for much of their time in detention, some in facilities allegedly designed “to break” those held inside them.
All left behind the wives they met in the United States, the children born in the United States and the lives they rebuilt in the United States.
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