Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, a 63-year-old man from Mexico, died in ICE custody on June 19, 2026, after he was found unresponsive at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, Texas, according to an ICE press release published June 24. He is the 20th person to die in ICE custody in 2026 and the sixth Mexican national to die this year, more than any other nationality. He is also the first person to die since Mamuka Artmeladze at Winn Correctional Center on June 4, fifteen days earlier. As far as I can tell, this is the first reported death at the Webb County Detention Center under this administration.
ICE’s account says that staff found Alcorta unresponsive at 9:13 p.m., began lifesaving measures, and called for emergency medical services, who transported him by ambulance to the Laredo Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 10:02 p.m. His cause of death is pending an autopsy. Alcorta had been in ICE custody only a few days when he died. ICE says he received medical care and was seen by medical professionals, and its own boilerplate promises every detainee a full health assessment within 14 days of entering custody—but Alcorta did not even live that long.
The Webb County Detention Center is near Laredo, right on the border. The county owns the facility, but CoreCivic has run it since it opened in 1999, back when the country’s largest private prison company still went by the name Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). It holds up to about 480 people for a mix of criminal and immigration detention, far from the attorneys, families, and independent observers who might otherwise see what happens inside.
In the Texas Tribune’s report on his death, Lomi Kriel quoted Webb County’s medical examiner, Dr. Corinne Stern, who said Alcorta died of natural causes and that his death was “not in any way related to his incarceration,” with the full autopsy still pending. That kind of early reassurance has not always held up. ICE has described other detention deaths as natural only for families to dispute the account, and one Texas death first called a suicide this year was later found to be a homicide involving staff. Kriel also reported that Alcorta’s death was not listed on ICE’s website when she broke the story, and surfaced only through a notification the agency is required to send Congress.
This latest death comes shortly after Republicans poured tens of billions of additional dollars into immigration enforcement while gutting its oversight. When I spoke recently with Heidi Altman, Vice President of Policy at the National Immigration Law Center, she explained that the amount of money ICE has drives how many people it locks up, and that the $70 billion package Republicans passed this summer through budget reconciliation committed roughly $38 billion to ICE through 2029 while stripping the transparency rules that ride along with normal appropriations, including the requirement that ICE publish basic data on who it holds.
The figures on Detention Reports are frozen in early April for that reason, and we may soon have no reliable public count of how many people are held in this system at all. After years representing people inside these facilities, Heidi has concluded that there is no good reason for an immigration detention system to exist at all, since everyone held in it is there over an alleged civil violation of the immigration code rather than serving a criminal sentence, which makes mass detention a political choice more than a matter of public safety.
John Washington, author of the forthcoming book How to Close a Camp, and I talked recently about whether these places are better understood as detention centers or as camps. A death like this one will only deepen the concern that the ongoing deaths inside immigration detention are no accident, but the product of a dehumanizing apparatus that knowingly puts immigrants at risk and keeps expanding anyway. Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez died inside it, in a facility most people will never see, in a year when its own numbers are being pulled out of public view.