I was speaking in Daniel Naujoks’s class at Columbia University yesterday when I first saw ICE’s latest detainee death notification. Dan, a political economist with deep experience in the world of international migration and development, asked me to give his students a crash course on immigration enforcement data. I covered the basics—on an actual chalkboard no less. Then, during Q&A, a student asked about the role of data in government accountability. I showed the students the Detention Mortality Dashboard as an example of how unstructured material can be transformed into structured data, which then represents a public archive of state violence that might be used to inform policy.
As I explained our methodology, I recalled recent news reports of yet another ICE detention death, estimated that ICE was due to release the official announcement, and went to ICE’s press release page to check. Indeed, it was there: a 56-year-old Mexican national and green card holder, Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, had died at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Laredo, Texas.
Opening the press announcement on the projector screen sent a nauseating air into the room. The phrase “criminal alien” comes first in this announcement, an attempt to render the subject of the announcement disposable before we even learn his name. The dissonance between this phrase and its justification—an assertion that Emiliano was arrested for theft in 2004, 22 years ago—was viewed with considerable skepticism. The fact that Emiliano was a green card holder raised further questions about why a lawful immigrant is even in detention in the first place.
It has been a while since I saw someone’s reaction (much less a whole room’s reaction) to one of ICE’s detention notifications. It was instructive, a reminder that the natural, human response to seeing ICE’s dehumanizing death announcements is disgust. And I want to talk about what we do with that disgust but first I want to give you the facts of the case as we understand it.
ICE says staff at the Rio Grande Processing Center found Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias unresponsive in his bed at about 9:48 a.m. on October 17, and that he was declared dead at 10:10 a.m. The cause of death is unknown, and an autopsy will determine it. Reporters broke the news first: Colleen DeGuzman and Alex Nguyen of the Texas Tribune reported it on October 18, citing his daughter and U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, whose district includes Laredo. Among the most dissonant parts of this case, we learned that Emiliano had held his green card for many years and went back and forth to Mexico on a regular basis. On the most recent return trip, I’m sure he was surprised to get put into detention rather than allowed through as he had probably grown used to.
ICE’s case seems to be that, because he did not disclose an arrest—to emphasize, an arrest, not a conviction—during a review process, he obtained his status fraudulently. I have more questions than answers about so much of this: about the legality or accuracy of ICE’s assertions, about how detaining someone who is living peaceably here with U.S. citizen family members represents “the worst of the worst,” and about ICE’s claims that it is providing “due process” (as if this agency even knows what that means).
Emiliano was held at a for-profit detention facility run by the GEO Group right next to the border. His daughter, Estefani Andrade, a 29-year-old U.S. citizen, told reporters that he had a heart condition along with diabetes and high blood pressure, that he arrived with his medication, and that staff would not give it to him. She said he lost weight over the 113 days he was held, that he developed a cough that worried the family because COVID-19 had hospitalized him in 2021 and left lasting damage, and that he told her medical staff brushed off his complaints even when he said he had trouble breathing and felt tightness in his chest. ICE says he received proper medical care and was seen by medical professionals. Reports that private detention staff dismiss serious medical concerns have been a part of nearly every detention death.
The first death of fiscal year 2027 follows the deadliest fiscal year on record, when 37 people lost their lives in ICE custody. Two of the deadliest three years on record have occurred under this administration. We know of many more who died as a result of immigration enforcement activity, but there are others who die as a result of complications from detention that we may never know about: people who die after ICE releases them or deports them, including asylum seekers and refugees who are persecuted and killed after being sent back to dangerous conditions.
A line chart of cumulative deaths in ICE detention by fiscal year, October to September. Grey lines show each fiscal year from 2004 through 2025; fiscal 2004 ends highest at 28 and fiscal 2025 at 23. The highlighted navy line for fiscal 2026 ends at 37, well above every earlier year.
ICE has now reported 27 detention deaths this calendar year, and the year is not over.
A timeline of every person who died in ICE detention since January 1, 2026: 27 deaths in 289 days, with the most recent, Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, on October 17.
Since January 1, deaths in ICE detention have averaged one every 10.7 days. Even that is only a fraction of the true cost of ICE’s unaccountable approach to enforcement.
That brings me back to the room at Columbia. We should not rush over that feeling of disgust but use that disgust as an engine toward change. In his book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Alain Badiou argues for an idea of the good as a commitment to the revelation of truth through the moment of realization. Among his examples are falling in love and political revolution (the two coincide in literature and poetry), and his point is that we remain true to the events that reveal the world to us. The killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January could be examples of such events when we fell into disgust with ICE and fell in love with the idea of abolishing ICE.
Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba make a similar argument in their book Let This Radicalize You, which Aly Wayne recently insisted that I read and which I did begin to read early on Saturday morning at his dining room table. Like Badiou, Hayes and Kaba and their many co-authors are calling for a fidelity to the truth of the many catastrophes of our time (e.g., a global pandemic, economic inequality, ecological crisis, war) by working toward systemic change rather than simply acclimating and moving on. It is an argument for memory in an age of chronic forgetting.
Remember your disgust the first (or next) time you read ICE’s detention death announcement, and do not acclimate yourself to it despite its increased frequency.