Seven Dead in Texas ICE Custody and Their Answer Is 3,000 More Agents

His name was Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias. He was 56. He lived in Dallas for decades and painted apartments and townhomes for a living. He had three adult children, all born in this country. And on Saturday morning, October 17, staff at the Laredo Processing Center, run by ICE, found him unresponsive in his cell. He is dead.

According to the Texas Tribune, he is the seventh person to die while detained by ICE in Texas this year. Seven. In one state. With two and a half months still left on the calendar.

Here is what his daughter told the Tribune, and I want you to read it slowly. Stefani Andrade, a U.S. citizen, said her dad had a heart condition, diabetes, and high blood pressure. He had his medicine with him when he was detained. She said staff at the center wouldn't "give him his medications." She said he had a cough and told her he wasn't feeling good. He asked the facility's medical staff for help, and he told her "they would just ignore him." She said he told staff he was having trouble breathing and felt tightness in his chest, and he felt they brushed him off.

A man with a heart condition. Complaining of chest tightness. Allegedly denied the heart medication he walked in with. Found dead in his cell. If you need me to draw you a diagram, I cannot help you.

To be fair, and I am being fair because the facts are damning enough on their own: the cause of death is not known yet. The Webb County Medical Examiner is doing the autopsy. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Laredo who confirmed the death, said it was unknown why he was found unresponsive. Cuellar said he planned to go to the facility and ask, "What happened? What were the conditions? [Was] there medical?" Good. Ask loud.

Now guess how the family found out. Not from ICE. Not from Homeland Security. His daughter told the Tribune they heard through the medical examiner. Federal agencies had not contacted them. DHS did not immediately respond to the Tribune either. They had time to detain him in June at the border coming home by bus. They had months to lose track of his health while, as his daughter put it, he "lost weight because he didn't look the same" on their video calls. They just did not have time to call his family.

The first Texas ICE death of the year, the Tribune notes, was Geraldo Lunas Campos. The El Paso Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide. Let that be the bookend on this year.

So what is the administration's big response to all this? More. Always more. Border czar Tom Homan told Fox News the administration is bringing in 3,000 more immigration enforcement agents, according to the Hindustan Times. Homan bragged that ICE kept breaking arrest records over the summer. "I think President Trump is keeping his promise because we're arresting more people now than ever before," he said. He also complained about roughly 85,000 habeas cases, which are people going to court to challenge their detention. Imagine being annoyed that the people you lock up keep asking a judge whether you are allowed to.

More agents. More arrests. More people in cells. And apparently not more nurses, not more phone calls to families, not more heart pills handed to the man who brought his own.

Meanwhile, up in New York, at least somebody in power is pushing back. On October 8, ICE agents surrounded a car on a crowded street in Marble Hill in the Bronx and fired multiple rounds at 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, hitting him in the neck while his 5-year-old son sat in the same car. The agents had reportedly been staging from a private parking lot a few blocks away. So on October 15, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and more than 100 elected officials sent a letter to every garage and lot owner in the city asking them not to rent, lend, or make their property available to ICE. "Do not rent your property to ICE. Do not lend it to them. Tell them they are not welcome," Mamdani said. The mayor's office says a garage on Morton Street already removed ICE vehicles after neighbors spoke up.

That is what pressure looks like. Neighbors, parking lot owners, and a mayor saying no.

And the public is getting there too. The new Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll found 56 percent of Americans say Trump has gone too far in deporting undocumented immigrants. Roughly six in 10 disapprove of his handling of immigration. People are watching.

So here is my question for anybody still cheering the "more agents" line. If a 56-year-old man with a heart condition can die in a cell after his own daughter says he was denied his medication, what the hell do you think 3,000 more agents are going to fix?