Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez Dies in Texas ICE Custody as Detention Death Toll Keeps Rising
He was found unresponsive at the CoreCivic-run Webb County Detention Center in Laredo and died shortly after being taken to a hospital.
Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez died in ICE custody after being found unresponsive inside the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, Texas. He was 63 years old. The facility is run by CoreCivic, a private prison company that operates detention facilities under government contract. His death adds to a fast-growing record of people dying inside federal immigration detention, including multiple deaths reported in Texas this year.
According to reporting and ICE’s own notice, Alcorta-Rodriguez was found unresponsive on June 19 and taken from the Webb County Detention Center to Laredo Medical Center, where he died shortly afterward. The Webb County medical examiner said the death was from natural causes, but the full autopsy was still pending. That distinction matters because a preliminary cause does not answer what happened before he became unresponsive, what care was available inside the facility, or how quickly staff responded after he was found.
ICE described Alcorta-Rodriguez through its enforcement record, including immigration history and an arrest after release from Webb County Jail. That information may appear in agency notices, but it cannot be allowed to control the frame of the story. The public fact at the center is that Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez was held in ICE custody, became unresponsive inside a detention center, and died after being rushed to a hospital.
His death is part of a wider custody-death pattern. The Texas Tribune reported that Alcorta-Rodriguez was at least the 20th person to die in ICE custody this year and at least the fifth person to die in Texas ICE detention. Texas accounted for at least a quarter of the reported national toll, placing the state at the center of the current record of detention deaths.
Texas accounts for at least a quarter of reported ICE custody deaths this year, with Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez’s death adding to the state’s growing detention record.
The Webb County Detention Center’s contractor structure is part of the public record. CoreCivic runs the facility, but the custody remains federal. When ICE confines people inside contractor-operated detention centers, the government still controls who is held, how long they are held, what standards apply, and what information becomes public after a medical emergency or death.
Texas detention conditions have already drawn broader scrutiny this year. Reuters reported that another Texas ICE detention center was flagged for missing records, medical failures, and mishandled death reports, including questions about how deaths were handled at that facility. Those findings do not decide what happened to Alcorta-Rodriguez, but they make the state’s detention system impossible to treat as a neutral backdrop.
National reporting has also intensified concern over deaths in immigration custody. Reuters reported that the United Nations human rights chief called for investigations into deaths in U.S. immigration custody, and Reuters’ analysis found the death rate among immigration detainees had more than doubled since Trump returned to office. Associated Press reporting has also documented concerns over suicide deaths in ICE custody tied to delayed mental-health care, inadequate monitoring, language barriers, and isolation.
Those wider findings give Alcorta-Rodriguez’s death a clear public context. He died in a system where detained people depend on ICE and its contractors for medical care, monitoring, emergency response, records, and disclosure. When a person becomes unresponsive inside that system, the public question is not limited to the final medical phrase on a notice. It includes the conditions of confinement, the response timeline, the facility’s staffing and medical capacity, and the records that show what happened before the hospital transfer.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, whose district includes Laredo, called for transparency and a full accounting after Alcorta-Rodriguez’s death. That demand belongs in the record because the public cannot evaluate an ICE custody death through agency language alone. The facility, the contractor, the medical response, and the pending autopsy all matter.
Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez should not disappear into a detention statistic or a preliminary cause-of-death line. He died while held in ICE custody at a CoreCivic-run facility in Texas, during a year when Texas facilities account for a large share of reported ICE detention deaths. His death belongs in the public record of immigration custody, contractor detention, medical-care scrutiny, and federal oversight failures.
ICE detention deaths cannot disappear into agency notices and pending autopsies.
Americans Against ICE documents the people who die in immigration custody, the facilities where those deaths happen, and the systems that keep the public record from disappearing.
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