Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum on Tuesday protested the deaths of Mexican citizens in U.S. immigration custody, escalating a dispute that has intensified alongside tensions over Cuba and energy policy. Her government called the deaths “unacceptable” and said the ICE detention centers are “incompatible with human rights standards and the protection of life,” according to remarks she made during a press briefing the day after a Mexican man died in Louisiana.
The immediate trigger was the death of 49-year-old Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, who died the previous day in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana. Sheinbaum’s government said it was the 15th death of a Mexican citizen in U.S. custody in little more than a year, with Mexico expressing concern about repeated failures inside detention facilities.
During the briefing, Sheinbaum said she had requested investigations into the deaths of the 15 migrants and instructed Mexican consulates to visit detention centers daily. She also said her government would raise the deaths in detention centers to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and was considering appealing to the United Nations, while also stating that it would support lawsuits in the United States filed by detainees over poor conditions.
“We are going to defend Mexicans at every level,” Sheinbaum said, adding that “there are many Mexicans whose only crime is not having papers.” In her comments, Mexico linked its response to the detention system’s human-rights implications, rather than limiting its message to bilateral diplomacy or isolated incidents.
The tougher tone follows a period in which Sheinbaum had sought a measured approach with Trump while pressing Mexico’s sovereignty. An analyst, Palmira Tapia of Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Teaching, said in the AP report that there has been “a shift,” with Sheinbaum becoming “more vocal than before” as the deaths of Mexican citizens in custody continued.
The AP report also described the political context in the United States, including growing U.S. disapproval of Trump-era immigration enforcement. It cited an February AP-NORC poll finding that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults say Trump has “gone too far” in sending federal immigration agents into American cities, and a U.S.-hemisphere business-and-policy analyst, Carin Zissis of the Council of the Americas, said that dissatisfaction creates “a more comfortable platform” for the Mexican government to raise concerns about the fate of Mexican citizens.
The confrontation with the United States has also spread to Cuba. The AP report said that the Cuba question has been a sticking point for Mexico’s political ethos since the Cuban revolution and that it became “a Rubicon issue” for Sheinbaum after the Trump administration announced tariffs on any country sending oil to Cuba. Sheinbaum said Mexico has “every right to send fuel, whether for humanitarian or commercial reasons,” and the report said she described the U.S. energy blockade of Cuba as “unjust,” accusing the United States of “suffocating” Cubans with sanctions.
Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, told AP that Sheinbaum would have to balance competing priorities, including the push to avoid disrupting renegotiations of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The report said her government’s more forceful messaging suggests a calculation that Mexico can push back on politically important fronts while still making progress on strengthening trade and meeting U.S. requests on security and migration.
The White House offered no comment to AP on Tuesday about Sheinbaum’s tougher stances, nor on the rising number of deaths of Mexican nationals in ICE custody, according to the report.