Edwin Lopez-Cornejo Is the 23rd Person to Die in ICE Custody in 2026

Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a 41-year-old man from El Salvador, died in ICE custody on August 1, 2026, after a medical emergency at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, New Jersey, according to an ICE press release published August 3. He was pronounced dead at University Hospital in Newark. He is the 23rd person to die in ICE custody in 2026 and the first Salvadoran national to die in ICE detention this year. By my count he is also the 51st person to die in ICE detention since the start of the current Trump administration. He is the first person to die since Jesus Manuel Arenas-Silva died in Georgia on July 13, nineteen days earlier.

He is the second man to die after being held at Delaney Hall. Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old man from Haiti, died on December 12, 2025, the same day ICE detained him, and ICE attributed that death to natural causes. Lopez-Cornejo lived in Plainfield for years and leaves a 12-year-old daughter who is a U.S. citizen.

ICE arrested Lopez-Cornejo in Plainfield on June 18 and held him at Delaney Hall for roughly six weeks. ICE’s own boilerplate promises every detainee a medical, dental, and mental health intake screening within 12 hours of arrival and a full health assessment within 14 days of entering custody. Lopez-Cornejo was in custody long enough to receive both several times over, but he died anyway.

GEO Group owns and operates Delaney Hall. The company ran it as an ICE facility from 2011 to 2017, and after that contract lapsed the building was put to other uses and eventually sat empty. ICE awarded GEO a 15-year contract for the 1,000-bed facility in February 2025, worth roughly $1 billion over its term and more than $60 million in the first full year of operations, and the building reopened that spring. It is now the largest ICE detention center on the East Coast. I published a full data profile of Delaney Hall in May, covering who is held there, how they got there, and where the facility fits within ICE’s northeast detention network.

Reporting by the Jersey Vindicator and Gothamist fills in much of what ICE left out from their official report. Steve Janoski reported that Lopez-Cornejo managed diabetes, high blood pressure, and seizures, all of which required medication, and that his family says he did not receive it.

His mother, Maria Cornejo, told Movimiento Cosecha that she believes negligence caused her son’s death and that she wants an answer for it. His brother, Danilo Lopez, said the facility did not provide the supplies he needed. Michael Sol Warren and Arya Sundaram reported that more than 70 people held at Delaney Hall have filed federal suits alleging medical neglect, and that more than 30 of them say they were denied prescribed medication for chronic conditions. Citing conditions such as these, about 300 people inside the facility went on hunger and labor strike in May.

His attorneys had already gone to federal court over his health. NJ 101.5 reported that they filed a habeas petition on July 24 challenging his detention on the basis of his chronic conditions, and that Judge Brian R. Martinotti ordered ICE not to transfer him. He died eight days later.

Governor Mikie Sherrill said she was deeply disturbed by the death and opposes private for-profit detention. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said GEO Group and ICE have repeatedly disregarded transparency about the health and safety of the people they hold. Baraka was arrested in May 2025 while trying to inspect Delaney Hall, and ICE and GEO have since denied entry to routine inspectors as well as to Sherrill and Representative LaMonica McIver. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman called for Delaney Hall to close and asked ICE for the timeline of the medical emergency, the medical records including medication access, and the incident reports and oversight reviews tied to the death.

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. The $70 billion enforcement law Republicans passed this summer through budget reconciliation committed roughly $38 billion to ICE through 2029 while stripping the transparency rules that normally ride along with the dollars, including the requirement that ICE publish basic data on who it holds.

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 second death at the same facility within eight months 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.