Edwin López Cornejo, the latest migrant to die in ICE custody: ‘I’m going to grow up without a father’

Three nights have passed since the mother received that final call from University Hospital Newark in New Jersey. Her son, Salvadoran Edwin Giovanni López Cornejo, who had been transferred from the Delaney Hall detention center on August 1, was already dead when he was handed to the doctors. “I have a recording from the hospital that says when he arrived his heart had already stopped,” María Cornejo said at a press conference on Tuesday. Nonetheless, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) says her son did not die in its facilities. Activists and community leaders allege ICE is trying to shrug off one more among the dozens of migrant deaths in detention recorded since Donald Trump returned to power.

“They didn’t give him the care he needed and now they say they did, that they gave him the medicine and all the medications. That’s a lie,” María Cornejo added from the Reformed Church in the Highland Park neighborhood, where she arrived with her family to hold the press conference.

On the night of Friday, July 31, López Cornejo, 39, called his mother to say he was not feeling well. He suffered from diabetes and hypertension, and by that time his face and his right hand were numb. He even told María that they would run some medical tests at the center, although he was not given a date for when they would be performed. “If a doctor saw him on Friday and he said part of his face and body was numb, why didn’t the doctor order him taken to the hospital?” the mother now asks.

López Cornejo spent just over a month at Delaney Hall, the first detention center opened under the Trump administration to advance the plan to deport millions of migrants, located in the city of Newark on the outskirts of New York. On June 18, while headed to his job in Plainfield, the Salvadoran was detained by immigration agents. López Cornejo had lived in the United States for more than two decades, since he decided to leave El Salvador permanently. The family says he was “an excellent son,” “a good brother,” “a hard-working man,” but what everyone laments most is that his 12-year-old daughter, Ashley, has lost the best of fathers.

“I’m going to grow up without a father,” the girl said on Tuesday, holding back her tears. “They didn’t even allow me to see him one last time before he died. We had so many plans, but we could never carry them out because they are heartless monsters,” she added. “There should be justice for everyone. They tried to cover up the fact that they killed him by sending him with the paramedics, even though his heart had already stopped.”

According to the official version from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), issued in a statement on Monday, López Cornejo suffered a “medical emergency” while in ICE custody. Staff from GEO Group, the private company that operates the detention center, and the facility’s medical personnel “responded immediately and called 911 to request emergency medical assistance.” Authorities said the official cause of death is still pending “a more thorough medical examination.”

María feels the deep hole left by her son’s death: “He leaves me with a wound that will never heal,” she says. But she wants answers, she wants justice; she wants ICE held responsible not only for a second death at Delaney Hall in recent months but for the more than 50 that have been recorded since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

Jorge Torres, national director of the National Day Laborer Network, said activists are demanding several steps from authorities: an independent investigation into López Cornejo’s death by the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General; the release of his medical records; the release of all detainees, especially those in fragile health; and the permanent closure of Delaney Hall, a facility long accused of physical abuse, poor food, and substandard conditions.

“We cannot keep allowing this to happen. How many more people have to die?” Torres said.

Last December, Delaney Hall reported the death of Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian immigrant who, according to ICE, died after a medical emergency of an “unknown” cause. In May, hundreds of detained immigrants launched a labor and hunger strike at the detention center to protest the poor conditions in which they are held. The protest ended in late June after harsh internal reprisals, transfers, and disciplinary measures by the facility’s authorities.

Congresswoman Analilia Mejía, who represents New Jersey’s 11th congressional district and has visited Delaney Hall and the detention center in the city of Elizabeth, told Tuesday’s press conference she has spoken with many detained migrants “who are denied their medications, whose medical care is delayed, or who receive only a portion of the dosage they need when they finally get their medicine. I have seen this with my own eyes and personally verified it. It’s a disgrace,” she said.

Sally Pillay, an activist with Eyes on ICE who has been protesting outside the detention center for months, told reporters there may have been another death at Delaney Hall two weeks before López Cornejo’s death. “So far, ICE has issued no public announcement about that death. New details about that case are still emerging,” she said, adding that another death may have occurred on Monday morning that has not yet come to light. “As more details about that case surface, we hope to share them with all media outlets. No one should disappear behind the walls of this detention center. Detention centers have become death camps,” she said.

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