CHICAGO () — Questions are intensifying about medical care for people held in ICE custody after another detainee died inside a privately operated immigration detention center.
The ABC7 I-Team found that the circumstances of the latest death bear similarities to the case of a Chicago business owner who died while detained at an ICE facility run by the same private prison company.
The family of Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a man from El Salvador, is grieving after he died Aug. 1 following a heart attack at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, operated by the private prison contractor GEO Group.
“ICE should be responsible, because when he was detained, he was treated horribly,” Cornejo’s daughter said during a news conference this week.
Relatives said Cornejo had diabetes and required treatment for the chronic illness before his death in ICE custody, but they claim he did not receive the care he needed.
“He had high blood pressure, he had diabetes,” the family said. “And they refused to give him his medication, and they brushed it off as complaining.”
For those familiar with the death of a Chicago business owner in ICE custody, the parallels in Cornejo’s case are difficult to overlook.
As the I-Team previously reported, Nenko Gantchev also had diabetes and was detained at a GEO Group-owned ICE facility, the North Lake Correctional Facility in Michigan. Records released by a Michigan medical examiner show Gantchev also died of a heart attack.
Gantchev’s family told the I-Team he also did not receive necessary care after a detainee death report prepared by ICE officials stated Gantchev “received… referrals for cardiology consultation and echocardiogram based on abnormal cardiac findings.”
That echocardiogram, the family says, never took place.
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“There was no accommodation for his diabetes, the fact that he needed any kind of special diet,” said Anna, a close family friend of the Gantchevs. “He was not feeling well, progressively.”
Dr. William Weber is the Medical Director for the Medical Justice Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for the right to medical care for anyone incarcerated in the U.S.
Weber said there are significant discrepancies in care for ICE detainees based on the MJA’s review of hundreds of cases nationwide.
“Everyone who is in ICE detention has a constitutional right to medical care,” Weber said. “But unfortunately, ICE, in many instances of our medical reviews of the records, they’ve seemed either unprepared or unwilling to provide kind of a basic standard of care.”
Weber said for people detained by ICE with diabetes, there are serious risks.
“We have found some disturbing gaps in care for patients who need insulin, especially during their ICE detention,” Weber said.
A spokesperson for GEO Group previously referred I-Team questions to DHS officials, who said, “There has been no spike in deaths,” and that, “For many [detainees] this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”
The DHS Inspector General’s Office recently announced it has launched an evaluation of detention center conditions given the recent increase in detainee deaths.
