A second in custody death at Delaney Hall, a private immigration jail run by the GEO Group in Newark, New Jersey has sparked renewed calls for the closure of the notorious 1,000 bed facility even as the Trump administration dramatically increases arrests and detentions across the nation.
On Saturday August 1st, 41 year-old Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died while in custody. Multiple press reports and Lopez-Cornejo's mother maintain that Lopez-Cornejo, a father of a 12 year-old girl, who suffered from chronic illness, died from medical neglect after he was refused treatment. He had been in the United States for 20 years and was taken into custody on his way to work.
In a statement shared with CNN, ICE said that Lopez-Cornejo "experienced a medical emergency while in ICE custody," and GEO staff "responded immediately and called 911 for emergency medical services."
Back in December, 41 year-old Jean Wilson Brutus died while in custody in Delaney Hall. At that time, 30 people had died in ICE custody across the country.
Unlike the high profile violent confrontations we saw in Minneapolis that sparked massive street protests that culminated in the murder of Renee Good and Alex Peretti, ICE is now utilizing non-law enforcement databases for programs like Medicare to target and apprehend thousands of people who are actually in this country legally. In fact, scores of American citizens have been abducted off the street and detained.
Since Delaney Hall re-opened as a private immigration prison at the start of Trump 2.0, grassroots groups like NJ Pax Christi and NJ Eyes on Ice have had a humanitarian witness at the site located next to the Essex County Correctional Facility in the Ironbound section of Newark.
Back on May 9, 2025 masked federal agents abducted Newark Mayor Ras Baraka off of a public street outside the private jail only to release him later that day after a mass non-violent protest. While charges were dropped against Mayor Baraka, the Trump Department of Justice continues to prosecute Rep. LaMonica McIver on charges related to that day that could result in a 17 year jail term. Rep. McIver, along with Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, who were also on site at Delaney Hall that day, insist they were there only fulfilling their Constitutionally protected oversight duties.
The City of Newark has been pressing for GEO to permit a fire inspection and obtain a certificate of occupancy for the sprawling private jail. Back in 2021, activists had successfully lobbied the State of New Jersey to prohibit municipal and county governments as well as private facilities from entering into new contracts with ICE to house immigration detainees.
Private jailers like GEO and CORE CIVIC successfully challenged the legislation in court. At the time, the Biden administration was holding more than 26,000 detainees nationwide at more than 120 sites. Multiple press reports indicate the Trump administration is holding almost three times that number now at over 450 facilities in all 50 states, Washington D.C. and in U.S. territories. In July, ICE reported it had arrested 51,000 people, the largest number in Department of Homeland Security's history, according to ABC News.
On the 2024 campaign trail, President Trump pledged to target millions of U.S. residents and "deport them so rapidly" he would "rescue every town that had been invaded and conquered." In that same campaign, Vice President Vance advanced an admittedly completely fabricated story about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio kidnapping and eating their neighbors' domestic pets. The claim was so outrageous, that local municipal officials and Ohio's Republican Governor Mike DeWine spoke out on behalf of Springfield's Haitian residents who they said had filled jobs in the rust belt town that had actually helped revive the local economy.
With close to four months to go for this year, at least 22 people have died in ICE custody. That does not include the multiple fatal shootings just since President Trump was sworn in for the second time. According to the Guardian, last month's fatal shooting of 52 year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was the 10th such fatal ICE shooting since the start of Trump 2.0.
In an interview with WBAI Pacifica Radio, Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-NJ), who has been in Congress for less than three months, recounted that in her multiple visits to Delaney Hall “what was clear was that there were individuals being detained with chronic health conditions that were not receiving the kind of care that is necessary and mandated by their doctors.”
Lack of access to timely medical care has been a long standing and well documented complaint throughout the ICE system and private contract immigration prisons across the nation.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall. Under the GEO Group business model detainees maintain the private jail for a dollar a day. Earlier this summer, large crowds of protestors converged on Delaney Hall in support of the hunger strikers.
While New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill has been a vocal opponent of the private jail and was turned away when she initially came for a visit, she did call out the New Jersey State Police at the height of street protests outside Delaney called in solidarity with the hunger strikers.
The move marked a significant escalation and came after the Trump administration threatened to suspend the processing of international flights at Newark Liberty International on the eve of the World Cup in which New Jersey had invested heavily.
Henry Craver, writing for the American Friends Service Committee, described GEO and ICE’s repressive and violent response to the show of solidarity for the hunger strike.
“In one incident guards tried to remove a strike leader soon after the strike began,” Carver wrote. “When other detained people formed a human shield around him, armed officers returned in force. They swept through multiple units, physically assaulted people, and deployed tear gas. People in those units told AFSC that they struggled to breathe for hours after.”
Carver continued. “The retaliation escalated in the following weeks. Hundreds of detained people have been transferred out of Delaney Hall to facilities in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania—far away from their families and communities.”
With a Republican Congress very much under the control of President Trump, efforts at oversight of ICE and the private prison system that has expanded significantly has been left to the Democrats who are in the minority. Grassroots efforts at the municipal level have been far more effective in galvanizing resistance to the creation of new immigration prisons.
State lawmakers also have a mixed record when it comes to reigning in ICE's mass deportation strategy. A federal judge recently struck down New York State's legislation to prohibit federal agents from wearing masks while letting stand a provision that prohibits town and county governments from entering into so-called 287 G partnership that deputizes local police to enforce immigration laws.
"I need to say that every single American should be paying attention to what's happening here--our government is treating a set of people with such impunity, with such inhumanity it is costing them their lives," Mejia said. "Now we can debate our positions on immigration and immigration reform but I think it is fair to say that essentially sentencing people to death is not what the American people are calling for or want."
Mejia continued. "It is imperative that at least the State of New Jersey is pushing hard to make sure that our state officials have full and unrestricted access to these detention centers to ensure the well being of these individuals. These are human beings."
President Trump has repeatedly described undocumented immigrants as "animals", "illegal monsters" and "gang members" staging "the largest invasion in the history of our country."
These claims, which have been the way the Fox media complex frames the immigration, are easily debunked by study after study that found immigration into the U.S. is actually associated with lower crime rates.
