Details of latest ICE detention center death mirror that of Chicago business owner
CHICAGO (WLS) -- There are renewed questions over the healthcare of detainees in ICE custody after another man died while held in a privately run immigration detention center.
The circumstances surrounding this latest death mirrors that of a Chicago business owner who died under similar circumstances at an ICE facility run by the same private prison company, the ABC7 I-Team found.
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A family is now mourning the death of a Salvadoran man named Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, who died Aug. 1 after having a heart attack in Delaney Hall, a Newark, New Jersey ICE facility run by the private prison contractor GEO Group.
"ICE should be responsible, because when he was detained, he was treated horribly," Cornejo's daughter said at a news conference this week.
Cornejo's family said he had diabetes and needed care for the chronic condition before he died in ICE custody. Care that his family says he did not receive.
"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."
The parallels between Cornejo's death and the death of a Chicago business owner are hard to miss.
As the I-Team previously reported, Nenko Gantchev also had diabetes and was held in an ICE facility owned by GEO Group: The North Lake Correctional Facility in Michigan. Gantchev also died of a heart attack, according to records released by a Michigan medical examiner.
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.
"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.
