BREAKING🚨 A New Jersey mother waited all Saturday for her son's daily call from inside an ICE jail. The hospital called instead, and asked her to come identify his body. Edwin Jovanny Lopez Cornejo, 39, called his mother Maria Cornejo from the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark on Friday, July 31, and told her he couldn't feel half his face or his right hand. A doctor was coming, he said. By Saturday afternoon, August 1, he was at University Hospital in Newark with no heartbeat. ICE agents stopped him June 18 as he walked to work from his home in Plainfield. He tried to show them the work permit he had held since 2022 and was told it was no good, his mother said. He spent the next six weeks inside Delaney Hall, run for ICE by the private prison company GEO Group — as Gothamist's Michael Sol Warren and Arya Sundaram first reported. He had diabetes, high blood pressure and epilepsy. He told his mother staff gave him his medication "when they wanted, not when he needed them," that doctors weren't there every day, that he shared a cell with about 10 men and one open toilet, and that he drank water from the bathroom sink. He lost about 30 pounds in six weeks. ICE says facility staff "responded immediately" and called 911, and that Lopez Cornejo "received proper medical care and was seen by medical professionals." The official cause of death is still pending. His family says staff knew he was sick and did not act until after he collapsed. His 12-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, was never allowed inside to see him. His request to add her to the visitation list was denied. "I'm going to grow up without a father. They didn't even let him see me one last time before he died," she said at a news conference Tuesday. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman said that if he was denied his medication, Delaney Hall's operators "should be charged with homicide."

 BREAKING🚨 Taxpayers just paid TEN TIMES the market value for ONE ICE detention center - ran by the SAME private company that spent $1.77 MILLION in lobbying and whom Trump bought stock in SIX TIMES prior to the purchase. 

The Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego sold to the Department of Homeland Security for $739.2 million on July 2. CoreCivic's own securities filings put that land and those buildings at roughly $160 million. San Diego County's assessor valued it at $168 million. The California City facility in Kern County, worth an estimated $71 million, went for $732.6 million.

CoreCivic still runs both. Its expected take after taxes? About $1.1 BILLION. 

On Wednesday it announced ICE had also bought its Prairie Correctional Facility in Minnesota and the Midwest Regional Reception Center in Kansas, and said it is in talks over "additional" sales.

California passed a law in 2024 letting local health officers make surprise inspections of these facilities. San Diego County had to sue in March after supervisors and a health inspector said they were turned away at Otay Mesa. A judge ordered CoreCivic to let them in. 

Once the buildings are federal property, state and local inspectors may lose that access entirely, the way federal prisons do.

George Zoley, CEO of the GEO Group, said it out loud on a May earnings call: "As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities."

A DHS spokesperson blamed "sanctuary politicians" and said federal ownership means ICE keeps the capacity "to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens." The same spokesperson said detention "is a choice."

A 2026 California Justice Department report found detainees with chronic illnesses at Otay Mesa and California City weren't getting adequate medical care, plus hygiene lapses and overcrowding that broke ICE's own standards.

CoreCivic gave $500,000 to Trump's inaugural committee and spent $1.77 million lobbying for the bill that funded these purchases. Trump's disclosures show he bought CoreCivic stock at least six times in 2025.

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BREAKING🚨 The nonprofits representing more than 20,000 migrant children just LOST their contract. Trump handed the $150 million replacement to a 26-person Houston firm with virtually no immigration lawyers.

The firm is Burke Law Group, and until this week its own website described its specialty as advising companies on "complex environmental, regulatory, and enforcement matters." After the award was announced, immigration was quietly added to the practice list. Its other lines of work: white-collar defense, commercial litigation, securities litigation.

The federal notice calls it a "single source cooperative agreement." That means the administration picked the firm with no competitive bidding, and offered no justification for skipping it.

Who runs it matters. Founder Marcella Burke was a Trump appointee at the EPA and the Interior Department. Founding partner Jeffrey Hall now serves as an assistant EPA administrator. Conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro is listed as senior counsel. Also on the roster: Justin Shubow, the leading champion of Trump's push to force federal buildings into classical architecture.

The children on the other side of this are as young as toddlers who haven't learned to speak yet, and federal law has required the government to facilitate lawyers for them for decades, precisely because they can be trafficked and abused. Without a real lawyer, deportation is close to automatic.

The network that did this work — nearly 100 legal nonprofits representing more than 20,000 kids, lost its contract last Friday. Burke's doesn't begin until August 15. As Michael Lukens of the Amica Center put it, "technically nobody in the country has a contract with HHS to provide services to kids."