Once again, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the past winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, uses their brand of journolism^[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading to try to create sympathy for an illegal immigrant, sympathy for people who have broken the law.

Without her father

Edwin López Cornejo prayed for another year to see his daughter grow up. He died in ICE custody.

by Aliya Schneider, Michelle Myers, and Andrea Padilla, Tuesday, August 11, 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT

Half a year into fatherhood, Edwin Jeovanny López Cornejo found the sight of his daughter, Ashley, revitalizing after a long day at work.

It was 2014. López Cornejo, an immigrant from El Salvador, had been working at a packaging company in South Plainfield, N.J. for about seven years. He came to the United States in 2007, filed an asylum claim, and received employee authorization from the federal government after being deported the year prior, according to court documents.

As he would often do in the years that followed, he took to Facebook to express his gratitude to God and his love for his daughter.

This past Friday, Ashley Lopéz, now 12, wore all black. She stood between her paternal grandparents as they held each other and wept at her father’s wake at Crescent Avenue Presbyterian Church in Plainfield.

López Cornejo had died in ICE custody just under a week prior at the age of 39 after experiencing what the federal agency called a medical emergency at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in Newark run by the private company GEO Group.

Ashley has barely been speaking. Or eating. And she doesn’t want to be around people, María Cornejo, her paternal grandmother, told The Inquirer in an interview on Monday, speaking in Spanish.

So, he was not here legally. What kind of asylum could he have needed after 19 years in the United States? He came as a 20-year-old, and started working. Regrettably, the Bush Administration allowed him to stay, following a previous deportation. And a whole family, in the United States for how many years now, still had to speak Spanish?

Letters of support submitted to the court after his June arrest, remarks from his family, and more than a decade of public Facebook posts written in Spanish paint the picture of a father who deeply loved his daughter.

Twelve years ago, Lopéz Cornejo and his then-girlfriend were expecting twins, but the boy died in the fifth month of pregnancy, Cornejo said.

“She is the only child he had, you should have seen him when she was born. That man was the most joyful man with his daughter in his arms,” Cornejo said. “It was his first time being a father and he wouldn’t even sleep so he could watch her sleep and make sure she was okay.”

López Cornejo wasn’t able to see his daughter at Delaney Hall. He had been there for about six weeks.

In other words, had Mr López Cornejo simply accepted deportation, he’d have been out of custody, and safely back in El Salvador. From there, he could have applied for legal immigration. Yes, immigration is a difficult thing, but our immigration laws were duly passed by Congress. And I remember the joy among our friends on the left when the Supreme Court let stand a Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Lozano v Hazleton (2006), in which it was held that the federal government had exclusive authority and jurisdiction over immigration. At the time, the younger President Bush and his minions were far more sympathetic to illegal immigrants.

On November 5, 2024, 77,302,580 American voters, myself among them, decided to change such sympathic policies, and Mr López Cornejo had to go. He fought the law, and the law won. Through the last two years of the younger Bush Administration, eight years under President Barack Obama, four years under the first Donald Trump Administration, and finally four miserable years under President Joe Biden and his virtually open borders policies, no one had decided that his asylum claim had merit. He had to go.

I get it: the publisher and editors of the Inquirer wholly support flooding America with illegal immigrants, but it is noteworthy that the newspaper only rarely publishes stories about illegal immigrants who are apprehended when committing other crimes. The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement regularly publicize such arrests on Twitter, a medium the newspaper itself uses every day — I use the Inky’s tweets to illustrate these articles, because in their setting to allow retweets, they have forsaken publication control of their images — but the newspaper almost never refers to such cases, even when they occur un the newspaper’s coverage area. Perhaps they should do better.