Carlos Josué Marchena Dies at Winn Correctional, the 25th ICE Custody Death of 2026 and the Third at Winn

Carlos Josué Marchena, 37, a Costa Rican national, died in ICE custody at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana — a converted state prison ICE operates through LaSalle Corrections. Costa Rica’s foreign ministry confirmed the death to his family on the morning of September 18, 2026; reporting places the death itself on the preceding Thursday or Friday. His family was told he suffered a cardiac arrest. His sister, Franciny Araya Marchena, told La Nación he had diabetes and needed medication, and the family has said he was denied adequate food and medicine. No official cause of death has been released. The family is seeking help repatriating his body to Costa Rica.

Marchena was detained after a January 14, 2026 arrest in Michigan, with ICE taking custody the following day. He was then moved through facilities in Michigan, California, and Louisiana before arriving at Winn — roughly eight months in detention across three states.

This is the 25th ICE custody death of 2026. Canon’s count last stood at 24 on August 13 (2026-08-13–ice-custody-deaths-reach-24-2026-on-pace-to-break-2025-record), a figure also carried in the July detention-record entry (2026-08-02–ice-july-2026-record-46000-detentions-24-custody-deaths). The intervening death at Saipan (2026-08-23–lianyong-wei-dies-ice-custody-saipan-cnmi-corrections) and this one continue a series Reuters documented mid-year as a doubling of the detention death rate driven by overcrowding and medical failure (2026-06-17–reuters-ice-detention-death-rate-doubles-50-deaths-overcrowding-medical-failure).

Winn is a repeat site, and that is the structural point. Per the ICE Detention Mortality dashboard as reported, this is the third death at Winn under this administration and the sixth since 2020 — two others occurred in 2026 alone. A facility that produces deaths at that cadence is not experiencing isolated medical emergencies; it is a documented pattern at a single LaSalle-operated site, and LaSalle’s contracting footprint is already in canon (2026-07-01–ice-10k-arrest-surge-lasalle-family-detention-contract). The transfer chain compounds it: a detainee moved across three states has his medical continuity broken at each handoff, and no single facility owns the record of his condition.

The count itself should be read as a floor. Mother Jones documented ICE’s undercount mechanism — deaths excluded from the official tally through post-release and non-reporting classifications (2026-08-05–mother-jones-ice-death-undercount-stewart-detention-trejo-ricano), the same mechanism canon recorded at Delaney Hall (2026-08-12–chajon-raxon-third-delaney-hall-death-post-release-non-reporting-policy). A published “25th” is the number that survived those filters.

Verification note. The ledger captured this from a single tier-2 feed (Austin Kocher) and flagged it for corroboration. Independent verification on 2026-09-21 found the death reported across multiple Costa Rican outlets — La Nación, Infobae, La Teja, and Teletica — including a named on-the-record interview with his sister, plus confirmation by Costa Rica’s foreign ministry. The January 14 arrest date and the cardiac-arrest account come from that reporting, not from the original capture. Status is reported rather than confirmed because ICE has not issued a death notice and no official cause of death exists; the 25th-of-2026 and third-at-Winn counts are as attributed to the ICE Detention Mortality dashboard in secondary reporting and have not been read off the dashboard directly.

Open: ICE’s official death notice and detainee ID (needed for FOIA); the autopsy or official cause of death; Winn’s inspection history under LaSalle, including the unannounced inspection reportedly in progress when the death was reported; and the full transfer chain with dates, which would show how long he was held at each facility and what medical record followed him.