Updated Friday at 5:21 p.m.

A 72-year-old man in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody died in a Virginia hospital Wednesday night. James Hill had previously tested positive for COVID-19, which is widespread in the facility where he was held.

In a press release Friday, ICE could not confirm Hill’s cause of death. Hill was previously hospitalized for several weeks with symptoms that included shortness of breath, according to the agency.

Hill had served 13 years of a 26-year sentence and was in ICE custody as he awaited deportation to Canada.

The Farmville Detention Center has the highest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 among ICE-managed detention facilities. At least 339 people at the center, located in Farmville, Va., and run by Immigration Centers of America, have tested positive for COVID-19.

Detainees throughout the facility started reporting symptoms associated with the coronavirus earlier this summer, weeks after ICE transferred 74 detainees from detention centers in Florida and Arizona to Farmville. At least 51 of those people ended up testing positive for COVID-19, according to ICE.

The people who were transferred came from Florence Detention Center in Arizona, the Eloy Federal Contract Facility in Arizona, and the Krome North Service Processing Center in Florida. Those are now among the ICE facilities with the largest outbreaks of COVID-19: 60 confirmed cases of the virus have been reported at Florence; 248 have been reported at Eloy; and 132 have been reported at Krome.

By July 2, staff at Farmville had completed coronavirus tests for everyone detained in the facility. Of the 366 people who were tested, at least 267 tested positive, according to a sworn declaration submitted by Farmville Director Jeffrey Crawford as part of a lawsuit against ICE. At that point, 80 results were still pending — which means that 93% of the detainees whose results were reported had tested positive for the virus.

Immigration advocates, attorneys, and detainees themselves have all criticized the decision to transfer people to Farmville during a pandemic.

“For us, the officials are the ones responsible … they wanted to see us sick,” said Rafael, a man who spoke with DCist/WAMU when he was detained at Farmville in July. He preferred not to disclose his last name for privacy reasons.

ICE says it has taken “important steps” to reduce the spread of the virus at the facility, including boosting sanitation practices and separating detainees who test positive from those who have not been infected.

Sirine Shebaya, Executive Director of the National Immigration Project and lead counsel on a lawsuit brought against ICE by National Immigration Project, CAIR Coalition, and Legal Aid Justice Center, told DCist/WAMU last month that ICE had “willfully and neglectfully ignored public health advice and kept people in conditions that all but ensured that they were going to get COVID-19.”

There are 298 people currently detained at Farmville. None are currently hospitalized. Two are being monitored by medical staff at the facility.

According to ICE, four people from its detention centers nationwide have died from COVID-19 complications.

This story was updated with additional information from ICE, including the identity of the man who died and confirmation that he tested positive for COVID-19. It was later updated with his full name.