Last month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and GEO Group, a private detention company, confirmed what many immigrant rights advocates in New Jersey had been raising alarms about for several months — the federal government plans to open another detention center in Newark, NJ at Delaney Hall.
When opened, Delaney Hall will be one of the largest ICE detention centers on the east coast and have the capacity to hold up to 1,000 individuals. It will be the first ICE detention center opened under the second term of the Trump Administration amid his calls for mass deportations.
But with so many beds, advocates worry that the increased capacity will lead ICE to ramp up enforcement and arrests in the area and devastate many families and communities in New York and New Jersey. The opening of the detention center has no official date, an earnings call in February said Geo Group officials expect to open Delaney Hall by the end of June.
In a state with two million immigrants, advocates say a new ICE detention center will put New Jerseyans at further risk for more arrests. One in four people in New Jersey is an immigrant, and one in six have an immigrant parent. There are an estimated 428,000 undocumented immigrants in New Jersey.
Ami Kachalia, campaign strategist with the ACLU of New Jersey, said the 15-year contract for 1,000 beds with a value of $1 billion, would “essentially quadruple the immigration detention capacity in New Jersey.”
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“That’s something to be concerned about, because we know that having local immigration detention bed capacity does impact what immigration enforcement looks like,” Kachalia said. “They can have intensified enforcement.”
As the current Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey holds 275 people, the large capacity in Delaney Hall would exponentially expand immigration detention.
“The reason they’re doing it seems quite strategic, these are densely populated areas, it’s near an airport,” said Katy Sastre, executive director of First Friends of New Jersey and New York “It feels like an attack on the communities who have really made these areas what they are. This huge immigration detention center opening up right here is going to have a huge impact.”
Sastre said that there may be increased ICE presence in workplaces and schools, noting that there is an “increased fear within communities that may cause people to pull back from public life, pull back from maybe sending their kids to school or accessing health services or whatever they might need.” She added that First Friends of New Jersey and New York, a nonprofit advocating for dignity and compassion for immigrants, have already been getting an increased number of calls from people whose family members have been detained or people who want to be accompanied to their ICE check-ins.
In 2021, New Jersey banned immigration detention centers from opening or renewing contracts with ICE. When GEO Group joined CoreCivic in the lawsuit, it was an indication to advocates that they were looking to expand detention in New Jersey.
Reopening Delaney Hall
Delaney Hall is built on a toxic waste site locals call “chemical corridor” because of the chemical plants that surround it, said Kathy O’Leary, New Jersey regional coordinator for Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace organization. She said that there is a refinery across the street and a large sewer treatment facility is within a half mile. She recalled that on the days she would protest outside Delaney Hall when it was originally open, the fumes would be nauseating.
“The place is just disgusting,” O’Leary said. “People will be living there 24/7.”
From 2011 to 2018, Delaney Hall operated as an immigrant detention center, when it had a notorious reputation for bad conditions for detainees. When the facility was open, a family member reported to O’Leary that her loved one who was detained had a cup of hot water and an egg for breakfast.The facility Delaney hall closed in 2018 due to a labor dispute over stolen wages of detained individuals.
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Before then, it was a privately run county jail. Derek West Harris at the facility in 2009 — a 54 year old man who had been detained for owing $722 in parking tickets — was beaten and stabbed to death, prompting multiple investigations.
GEO Group, who will be running Delaney Hall, also has a track record of lawsuits for wage theft, dangerous and neglectful conditions and retaliation against detainees who raise concerns. Groups of detained immigrants have participated in hunger strikes due to the conditions at GEO Group run facilities across the country.
O’Leary also said there is a lack of transparency in private detention, which makes it difficult to access information and monitor these conditions. She said that when it comes to private detention, advocates do not have access to state level public records and there is no local elected official with direct responsibility for the facility.
“The whole immigration system has such limited checks and balances,” O’Leary said. “There’s this extra layer of opacity in ICE detention and it makes it so much easier to abuse people in ICE detention. People who are already dehumanized in the carceral system are even further dehumanized and turned into units of profit.”
New Jersey’s Immigrant Trust Act
To combat increased ICE enforcement in New Jersey, advocates are urging lawmakers to pass the Immigrant Trust Act, which puts in place both privacy-like data privacy protections at state and local agencies and will limit the cooperation of law enforcement with ICE. The bill, which has been sitting in the legislature without a hearing since August, also expands protections to places schools, public health centers, libraries and other places that people go for public services, so that those agencies are not disclosing information to ICE unless required by a judicial warrant.
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“There’s no better solution in front of [lawmakers] than making sure that when ICE officers come knocking on doors or asking schools to disclose information about students, that those schools feel empowered to say ‘show you paperwork, we’re not going to do so without a judicial warrant,’” said Amy Torres, executive director of the NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice. “But again, that bill has been stalled for months now.”
Kachalia said the bill creates a bright line between the role of state and local law enforcement and the role of ICE. She said that a third of the state legislatures are in support of the bill.
“That’s really important,” Kachalia said, “because that is something the state can do to ensure that we’re standing with immigrant communities and making sure people aren’t entering into the ICE detention and deportation system in the first place.”
