ICE says it has reached an agreement with the private owner of Delaney Hall in Newark to reopen the vacant jailhouse as an immigrant detention center and that the opening was "imminent."Steve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media For NJ.com
ICE says it’s opening its first new immigration detention facility under President Donald Trump’s administration, expanding its capacity to house detainees and easily deport them through a deal involving a privately owned jailhouse in Newark.
Caleb Vitello, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as ICE is officially known, said in a statement announcing the deal that the Newark 1,000-bed detention facility would be, “the first to open under the new administration. ”
“The location near an international airport streamlines logistics and helps facilitate the timely processing of individuals in our custody as we pursue President Trump’s mandate to arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from our communities,” Vitello stated in the announcement, which was posted on ICE’s website on Wednesday then updated Thursday.
The facility’s owner, the GEO Group of Boca Raton, Florida, a global operator of private jails and re-entry programs, said its contract with ICE would be worth “approximately $1 billion” over its 15-year term.
The company said the contract calls for ICE to have exclusive use of the facility, known as Delaney Hall and for the company to provide “security, maintenance, and food services, as well as access to recreational amenities, medical care, and legal counsel.”
“Our company-owned Delaney Hall Facility will play an important role in providing needed detention bedspace and support services for ICE in the Northeast,” GEO’s executive chairman, George C. Zoley, said in a statement. “We are continuing to prepare for what we believe is an unprecedented opportunity to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities.”
Zoley added that “the new support services contract is expected to generate over $60 million in annualized revenues for GEO in the first full year of operations.”
Gov. Phil Murphy has opposed the immigration agency’s use of county, state and private correctional facilities to detain immigrants. And a spokesman for Murphy, Tyler Jones, released a statement Thursday saying, “We are extremely disappointed by the Trump Administration’s new contract with a for-profit prison company to open an ICE detention center in Newark, one of New Jersey’s most populous and diverse cities.”
“Our Administration has previously fought to limit such entities opening in our state and will continue to do so,” the statement added.
Other opponents of the deal include the ACLU of New Jersey, which called it an “attack on our state.”
“The planned opening of Delaney Hall as a private immigration detention facility presents a serious threat to New Jersey’s immigrant communities and is one of the largest immigration detention contracts our state has ever seen,” Amol Sinha, the civil liberties group’s executive director, said in a statement Thursday. “This massive increase in detention capacity places the public in further danger of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional, racist, and xenophobic mass detention and deportation agenda.”
Newark has become a focus of nationwide attention on Trump’s promise of a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants since a Jan. 23 raid on a local seafood distribution outlet and retail store three days after his inauguration.
Delaney Hall is on Doremus Avenue in an industrial area of New Jersey’s largest city near Newark Bay, a few miles north of Newark Liberty International Airport.
This week’s announcement follows an April 2024 advisory by ICE under the Biden Administration that it had met with the GEO Group to discuss operating Delaney Hall as a detention center.
Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, the state’s senior U.S. senator, Cory Booker, and other local, state and federal elected officials have joined immigrant advocacy groups to oppose the facility’s opening, which would quadruple ICE’s detention capacity in New Jersey. Only one other such facility exists in New Jersey, a 300-bed center in Elizabeth that’s also privately operated under a contract with ICE, by CoreCivic of Nashville, Tennessee. Elizabeth is Newark’s neighbor to the south, where the airport straddles the two cities’ border.
A 2021 state law signed by Murphy effectively banned private immigrant detention centers in New Jersey, though a court ruling partially struck down the statute, a ruling now under appeal.
U.S. Rep. Lamonica McIver, a Democrat who represents parts of Newark in New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District, has been among the detention center’s opponents and issued a statement Thursday in response to the ICE announcement.
“The Delaney Hall contract is in direct opposition to the will of the people here in Newark,” McIver said. “Privately owned detention centers degrade public trust in our institutions — the lack of transparency often leads to poor conditions and longer sentences. New Jersey is the proud home to more than two million immigrants, and I will not sit idly by as Trump’s policies continue to harass and harm our neighbors.”
Delaney Hall has previously served as an annex to the Essex County jail for criminal inmates, though it’s been unused since its contract with the county expired in December 2023. Rehabilitation work on the facility has been going on for months, though ICE was mum on its reopening until this week.
Neither ICE nor the GEO Group specified when the agreement to reopen the facility was reached, nor did they put a date on when Delaney Hall would begin housing detainees. ICE said only that its opening was “imminent.”
ICE acknowledged receipt of questions from NJ Advance Media on Thursday but did not immediately answer them. The GEO Group declined to elaborate on its announcement.
Baraka issued a statement Thursday asserting that ICE could not legally begin housing detainees without city permission.
“Without satisfying city property-use requirements, inspections, and permits, Delaney Hall cannot lawfully open in Newark at this time,” Baraka stated.
“Regardless of the process, an immigrant detention center is not welcomed here,” Baraka added. “ICE’s stated intention to round up ‘criminals’ is a thin veil that does not conceal their scheme to violate people’s rights, desecrate the Constitution, and disassemble our democracy.”
Baraka was referring to ICE’s insistence that it targets undocumented immigrants who have defied deportation orders or those wanted on criminal charges apart from their immigration status.
One reason immigrants' rights advocates oppose creation of new detention space is that, by definition, it allows ICE to lock more people up even before a hearing to determine whether they should be deported.
Mustafa Cetin, an immigration lawyer based in Wayne, said one positive aspect of the new facility is that it could let his northern New Jersey clients avoid being held out of state. Physical proximity facilitates face-to-face attorney-client meetings, which Cetin said are more effective than phone calls when it comes to preparing for a hearing.
“It becomes a practical advantage for representation,” he said.
Stories by Steve Strunsky
Nobody knows Jersey better than NJ.com sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com.
Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com