BY WALTER ELLIOTT
Photo Courtesy I.C.E.
NEWARK – The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s intention to reopen Delaney Hall at 451 Doremus Ave. as a detention facility for deportees Feb. 27 received a “Not if we have a say in it,” reaction from Mayor Ras Baraka later that Thursday.
Baraka, in that afternoon’s interview with a statewide media outlet, said that ICE and would-be operator GEO Group has not done the legal due processing in reopening the 1,000-bed facility.
“Delaney Hall cannot legally open at this time,” said the Mayor. We’re going over there in the next couple of days and will probably do a stop work order to shut the building down until they finish getting permits, You wouldn’t be able to sign contracts or do any of these things without even knowing if you’re going to get into this facility.”
Baraka ran down a list of needed permits from fire suppression and for elevators to at least a temporary certificate of occupancy.
“First, you have to get change-of-use permitting from the (Newark Central) planning board; that hasn’t been done,” added the Mayor. “If you did work on a building, you have to get permits to do that. They did not get any city permits to start or finish work. And, once the work is done, it has to be inspected.
“Regardless of the process,” concluded Baraka, “an immigrant detention center is not welcomed here.”
The President Donald J. Trump Administration announced that morning that ICE and Delaney Hall’s owner, GEO Group, signed a 15-year operations contract. Payments to GEO – a private prison owner and operator from Boca Raton, Fla. – would be paid $60 million to house the to-be-deported the first year and about $1 billion into 2040.
The contract, according to geogroup.com, would be providing security, maintenance and food service plus access to legal counsel, medical care and recreation activities. GEO will have exclusive use. The company intends to reopen the facility between April 1 and June 30.
GEO had run the hall adjacent to the Essex County Corrections Facility 2011-17 to house immigrant detainees. It is to be the first such facility to be reopened under the Second Trump Administration.
There had been rumblings that GEO wanted to reopen Delaney since April 2024. The company, at that time, took the State of New Jersey to court to strike down the latter’s law that barred any future public or private entities from contracting with ICE to house detainees. The law came from another company, CoreCivic, owning and operating a detention facility in Elizabeth.
A federal judge partially struck down that law, allowing private detention facilities to continue operating in Elizabeth and elsewhere in New Jersey, in 2023.
Acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello said that Delaney’s size and proximity to Newark Liberty International Airport will help it pursue the Trump Administration’s order to “remove illegal aliens from our communities.”
The President’s administrators, indeed, had been looking for more jails across the country to house those ICE had detained for potential deportation to the detainees’ “home” countries or third party countries, like El Salvador, who so accept.
The Administration, for example, had opened a 30,000-bed tent city in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for what they are calling “deportees with criminal convictions.” The feds have been negotiating with New York City Mayor Eric Adams about reopening part of the latter’s Rikers Island Detention Facility for ICE use. Surplus and active military bases are also being examined.
ICE has made an average 750 daily arrests since Jan. 20, more than what the Biden and Obama administrations had done. Trump’s administrators however, on Feb. 7, told ICE to make 1,200 to 1,400 daily arrests. This is despite ICE detaining up to 42,000 people by that day – some 2,000 over the agency’s budgeting.
Those arrests were originally for undocumented adults who have been convicted of a felony. “Just felons,” however, are not the only ones being deported.
Newarkers remember ICE entering an Ironbound fish wholesaler and leaving with its manager under its arrest in January. Its agents refused to honor the U.S. citizen’s military identification card.
Trump had meanwhile signed the Laken Riley Act into law Jan. 29. The act requires the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s agents to detain undocumented immigrants who are accused of theft, burglary, assaulting a law enforcement officer and “any crime that causes serious bodily injury” like DWI.
HHS Secretary Kristi Noem, on Feb. 20, signed an order ending Temporary Protective Status on some 500,000 Haitians in August and Trump, on Feb. 2, revoking TPS on some 300,000 Venezuelans. Trump, in his first administration, sought to revoke TPS on people from Haiti, Sudan, and El Salvador.
Awarding the Delaney Hall contract appears to be in keeping with the Trump Administration’s breakneck speed to dismantle federal agencies, fire employees, pause payments and contracts and erase DEI without considering the legal aspects. The attitude appears to be: “Let’s do it and leave any questions or problems with the courts.”
