Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.
In February 2025 the administration signed a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the GEO Group, which operates private prisons, to expand the Delaney Hall facility dramatically as an ICE prison. New Jersey officials have argued in federal court that GEO Group does not have the required permits to operate the expanded facility, yet the facility opened about a year ago.
In February, twenty-five detainees at Delaney Hall signed a letter distributed by the national advocacy group for undocumented immigrants, Cosecha, as “Our Cry: A Letter from Inside Delaney Hall.” In the letter, they apologized “for the way we entered the United States,” explaining that “we were experiencing safety circumstances that endangered our lives and the lives of some members of our family.” They emphasized that they had surrendered to border authorities and continued to work within the system, attending check-ins, getting work permits, and paying taxes, before being seized by ICE agents.
They explained that they have not been afforded the legal hearings guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and are being pressured to self-deport under threats of being sent not back to their country of origin, but rather to third countries like Uganda. They noted that ICE agents have arrested children, the elderly, and people with medical issues and that the facility is overcrowded.
In a second letter, Delaney Hall detainees expanded their picture of their circumstances, noting that some of them have lived in the country for more than a decade, have citizen children, and were complying with legal requirements. They noted that detainees with HIV, cancer, diabetes, and heart conditions are not receiving proper medical attention.
In the second letter, signed by nearly 300 people, the detainees pleaded with “Senators, Congress members, foundations, and organizations that collaborate with immigrants” for help. In big letters at the bottom of the document they wrote: “S.O.S.,” the international distress call.
As Sophie Nieto-Muñoz of the New Jersey Monitor reported, about 300 detainees at Delaney Hall began a work and hunger strike on Friday over the conditions and treatment there. From inside, they called their family members outside, who shared their stories of worm-infested food, crowded conditions, and pressure to self-deport until guards cut their access to phones and tablets. Their goal, they said, was the immediate release of young detainees, the elderly, and those who are medically vulnerable, and to bring attention to the fact that immigration judges are ignoring their cases.
On Saturday, Kim and Representative Rob Menendez Jr. visited the facility.
Kim posted on social media that the detainees had accurately represented conditions there. He said he found an eighteen-year-old high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate; a pregnant woman without full OBGYN care; a woman who had suffered a miscarriage and had no medical care; a mother who was largely separated from her four-month-old baby, the husband of an American citizen wife and child; spoiled food; a court docket showing one judge with 74 cases to handle in one day, allowing the judge about five minutes per case; a man from South America being threatened with deportation to Congo, where there is an active Ebola outbreak; and so on.
Kim concluded: “Spending tens of billions of dollars from American families to perpetrate cruelty against people who aren’t violent criminals or felons is a waste of money and wrong…. Our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.”
On Sunday evening, dozens of protesters blocked the entrances to Delaney Hall after it appeared that guards were trying to move Martin Soto, one of those who announced the hunger strike. His wife, Gabriela Soto, has been organizing protesters on the outside. “The people inside Delaney Hall are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and members of our community,” she told Ryan Mancini of The Hill. “In New Jersey, we believe in the rule of law and that everyone deserves to be treated with basic dignity. We have a duty to safeguard the rights, health, and well-being of everyone within our borders.”
On Monday, New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was denied entry to the facility. She said that refusal raised “serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Sherrill’s visit was “nothing more than a political stunt on Memorial Day when visitation is currently suspended due to riots outside in the facility.”
DHS also insisted that Democratic lawmakers were “spreading smears” about ICE and Delaney Hall. It denied that there was a hunger strike underway, and claimed that “ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” although nearly 50 ICE detainees have died. It claimed Democratic concerns were “a political stunt” and insisted those it is detaining are “the worst of the worst.”
On Monday, Kim, Sherrill, and New Jersey representatives Nellie Pou and LaMonica McIver were back at the facility along with about 150 protesters when federal agents sprayed the crowd with pepper balls and pepper spray. In a statement, DHS said: “No individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.” It then went on to call the protesters “dangerous rioters” and said their obstruction of the way out of the facility—preventing Soto’s removal—was “a federal crime.” It added that “assaulting law enforcement is a felony.”
In fact, far from being a dangerous rioter, then-representative Kim was caught on film in the evening of January 6, 2021, picking up the trash the actual rioters left behind in the Capitol.
On Monday afternoon, a DHS spokesperson said they had moved Soto to a different facility.
Representative McIver responded to DHS today, saying: “I was at Delaney Hall yesterday. Everything the detainees wrote in their S.O.S. letter is 100% correct. DHS is lying to keep their abuses from being exposed. And to make things worse, they pepper sprayed [Senator Andy Kim] and are lying about it to cover their tracks.”
The administration’s deportation policies were back in the news this weekend after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within DHS, announced sweeping changes to policies for obtaining permanent residency in the U.S. Before this administration, about 800,000 people a year applied for a green card, and half of them applied from within the U.S. Now those people apparently will have to leave the country and apply through consulates abroad.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained that the new policy will “force people to leave their jobs, homes, and families for weeks or months, all at their own expense,” decisions made at consulates are “virtually unchallengeable” in court, and backlogs will get even worse than they already are. He notes that about half of all green cards go to people applying from within the U.S.: “everyone from spouses and children of US citizens to skilled professionals getting a green card through an employer.”
Law professor Daniel Kanstroom told Rebecca Schneid of Time magazine that it appears “[t]his Administration is trying to make it as difficult as possible for as many people as possible to attain permanent resident status.” Referring to the spouses and family members of people who are legal residents or U.S. citizens, he added: “We’re focusing now on the group of people who potentially have the strongest reasons to stay in this country legitimately.”
Schneid notes that in the Immigration and Nationality Act, Congress explicitly allowed people to change their residency status from within the U.S.
David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute told Schneid that DHS has already slashed green card approvals in half simply by failing to process the applications.
On Friday, Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee dismissed the criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García. After wrongfully deporting Ábrego García to El Salvador, the administration facilitated his return only after securing an indictment against him for human smuggling, based on a 2022 traffic stop, saying he is a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
Ábrego García had not faced charges from the traffic stop initially, and Crenshaw said the Justice Department’s reopening of the old case to prosecute Ábrego García after he had successfully challenged his deportation to El Salvador showed vindictive prosecution. “The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power,” Crenshaw said.
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán of NPR reported that DHS called Crenshaw’s decision “naked judicial activism” and vowed that “this Salvadorian is not going to remain in our country.”
In a statement, Ábrego García said, “Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill; and I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”
Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted today that he had just visited so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” which appears to be in the process of shutting down. He suggested that Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Trump haven’t wanted to admit it was closing because they have spent a billion dollars of taxpayer money on the site in less than a year.
But, Frost said, “we can’t allow this place to just shut down and then not talk about it anymore. That’s what they want because they used a billion of our dollars to enrich private contractors that built and operated the place. They want us to move on because they don’t want us to talk about the human rights abuses and civil rights abuses that happened there and in other facilities as well…. We have to continue to push for accountability and consequences for people who broke the law and misused our…money, meant for hurricane preparedness, to kidnap and cage our neighbors.”
