The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, has been detained at an ICE detention center in his city after he and a congressional delegation visited the facility, seeking to get a look inside. Delaney Hall – which had been a halfway house, immigrant detention center, and a jail before sitting vacant as of last year – was recently re-opened to take in migrants swept up by President Trump’s mass deportation policy.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, along with Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver were at the 1,000-bed facility along with protesters. According to a report from POLITICO, Baraka was detained amid a “chaotic scene” in the facility’s parking lot, where he and the group had initially been allowed to enter, until Baraka was told to leave. The officers on site who arrested Baraka would not answer shouted questions asking why he was being detained.
Interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, who was been a personal attorney for Donald Trump for years, announced the arrest on social media: “The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Baraka has opposed the re-opening of the facility for this purpose since ICE announced it in February, saying that the detention center “is not welcome here.” Last month he sued the private company that operates it, GEO Group, claiming that they are not in compliance with local laws. “They have to have a certificate of occupancy, they had to allow us in to get inspections,” Baraka said in announcing the suit on April 1st. “They refused to do that.” Baraka also said that his office has been kept out of the loop about its operations more broadly: “we don’t know what’s going on in there, we don’t know how many people they have in there.”
Plans were already underway with the Biden administration to re-open the facility for its current purpose last year, which met with resistance from Democratic officials in New Jersey at that time as well, as Governor Phil Murphy had passed a law barring immigrant jails in the state in 2021, a clear clash with the federal government that led GEO Group to sue the state in federal court. Another private prison corporation, CoreCivic, brought a similar suit in 2023 against the state and won.
GEO Group’s 15-year contract for the Delaney Hall facility is valued at $1 billion, which would generate over $60 million in annual revenue for the prison corporation.
