Sherrill calls for the shutdown of the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center

New Jersey’s Gov. Mikie Sherrill continued to condemn the mass immigrant detention center Delaney Hall on Thursday, following a press conference in Trenton.

“I’d like to see it shut down,” said Sherrill regarding the divisive center in Newark that has been the site of heated protests for over a week. 

Delaney Hall has up to 1,000 beds and, as of April 2, had a daily average of 891 detainees, according to the nonpartisan TRAC federal data website. The facility has been at the center of recent controversy due to alleged inhumane living conditions and for blocking state health inspectors from fully accessing the facility. Sherill was formally denied access to the site on May 25. Officials, including New Jersey’s United States Senators Andy Kim and Corey Booker, alongside numerous congressional representatives, have recently visited the facility.

The center is privately operated by the for-profit GEO Group and under federal contract with the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I don’t think private detention centers should be operating in New Jersey,” Sherrill said Thursday. Earlier this week, New Jersey filed a lawsuit against the GEO Group to compel full access for state health officials.

“We did pass a law here in New Jersey to not allow these private detention facilities – and that legislation was overturned in the courts. This lack of accountability, the lack of oversight, the lack of following good norms – it’s why I fought so hard,” Sherrill said. 

Though Delaney Hall was allowed to open, Sherrill noted that opponents were able to prevent a proposed detention center from opening in Roxbury, where the U.S. Department of Homeland Security purchased a 470,000-square-foot former industrial warehouse earlier this year to house up to 1,500 detainees.

Tensions at Delaney Hall were exacerbated in late May after detainees and immigrants-rights advocates alleged inhumane living conditions within the facility, including inadequate medical care, poor food quality, lack of basic hygiene products, and limited access to family visitation and attorneys. 

Sherrill confirmed that recently, “we were able to get two pregnant women released who were not getting good medical care,” in addition to two teenagers, one of whom was released to attend their high school graduation. 

Advocates also reported a hunger and labor strike at the facility, which the Department of Homeland Security has denied.

Demonstrations and protests escalated late in the week of May 24 into clashes between protesters and law enforcement. 

Newark officials initially imposed a curfew around the facility when the protests continued for several nights. Sherrill defended the state’s deployment of state police as necessary to protect public safety and peaceful protest while reducing the chance of violence between ICE agents and the protestors. 

Protesters, however, condemned the state response and argued that law enforcement shifted attention away from the detainee’s demands.

On Thursday, Sherrill justified the decision to involve state police on May 29 by explaining it was the only way to prevent more violence and unwarranted detentions from ICE. 

“We saw violence increasing throughout the week. By Thursday night, we were seeing ICE marshaling troops, and we knew that on Friday, they were getting ready to start coming out on our streets in a Minneapolis-style program here. And we knew what that looked like,” Sherrill said. 

“When ICE surges troops onto the streets, there are mass immigration raids, mass round-ups of people – many of them here legally, some of them citizens – put into detention facilities. On more than one occasion, someone has been on their way home from dropping their kid off at school, and they’ve been killed,” she said.

By calling in the State Police, Sherrill said she wanted to make sure that “we did not have ICE on our streets, that no one got killed, and that we could ensure that we did not have these huge immigration round-ups.” 

Also, on Thursday, Sherrill announced a $12 million increase in funding for the Detention Deportation Defense Initiative, bringing the total funding for the program to $20.2 million. The program expands the availability of legal services for low-income New Jerseyans, including for all low-income detainees in Delaney Hall.

Sherrill and Human Services Commissioner Stephen Cha also announced a coordinated Rapid Legal Response Initiative seeking volunteers to expand statewide legal assistance for emergency immigration defense.

The state of New Jersey sued the GEO Group on June 2 after state health inspectors were denied full access to Delaney Hall, including medical, sleeping, bathing, and sanitation spaces, viewing only a portion of the dining quarters. Sherrill has called for the facility to be closed and framed the denied inspection, including her own rejected request for entry, as a transparency issue, arguing that the state should be allowed to verify conditions inside a federal facility operating in New Jersey.

When met with concerns that the state does not have the jurisdiction to shut down the facility, Sherrill said Thursday, “the power I have in this space is to demand that the Department of Health get in there to inspect it, and to continue to bring attention and fight alongside families. That’s why I met with families” of people held inside.

Sherrill said, “We have backed them [ICE] down from entering our street. We’ve backed [Homeland Security Director] Markwayne Mullin down from his threats to shut our international terminal, so we have a great deal of power here. But shutting down the facility itself, we need to bring public pressure to bear there.”

“We will continue to advocate across the state,” said Sherrill, “while at the same time continuing our court case to get the Department of Health to force them to clean up their act. We really need to continue that focus on taking care of vulnerable people, and ultimately getting it shut down.”

This article is written by  Devon Williams and Miniya Malone courtesy of the NJ State House News Service