Reports indicate that around 50 detainees at Delaney Hall, Trump’s newly opened ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, staged an uprising against inhumane conditions on Thursday, June 13. According to reports by New Jersey law enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, and detainees’ lawyers, four men escaped the facility amid the unrest.
There had reportedly been discontent at the ICE detention facility for days due to inhumane conditions, including reports of insufficient food, scalding hot undrinkable tap water, and lack of staff. “We had some members of our community come out and tell us that their family members were not being given food,” said immigrant rights organizer Ana Paola Pazmiño, the executive director of Resistencia en Accion NJ. According to a post on X by the NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice (NJAIJ), detainees endured 20 hours without food. Demonstrators gathered outside the facility later on Thursday in solidarity with the detainees.
Pazmiño, like other immigrant rights activists, are skeptical of reports that detainees escaped the facility. “Although DHS has said that people have escaped, they don’t name anybody,” Pazmiño told Peoples Dispatch.
NJAIJ wrote in a post on X: “Don’t believe the lies about escaped detainees. ICE says so themselves: they’ve lost count. ICE is arresting, detaining, and deporting people with such haste and fervor that they can’t keep accurate headcount.”
According to Mustafa Cetin, an immigration lawyer who represents one of the detainees inside of Delaney Hall, tensions over the conditions inside the detention center boiled over on Thursday. Amid the uprising, detainees pushed down a wall within the facility.
“We are concerned about reports of what has transpired at Delaney Hall this evening, ranging from withholding food and poor treatment, to uprising and escaped detainees,” said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka in a statement. “This entire situation lacks sufficient oversight of every basic detail – including local zoning laws and fundamental constitutional rights.” Baraka himself was arrested by federal agents while protesting the facility alongside immigrant rights activists.
Delaney Hall has been a major site of struggle in the immigrant rights movement in New Jersey and nationally since February of this year, when it became the first ICE detention center to open under the second Trump administration. Activists have sought to shut it down, claiming that it violates New Jersey law and expands Trump’s mass deportation agenda. “Beloveds, this center has gone from 400 beds to 1100 illegally,” said Charlene Walker, the executive director of Faith In New Jersey who has participated in protests against the opening of Delaney Hall, at a press conference last week. “This place intends to put everyone that dissents, that uses their voice, behind bars, so that we all can be put on a plane and sent elsewhere.”
NJAIJ reported on Friday that all detainees were being evacuated out of Delaney Hall. “Rather than releasing people to the community and reporting to check ins, everyone will be transferred from Delaney Hall within 24 hours. Vans already here,” the immigrant rights organization wrote in a post on X.
