Dozens of law enforcement officials from several policing agencies responded on Thursday to a private immigration detention center in Newark after reports of a disturbance inside.
Masked officers carrying plastic handcuffs and pepper spray could be seen entering the facility, known as Delaney Hall, just after 7 p.m., and people standing nearby reported smelling a pungent odor.
Earlier on Thursday, Amy Torres, the director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said two calls came in on the alliance’s emergency hotline from detainees. Relatives with scheduled appointments had not been permitted inside to visit, she said, and detainees were complaining about meager amounts of food and water over the past day.
Delaney Hall is run by one of the country’s largest private prison companies, the GEO Group, which has a contract with the Trump administration to hold as many as 1,000 migrants at a time. Last month, a clash outside the facility led the Justice Department to charge Representative LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat, with assault. Ms. McIver, who has maintained her innocence, is scheduled to be arraigned on Monday and has said that she will enter a not-guilty plea.
A spokesman for the GEO Group referred questions to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said she was in touch with officials at the facility but was not able to offer an immediate comment.
Relatives who had scheduled appointments to visit detainees were gathered outside on Thursday afternoon when a fire truck and then police vehicles from several agencies, including the Newark Police Department and the Essex County Sheriff Department, pulled up.
“They weren’t letting visitors in,” said Raymond O’Neill, a Newark resident, who has joined regularly with other activists outside the facility, which has become a recurring flashpoint in President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
ICE entered into a $1 billion contract with the GEO Group to operate the facility, which began housing detainees last month. Democratic officials in New Jersey have opposed its opening, leading to a lawsuit, protests and a volatile clash outside the facility that led to the arrest Newark’s mayor and charges against Ms. McIver.
In recent days, reports about unsanitary conditions inside began to percolate among immigration lawyers and activists.
Francisco Castillo, a Dominican immigrant who has been held at Delaney Hall since last week, said in a phone interview from the detention center on Tuesday that the facility was so overcrowded when he arrived that some detainees had to sleep on the floor. He said on Tuesday that the crowding issue had been recently resolved.
But he said detainees were being served dismal meals at irregular hours, an issue that was particularly affecting detainees who are diabetic and need to eat at regular times to control their blood sugar levels. He said detainees were often served small cartons of expired milk for breakfast. Dinners were sometimes not served until around 11 p.m., he said.
The living conditions grew so bad, he said, that a group of about 30 detainees had begun drafting a petition detailing the conditions that they could get to the public through their relatives and lawyers.
“Every day is a disaster with the food here,” Mr. Castillo, 36, who was detained by ICE at an immigration courthouse in New York City on June 4, said in Spanish.
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a Times reporter covering immigration, focused on the influx of migrants arriving in the New York region.
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