A revolt at a controversial New Jersey ICE facility morphed into a jailbreak late Thursday.
Four detainees were unaccounted for at Delaney Hall detention center after about 50 captives pushed down a dormitory wall in protest of their living conditions, an immigration attorney representing one of the men told NJ Advance Media.
Detainees were starving, reportedly having been made to wait hours for their next meal, when the literal pushback began.
“It’s about the food, and some of the detainees were getting aggressive and it turned violent,” the lawyer, Mustafa Cetin, told NJ Advance Media. “Based on what he told me, it was an outer wall, not very strong, and they were able to push it down.”
But the crowd was not alone in their protest—instead, a gathering of people outside the facility mobilized to block ICE activity, barricading the gate to prevent more officers from entering the center.
LIVE protestors are barricading the gate at Delaney Hall to prevent more officers from entering https://t.co/L0Zh5avEyI
— NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice (@NJAIJ) June 13, 2025
Amy Torres, executive director of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, told NPR affiliate WHYY that officers had used “pepper spray and tackled and dragged protesters away from the facility.”
“She said some protesters had minor injuries, but no one was hit by the vehicles,” WHYY reported.
Delaney Hall is run by a private prison company, GEO Group, that made $2.24 billion in revenue in 2024, according to its fourth-quarter earnings report. The company currently has a $60 million contract with the Trump administration to hold up to 1,000 people in the New Jersey detention center.
Shortly after the ICE facility reopened in May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and New Jersey Representative LaMonica McIver were arrested and charged while touring the facility. The lawmakers were reportedly visiting to serve a summons for code violations to a Geo Group representative. The charges against Baraka were dropped weeks later.
“I have serious concerns about the reports of abusive circumstances at the facility,” McIver wrote in a statement late Thursday regarding the breakout. “Even now, as we are hearing reports from news organizations and advocates on the ground about a lack of food and basic rights for those inside, the administration appears to be stonewalling efforts to learn the truth.”
Dozens of anti-ICE protests have spread from coast to coast, with gatherings in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Diego, Denver, Seattle, Las Vegas, Raleigh, Columbus, Oklahoma City, Washington, D.C., and others. But Donald Trump is still having a difficult time believing that his nativist agenda is facing such widespread opposition: On Wednesday, the president torched a Fox News reporter when she informed him that the protests had spread outside of Los Angeles, spouting from the Kennedy Center’s red carpet that he simply didn’t believe her while patting his administration on the back for its military intervention in the City of Angels.
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