Conditions had been disintegrating for days inside a massive immigration detention center in an industrial corner of Newark.
Meals had been erratic at the privately run facility that last month began holding migrants facing deportation. Some detainees were sleeping on floors. And the water available from faucets was sometimes scalding or foul tasting.
Several dozen men in Unit 5, on an upper floor of the jailhouse known as Delaney Hall, had grown frustrated. And after returning Thursday afternoon from a first-floor cafeteria, where they said they had been given slices of bread in place of a meal, they began covering security cameras and smashing at walls and windows.
Two security guards stationed in the unit retreated, and some of the detainees pushed the door closed.
By the time the disruption was over, four men had escaped.
This account of events before and after the escape is based on interviews with several immigration lawyers who spoke to clients at Delaney Hall during the melee and more than a dozen people who had conversations with loved ones who called from inside the jail, pleading for help. On Friday, Senator Andy Kim and Representative Rob Menendez, both Democrats from New Jersey, offered additional details after touring the facility and speaking with federal officials and representatives from GEO Group, the private company that runs the 1,000-bed jail.
The tumult raised urgent questions about the living conditions inside the detention facility and others like it across the country as President Trump ramps up immigration arrests, filling to capacity many detention centers that, together, are holding about 51,000 migrants nationwide.
The breakout also prompted scrutiny of GEO Group and the measures it took as it converted a facility that had been dormant for about a year into a detention center after winning a 15-year, $1 billion contract from the Trump administration in February. Local officials have for months raised concerns that Delaney Hall had not been properly inspected, leading the mayor of Newark, Ras J. Baraka, to sue GEO Group as he sought to force the company to reapply for a new certificate of occupancy.
The men who escaped had punched a hole through an exterior wall of the jail that Mr. Kim described as crude — “essentially just drywall with some mesh inside.”
“It shows just how shoddy construction was,” he said, and highlights what can happen when for-profit prisons “try to pocket” as much money as possible.
On Friday afternoon, representatives from GEO Group pushed back on that claim, noting all the services offered to the detainees, including medical care, family visitations and opportunities to exercise religious faiths.
“Contrary to current reporting, there has been no widespread unrest at the facility,” Christopher Ferreira, a GEO Group spokesman, said in an email.
Still, on Friday night, guards began loading migrants into large white vans and appeared to be evacuating at least part of the facility, as officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, rushed to contain the fallout.
Trouble had been brewing at Delaney Hall for days.
Detainees had complained to their lawyers and to relatives about increasingly crammed quarters and paltry meals served at irregular hours.
The cafeteria was being used to accommodate migrants who had been moved out of other parts of the facility to address crowding, Mr. Kim said. That disrupted the delivery of the already small portions of food, he said.
At about 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, the tension hit a tipping point.
“Guards — they lost control,” said Mustafa Cetin, a New Jersey immigration lawyer who spent 11 minutes on the phone Thursday night with a Turkish client who huddled during the chaos with others in Unit 5.
The Turkish man, a father of three who lives in South Jersey, told Mr. Cetin that after a hole was punched through the wall, the men who escaped used bedsheets to lower themselves to the ground.
Mr. Kim said that the fleeing men wound up in an adjacent parking lot, and then climbed a fence behind the facility to escape.
A woman whose brother, José, was being held at the facility, said she got a call from him at 5:44 p.m. Thursday. A Salvadoran construction worker in New Jersey, he had been there for several weeks after being detained when he showed up for a court hearing.
“He told me he was scared and didn’t know what would happen to him,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Cecilia, because she fears retaliation. “People were desperate, breaking doors, banging on walls.”
The unit was also very hot, she said, with air conditioning that was either broken or not working well. Temperatures on Thursday in Newark were unseasonably high, hitting 91 degrees in the late afternoon.
At around the same time, another detainee called a staffer at DIRE, an emergency immigration hotline in New Jersey.
“We could hear screaming and yelling in the background,” said Ellen Whitt, a volunteer who works at DIRE.
People who had been scheduled to visit detainees on Thursday afternoon were turned away. Many were still gathered outside when a fire truck showed up, followed by squad cars from the Newark Police Department and the Essex County Sheriffs Department.
Soon after, vans filled with masked federal agents wearing vests labeled ICE and ERO, an ICE division known as the Enforcement Removal Operation, began arriving and entered through the locked gated perimeter of the facility, according to several videos taken by immigrant rights activists and relatives of detainees.
One van that entered held two gray vats of material labeled “toxic” and “flammable,” according to photos taken by a witness and shared with The New York Times.
As guards attempted to restore order, a pungent odor filled Unit 5, Mr. Cetin said, and his client doused fabric with water and placed it under a door in a dormitory-style room to try to keep a strong smell of gas from seeping in.
Over on Unit 4 a guard entered and asked a Mexican detainee if the “gas” that had been fired to quell unrest in another part of the building had reached his dormitory, according to Rosalinda Ortega, 35, the detainee’s wife.
“He’s the only one who speaks English in his room, and he told me that an official asked him if they were fine, because they had thrown gas to control the other people and they wanted to check because the windows were sealed,” Ms. Ortega said, relaying a phone conversation she had with her husband on Friday.
Delaney Hall has for weeks been the site of protests against the Trump administration’s immigration arrests. As news of the disturbance began to spread Thursday night, so did the size of the crowd outside.
At nightfall, a K-9 unit and agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived.
A New Jersey law enforcement official who was briefed on the details of the escape said that the number of people who were believed to be missing fluctuated throughout the night, from five to nine and then to four.
Federal authorities continued to search late Friday for the missing men, who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, were from Colombia and Honduras and all had criminal records. The men had crossed the border illegally in recent years or had overstayed their visas, the agency said. They had all been arrested in New Jersey or New York for crimes that included weapons possession, burglary, aggravated assault and terroristic threats.
Officials announced a $10,000 reward for information about their whereabouts.
Worried families showed up at Delaney Hall early on Friday, hoping to get a glimpse of their loved ones.
Ms. Ortega, the wife of the Mexican detainee, said she drove 13 hours from Gainesville, Ga., with her three young daughters, hoping to pick up her husband, who had been scheduled to be released on Friday.
She worried that the breakout would delay or derail their reunion.
She and her daughters watched Friday evening as van after van filled with migrants exited the facility, wondering aloud if their husband and father was inside one of them, and where he might be going next.
Mark Bonamo contributed reporting.
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.
The post Inside the Tumult That Led 4 Men to Escape from a Migrant Facility appeared first on New York Times.
