The Trump administration announced plans this week to reopen an immigration detention facility in Newark, just a short drive from New York City, greatly expanding its capacity to hold detained immigrants in the Northeast as federal authorities seek to ramp up arrests and deportations.
Known as Delaney Hall, the 1,000-bed, privately operated facility will be the first new detention center to open during President Trump’s second term, according to Caleb Vitello, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who was recently reassigned. ICE did not provide a date for the opening.
The center will dwarf the only other detention site in New Jersey, a facility in Elizabeth that has about 200 beds. The new center’s location — near major airports and on the outskirts of immigrant-rich New York City — could play a pivotal role in the agency’s ability to increase the number of detainees it can hold and to quickly stage deportation flights.
“The location near an international airport streamlines logistics and helps facilitate the timely processing of individuals in our custody as we pursue President Trump’s mandate to arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from our communities,” Mr. Vitello said in a statement late Wednesday.
One of the major obstacles facing Mr. Trump as he aims to deport millions of undocumented immigrants is securing enough detention beds to hold the people federal agents are arresting. The administration has already turned to military bases, including Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, and is developing plans to detain undocumented immigrants at military sites across the country, including in New York and New Jersey.
The plan to reopen the Newark detention center was the first concrete indication that the Trump administration intends to also rely on more traditional facilities to expand its detention capacity. ICE has been running low on beds in recent weeks as it holds about 40,000 people in jails and centers nationwide, a number that federal officials want to significantly increase.
The Newark facility is owned by the GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies, which has billions of dollars in contracts with ICE. Delaney Hall had operated as an immigration detention center until 2017, when it closed and was converted into a halfway house.
In 2021, New Jersey enacted a law that banned the use of private and public facilities to detain immigrants, leading to a protracted legal battle that is continuing.
CoreCivic, a prison company that operates the detention center in Elizabeth, successfully sued New Jersey over the law in 2023, with a judge ruling that the part of the law that prohibited private immigration detention facilities was unconstitutional. The ruling, which the state is appealing, allowed the Elizabeth detention center to remain open. Last year, the GEO Group filed a similar complaint to ensure it could also open Delaney Hall as a detention center.
Immigrant advocates, who have long criticized conditions at such detention facilities, said they were outraged by New Jersey’s distinction as a hub for the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort.
Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, placed some of the responsibility on New Jersey’s Democrat-led State Legislature.
“It’s almost entirely with their consent,” Ms Torres said. “What have they done to buffer any of this?”
The potential conversion of Delaney Hall had been on the radar of advocates and local Democratic officials for several months. The GEO Group began making millions of dollars in upgrades to the facility last year when ICE, under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., sought to expand the agency’s detention capacity in the Newark area and issued a call for potential contractors.
Hours after ICE announced it would reopen Delaney Hall, the GEO Group held an earnings call for its investors. The Newark facility was mentioned repeatedly as a core component of the company’s long-term business strategy. The company said it would “reactivate” the facility in the second quarter of this year.
The center is expected to generate $1 billion over the 15-year life of the contract, company officials said during the call.
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