Immigration and Customs Enforcement is set to reopen an immigration detention facility in Newark, nearly doubling the agency’s capacity to detain people from the New York city region, the agency announced in a press release late Wednesday evening.
The private prison contractor The Geo Group said the facility would open later this spring with 1,000 beds and that the company had signed a 15-year contract worth $60 million. The contract, dated Wednesday, is worth a total of $1.2 billion, according to the Federal Procurement Data System.
The reopening of Delaney Hall, which previously housed detained immigrants between 2011 and 2017, will make the by far the largest detention facility in the New York metropolitan region.
“This detention center is the first to open under the new administration,” said acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello in the release. “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.”
George Zoley, executive chairman of The GEO Group, called it an “unprecedented opportunity to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities,” adding they’d expanded bed capacity since the facility was last used.
“Our company-owned Delaney Hall Facility will play an important role in providing needed detention bedspace and support services for ICE in the Northeast,” he said.
Reopening the facility has been in the pipeline for months, and has triggered alarm among local immigrants rights activists, who argue that the easier it is for ICE to detain immigrants, the more the agency moves to do so. The Biden administration solicited proposals for a new detention facility back in July.
“It is a very scary time for New York City residents,” Karla Ostolaza, the managing director of the immigration practice at Bronx Defenders. “It’s very concerning that there is going to be a much more direct pipeline from the city into detention centers that are across the river and what that will mean for New York City families.”
President Donald Trump has promised to detain and deport historic numbers of immigrants. There was an initial surge in arrests in the days after Trump’s inauguration, though arrest numbers have sunk back down to Biden-era levels, according to the most recent data available through mid-February.
Still, the number of people in detention is climbing. As of Feb. 9, immigration detention centers nationwide held 41,169 people, more than half of whom had no criminal charge or conviction, according to data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that maintains immigration data online. That’s the greatest number of immigrants detained since before COVID.
Currently New York State has three jails where detained immigrants are housed, including one in Buffalo, one in Orange County, and one in Clinton County, which house around 600 people, according to the most recent TRAC data available.
The only existing detention center in New Jersey, located in Elizabeth, houses 270 detained immigrants, while the largest detention center in the northeast, Moshannon Valley Processing Center, where New York City residents are sometimes sent and about 1,100 people are being held currently, is a four-hour drive away.
The reopening of Delaney Hall will nearly double ICE’s capacity to detain immigrants in the region.
New Jersey lawmakers tried to bar public and private immigration detention centers with a 2021 law signed by Gov. Phil Murphy. But The Geo Group and CoreCivic, another private prison contractor, sued and a judge deemed the law partially unconstitutional in 2023.
At the time, the Biden administration took the side of private prison companies, arguing in federal court papers that ICE needed detention centers near airports to expedite operations.
“Without a nearby facility, turnaround cases would either remain in the airport for days waiting for their return flight, or be released into the United States with little hope that they would actually depart as required by law,” a statement of interest written by Robert Guadian, Deputy Assistant Director for Field Operations at ICE and DHS in July of 2023. “Second, forcing ICE to close the Elizabeth facility would likely prevent ICE from detaining noncitizens with violent criminal histories that are released from state and local facilities.”
Spokespeople for Murphy and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka didn’t respond immediately to requests for comment.
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