Delaney Hall is reshaping how ICE runs its detention centers

The Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, has become the epicenter of protest against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, with its prominence only growing in recent months. The Department of Homeland Security’s recent policy shifts show a department learning from the recent attention directed towards Delaney Hall in their attempts to evade oversight.

Starting on May 19, detainees launched a labor and hunger strike within Delaney Hall, which quickly became a hot spot for anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests and organizing. The strike was a high-profile example of detainees organizing themselves against ICE over allegedly dangerous and inhumane conditions in the facility.

Detainees pointed to poor sanitation, spoiled food and alleged coercion from guards to sign documents that result in a detainee’s deportation at the facility. The strike also impacts the bottom line of the company that manages the facility, The GEO Group, because like other private prison companies, it relies on the low-wage labor of detainees to maintain its profit margin. In immigration facilities, companies can have detainees work for as little as $1 a day — a standard established in 1941 that has not been updated since.

The strike inside the facility and the conditions that incited the strike also made the facility a hotspot for protests against the Trump administration’s policies. Protesters have clashed with both DHS contractors and officers periodically over the past month. In mid-June, however, ICE changed the standards for contractors like The GEO Group, in a move that ICE said was meant to “reduce the burden on our detention operators.”

Specifically, in the updated standards, ICE removed language that required detention facilities to comply with state and local laws relating to the treatment of detainees and specified that detainee workers are not considered employees, with the Washington Post reporting that this was done at the behest of The GEO Group. The company has faced multiple lawsuits alleging that paying detainees $1 a day violates minimum wage laws, and both of these changes help protect the company from those suits.

Less than a week after these changes were made, advocates in communication with detainees at Delaney Hall announced that the strike had ended inside the facility, with Sally Pillay, an advocate with Eyes on ICE, an activist network that has been helping support the families of detainees at Delaney Hall, saying that the strike ended due to “intimidation tactics.”

“Because of the intimidation tactics, the disciplinary consequences for folks to be placed in segregation, [detainees] have now resorted to going back to job assignments and eating,” Pillay said.

According to advocates and analysts, it’s no coincidence that resistance from the detainees ended shortly after the change in standards, because the new standards eliminate many of the protections previously afforded to detainees and insulated detention operators from oversight.

Sister Susan Francois, an assistant congregation leader at the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace in New Jersey, has been active in the family support operation that maintains an aid tent outside Delaney Hall. She told Salon that she considers working conditions in the facility to be “very close to slavery.”

“This is part of the business model of GEO Group and CoreCivic, and it’s not a secret that the decision makers in DHS and ICE are former GEO Group executives. Delaney Hall is not the only place where detainees have gone on a labor strike, attacking their business model,” Francios said. “At Delaney Hall, they have a 15-year $1 billion contract. On their own website, where they were talking to shareholders, they anticipated making $60 million a year in profit at Delaney Hall alone. About a quarter of that profit comes from not having to hire janitorial staff.”

The recent changes only further stack the deck in favor of the detention operator, which already had a broad set of options when it came to cracking down on detainee organizing. For example, family members of detainees told Salon in interviews that detainees had been moved between facilities in an attempt to break the strike, guards have pepper-sprayed detainees for striking and the guards arbitrarily change visitation rules from day to day in an attempt to isolate detainees from their families. For a period last month, Delaney Hall even paused all visitation.

Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, also highlighted in an interview with Salon how these changes, insulating detention operators from state and local laws, serve to further stand in the way of oversight of facilities like Delaney Hall.

“We’ve seen that it’s not just pressure from members of Congress visiting facilities and conducting oversight — now it’s also state and local elected officials,” Gupta said. “That means these private prison companies are having to manage oversight interest engagement from elected officials, not only from the federal level now, but state and local governments, and that is more of a spotlight and transparency than they’re used to.”

At Delaney Hall, The GEO Group has already denied state and local elected officials access. In May, for example, Gov. Mikie Sherrill was denied access to the facility, who later issued a statement saying that it raises “serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view.”

Though the Trump administration has also attempted to block members of Congress from conducting oversight visits, courts have maintained members’ access and struck down rules aimed at limiting that oversight, such as one rule that would’ve required members of Congress to give a week’s notice before a visit.

Even so, at Delaney Hall, guards have attempted to limit oversight from federal officials. When Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., visited the site, Kim said that guards kept him from speaking to any detainees, saying that doing so would result in an immediate end to the visit. Even in instances when something appeared to be seriously wrong, Kim was unable to communicate with detainees, as in the case of one woman he recalled who was curled up on the floor in the fetal position, “clearly in some pain and agony.”

The changes also help to assuage potential anxiety operators might have felt about disregarding state and local laws and the lawsuits that result from that disregard for the law.

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“I think the lawsuits that these states bring around conditions in facilities that are housed in their state are something that has given these companies a lot of anxiety and wasted time,” Gupta said. “And that’s a perfect incentive to actively pursue a policy of we’re just going to disregard these laws altogether, and while there may be legal challenges to that position, they’re doubling down on the idea that they don’t have to listen to state and local leaders.”

Gupta also underscored that, despite the outsized attention being paid to Delaney Hall due to the high-profile strike there and its proximity to major media outlets in New York City, similar facilities have been established by the Trump administration all around the country. She also highlighted how recent of a development these sorts of facilities are in the United States, at least in the context of civil immigration enforcement.

“The current immigration detention system is relatively new in U.S. immigration history. We can absolutely enforce civil immigration laws without the use of mass incarceration. This is a civil legal system. It is not a criminal one. And the United States government can enforce rules and enforce consequences against violators of immigration law without running an entire system of mass incarceration at the hands of private companies,” Gupta said. “We don’t need immigration detention to enforce our immigration system.”

Neither ICE nor The GEO Group immediately responded to a request for comment.