Why closing an ICE detention center is difficult — and rare. And how N.J. immigration advocates hope to make that happen.

Immigration advocates don’t want authorities to fix Delaney Hall, the ICE detention center in Newark where reports of dire conditions have ignited clashes between protesters and police.

They want them to close it. Permanently.

“A modern day concentration camp,” Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road New Jersey, said of the facility. “We need to shut down Delaney Hall and free everyone inside.”

That’s not easily done. The United States runs the largest immigrant-detention system in the world, more than 200 centers and jails that hold an estimated 60,000 people, including about 850 at Delaney Hall.

And the Trump administration is determined to expand detention capacity, not shrink it. Delaney Hall is important to ICE officials who move detainees across the country and the world because it offers easy access to major highways and airports in the New York metro area.

“Delaney Hall will NOT be closing,” Homeland Security acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis told The Inquirer in an all-caps message on Tuesday.

Trump Border Czar Tom Homan insisted to CNN, “That place is not going anywhere. Everybody in that facility is being legally detained.”

But a few detention centers have been closed, including one in Pennsylvania that was shuttered in 2021 after years of lawsuits, protests and public pressure.

Today demonstrators routinely confront ICE detention centers in places around the country — two protests are planned this month at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County, Pa., the biggest immigration jail in the Northeast United States.

Moshannon faces the same complaints as Delaney Hall, including inedible food and lacking medical care.

Focus on that center is rising as the Clearfield County Commissioners prepare for a September vote on whether to renew their contract with ICE and the GEO Group, the same private-prison firm that runs Delaney Hall.

What’s different in New Jersey is that top Democratic elected officials are actively moving against Delaney Hall, including two new lawsuits over health and safety, one led by State Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and the other by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.

On Wednesday U.S Sen. Andy Kim exhorted, “ICE is feeling the pressure. Keep raising your voice,” announcing on Facebook that an 18-year-old high school senior and several people with medical conditions had been released.

Both lawsuits target the GEO Group, saying that as a private company it must comply with all New Jersey laws and regulations.

The suit that Davenport filed on Tuesday cites “well-documented concerns about inhumane and unsanitary conditions,” and demands full access for state health inspectors.

The Newark mayor said the city would expand its own lawsuit that seeks to shutter the center over conditions, accusing the GEO Group of violating city codes and ordinances.

“There’s not going to be a single thing that closes it down,” said Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance For Immigrant Justice. “By being more scrutinous of GEO’s operations, ICE may decide to release more people or GEO may decide it’s not worth it to do business in New Jersey. … Every lever needs to be pulled.”

Pressure must come from all quarters, including upon businesses that supply food and rent cars to ICE, she said. The GEO Group has vast resources, operating 95 secure facilities around the world, but the state of New Jersey has power too, she said, including the legal right to regulate and inspect.

Credible allegations of mistreatment, poor conditions, and civil-rights violations helped compel the Biden administration to discontinue use of a detention center in North Dartmouth, Mass., and another in Ocilla, Ga.

The Georgia Center reopened last year under a new ICE contract.

While it’s rare for new detention centers to be built from the ground up, the Trump administration has brought empty prisons and county jails back on line while also constructing big, temporary tent camps.

The number of facilities used by ICE has grown 91% since Trump took office in January 2025, according to the American Immigration Council.

Delaney Hall, operated by Florida-based GEO under a 15-year, $1 billion contract, became the first federal detention center to open during Trump’s second term.

“There have only been a few closures or cutting of contracts in the past, and more so under sympathetic administrations, which we don’t have right now,” said know Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “That usually requires significant public protest, community organizing, [and action by] public officials.”

Those kinds of demonstrations and organizing took place around the 96-bed family detention center in Leesport, Berks County, about 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

Berks confined mostly immigrant mothers and children, their treatment a near-constant target of protest.

In 2016 a 40-year-old guard pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 19-year-old Honduran woman. Berks confined babies, 1-year-olds, and other children too young to attend kindergarten.

It closed in 2021 when ICE did not renew its contract with the county government, saying tax dollars could be better spent on facilities that offered greater performance, efficiency, and economy of scale. It later became the Berks County Youth Center

But even if a facility closes, advocates say, the next question becomes what happens to the people inside. Are they released to live with their families, to pursue their immigration cases from a position of freedom? Or are they transferred to other, far-away centers, further limiting their access to attorneys and loved ones?

“Any of us who have seen the insides of detention facilities, including Delaney Hall,” Gupta said, “know they’re designed to push people to stop fighting their cases in Immigration Court.”

Delaney Hall is a gray, two-story structure in an industrial area of Newark, set beside the Essex County prison a few hundred yards from the banks of the Passaic River.

It opened in 2000 as a drug-and-addiction facility, named for Geraldine Owen Delaney, a treatment pioneer who turned her journey to sobriety into a mission to help others.

It later became an immigrant-detention center, then returned to its original treatment role before falling vacant in 2023.

In May 2025, as the Trump administration sought to expand the number of detention beds, Delaney Hall was revived. Reports concerning sanitation and detainees’ health and hygiene arose almost immediately.

In June, after detainees complained about frozen and incomplete meals ― some people getting a hot dog, others a bun ― an uprising led to the escape of four detainees. They broke through a second-story wall and dropped mattresses to cushion their leap to the ground.

All were eventually recaptured.

Two weeks ago on Memorial Day weekend, reports of a detainee hunger strike exploded into violence between demonstrators and ICE officers.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill was turned away from the facility, and Kim hit by a cloud of pepper spray in a melee that occurred after he met with dozens of detainees.

Those detainees included a pregnant woman who said she was not receiving full obstetrics and gynecological care, and another who said she suffered a miscarriage but was left to manage her care on her own, Kim said.

Federal officials insist no hunger strike occurred, and that detainees at Delaney Hall and elsewhere are held in safe and humane conditions.

On Thursday Homeland Security published an extensive menu on social media, along with a link on self-deportation, saying, “If detainees are not satisfied with their dining experience, they are welcome to leave.”

The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment, but says on its website that it offers around-the-clock access to medical care, in-person and virtual legal and family visitation, library services, and dietician-approved meals.

The Trump administration said in a statement and in posts on social media that New Jersey “sanctuary politicians” need to thank ICE for removing murderers, rapists, pedophiles and drug traffickers off the streets, and work with the agency “to get these criminals out of their state.”

But research by Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University professor who studies immigration data, shows the vast majority of those held in Delaney ― 88.3% ― have no criminal convictions

“If you were looking for an ICE facility that holds a large number of dangerous criminals,” he wrote in an analysis, “Delaney Hall just isn’t it.”

As of mid-March, Kocher found, nearly all of those in custody, 84.2%, have no final order of removal — meaning they are being confined even though ICE cannot deport them.

Closing Delaney Hall, said Kathy O’Leary of Pax Christi New Jersey, part of the Catholic peace and justice movement, would benefit not only immigrants in New Jersey. A reduction in detention centers means fewer beds, and it’s harder for ICE to arrest people if they have nowhere to put them, she said.

“The goal is to free people,” O’Leary said as she worked outside Delaney Hall on Thursday, providing water and snacks to visiting families. “And that’s what the people inside are asking.”