NEWARK, NJ – Today, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued the following statement in response to the imminent reopening of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, New Jersey.
“In June of last year, I sent a letter to then DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ICE Acting Director Patrick Lechleitner expressing my dismay and firm opposition to proposed plans to open a new ICE detention center in Newark. Today, those plans became a reality with the announced reopening of the Delaney Hall Facility.
“Not only am I opposed to the premise of mass warehousing thousands of people, I am concerned that GEO Group, a private, for-profit prison company, will continue to run the facility. This 15-year, $1 billion contract, announced the very same day that GEO Group released its fourth-quarter earnings, is not about making New Jerseyans safer or fixing our broken immigration system. Instead, it demonstrates this administration’s driving motive to enrich its favored corporations while wasting taxpayer dollars. GEO Group has a documented history of gross neglect, including malnourishment, inhumane living conditions, forced labor, and the physical and sexual abuse of people detained at its facilities. Yet this administration is cutting them a $1 billion check. Put plainly, the reopening of the Delaney Hall Facility is an insult to immigrant communities and advocates in New Jersey, New York, and around the country who have fought tirelessly to document the human rights abuses at private detention centers and repeatedly pushed administration after administration to ensure the humane treatment of detained people. Geo Group’s presence in our community will yield chronic insecurity among the communities I represent, and all communities across the state will be less safe because of it.”
To read the full text of the June 2024 letter, click here.