On a recent frigid evening, visitors outside Newark’s Delaney Hall huddled under blankets while waiting to see family members or friends locked up inside the huge, privately operated immigrant lock-up.
Visitors are required to show up to the grim cinderblock building at least an hour before their scheduled 30-minute visit and often wait at least that long outdoors before entering the gated complex and passing through security.
Those who don’t arrive at least an hour early to the center, which is about a 20-minute bus ride away from Newark-Penn Station, are regularly turned away.
“They should find a way to accommodate us inside,” said Tatiana Conza, 32, in Spanish as she waited to see her cousin. “For me, this is a joke. You don’t even treat an animal this way.”
Conza has visited once a week for two months ever since her cousin was arrested at his credible-fear interview with immigration officials, a previously routine step in the asylum application process that’s recently become an arrest trap for ICE. She always comes with her two young daughters to try to keep her cousin’s spirit up.
“It’s hard to be in there,” she said.
Since this spring when Delaney Hall opened, groups of volunteers, most of them driving there from elsewhere in New Jersey, have been showing up on the four days a week that visits are allowed.
When THE CITY visited the center one recent evening, they were passing out hand warmers, gloves, instant ramen and cups of steaming tea and hot chocolate. They’d brought quilted blankets and cushions to cover the newly installed metal benches.
For many of the people visiting loved ones at Delaney Hall, “these are the last times they’re going to see each other for a very long time,” said Stephanie Campos. For months now, the Jersey City resident has been showing up for visiting hours twice a week. “This is it for them,” she told THE CITY.
Surrounded by fences and barbed wire on a difficult to access and desolate industrial strip, Delaney Hall quickly became the largest ICE detention center in the Northeast, with more than 900 people held there on a given day. It is a regular destination for New York City residents grabbed by ICE on the streets at immigration court appearances or at ICE check-ins.
That’s accelerated since the summer, when a federal judge limited the number of people who could be held at one time inside the ICE holding areas at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan.
When Delaney Hall first opened, it quickly became the flashpoint of protests and confrontations with federal agents. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was detained inside for hours, while New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver is still facing federal charges for impeding federal officers.
But in the months since, the protests have largely given way to a steady stream of visitors, many knowing or fearing that it could be the last time they see their loved ones.
GEO Group, the private prison company that runs Delaney, didn’t return THE CITY’s request for comment on the long wait outdoors that visitors must endure.
The number of people in immigration detention has soared under President Donald Trump, reaching never-before-seen heights. While the Trump administration has claimed its focusing on the “worst of the worst,” half of the 65,000 people being held in detention as of late November had no criminal convictions or pending charges. In New York City arrests have skewed even more toward people with no criminal history, accounting for 70% of people arrested so far this year, THE CITY previously reported.
Advocates have been raising alarms about the conditions inside Delaney, complaints about rotten food, dirty water and difficulty accessing medical care. Last week, ICE reported the first death since it reopened. In a press release, it said a 41-year-old Haitian man died of “suspected natural causes.” Advocates are demanding a deeper investigation into what happened.
‘It Tears Me Apart’
Over the past months, volunteers have brought umbrellas and ponchos in the rain, tents and cool drinks in the summer, and clothing for people turned away due to the inscrutable dress code that seems to shift with the whims of guards.
Kathy O’Leary, the New Jersey region coordinator for Pax Christi, a Catholic services nonprofit, began attending vigils protesting Delaney’s imminent opening and remained as visitors started showing up.
“They need something more than just a word of kindness and moral support,” O’Leary said. “People need stuff. They need something physical. They needed chairs. They needed water. They needed information.”
The cold of recent weeks has presented a new host of challenges, she said.
“We’ve been telling everybody we need an indoor waiting area,” O’Leary said.
In November, after pressure from O’Leary and other volunteers, along with the office of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, GEO Group installed a covered shelter and three rows of metal benches.
Advocates acknowledged it was an improvement, though the structure does nothing to protect visitors from the biting cold.
Jay Arisso, a pastor at Today’s Church in Elizabeth, was in line waiting to visit a parishioner whose family members were too terrified to come visit themselves.
“The walls are really just walls, he’s free in his mind,” Arisso said, he tried to console people during visits. “There’s another chapter after this.”
Another religious leader, Rev. Chloe Breyer of the Interfaith Center of New York, was turned away while trying to visit Bronx imam El Hadji Hady Thioub, whose arrest was reported on by the Religion Service News.
A guard had recognized her from a prayer service earlier in the week, when she had spent time tabling with volunteers, and decided she wasn’t allowed to enter, Breyer said.
“He seems to be making up a lot of rules,” Breyer continued. “There are people providing humanitarian aid here, and he has I guess decided that that somehow excludes them from visiting the people inside.”
The guard who’d turned away Breyer declined to comment, while telling a reporter for THE CITY to get off of GEO Group’s property.
The line demarcating the prison company’s property from the public space where the volunteers have their tables is painted in yellow on a stretch of tarmac.
Regular visitors and volunteers were used to the arbitrary anger of the guards at the gate, who bark orders at the shivering visitors huddled on the other side.
“Behind the barrier!” the guard shouted, as unmarked white vans holding newly detained immigrants raced in.
“The only thing I say to him is God bless you,” said Kenia Barragan, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Mexico, who has come to Delaney as often as possible since her daughter’s boyfriend of six years was arrested in Yonkers in mid-October on his way to his construction job.
Barragan’s family spent Thanksgiving at Delaney Hall with her daughter’s boyfriend. The 23-year-old immigrated to the United States at age 15 and has no other family in the country.
Earlier that day, an immigration judge had denied his release on bond. Crestfallen, the family now intended to return for Christmas as well.
“The only way that we can help him is coming here, talk to him, make him feel hope, make him laugh, at least one hour,” Barragan said.
By around 8 p.m. a final group of visitors filed in behind the gates, while another group trickled back out into the cold night. Esperanza Valladolid, a 40-year-old Ecuadorian woman emerged from the gates, bouncing a fidgety toddler on her hip, as she waited for the Uber volunteers had ordered for her.
Valladolid’s life has been upended since her husband’s arrest at his credible-fear interview in Newark several weeks prior.
“To see my son every day pick up the phone, put in headphones and call his father, it tears me apart,” she said in Spanish.
Earlier that day, her husband had been ordered deported by an immigration judge, and she was still grappling with what to do. “We don’t know, I guess we’ll stay here and he will leave.”
Her husband had been the sole breadwinner of the family, and Valladolid was adjusting to life as a single parent to her two young kids. In the meantime, she said, she would return as many times as she could, no matter the weather.
“Any moment they’re going to take him,” she said.
