This past weekend, Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) was denied access to detainees at Delaney Hall Kim told reporters on Saturday. Kim told reporters that this was the first time that GEO, the private company that runs the site, had obstructed his ability to provide legally required Congressional oversight.
"They told me if I were to speak to any detainees that the oversight tour would be immediately cut off and stopped," Kim told reporters outside the Newark site. "This is impeding my ability to have the oversight I am legally allowed to do and I told them this was a deep breach of my ability to do oversight and what the American people are demanding for oversight for places like Delaney Hall."
Kim described his frustration of seeing female detainees signaling to him to intervene "waving their hands--flagging and pointing to a woman curled up in the fetal position in one of the beds and I am trying to figure out what is happening there and these women are frantic."
Delaney Hall, a private-for-profit prison, is just one of a vast complex of detention centers that earlier this year held as many as 70,000 prisoners for alleged immigration violations, up from the 40,000 being held at the start of President Trump's second term. According to the American Immigration Council. By the end of 2025, ICE was using "104 more facilities for immigration detention than at the start of the air, a 91 percent increase."
On Friday, the US Senate passed a $70 billion appropriation bill to fund Trump's accelerating mass deportation plan by a 52 to 47 vote. The bill now heads to the GOP controlled House. The advance of the massive spending bill comes as the Trump administration doubles down on implementing a "no release" system curtailing the use of bond hearings.
"Hearing Sen. Kim's report from the outrageous scene at Delaney Hall is both sad and shocking," Dr. Joseph Wilson said during WBAI's BREAKING NEWS report. Wilson described Delaney Hall not as a detention center but as a "concentration camp" where people are imprisoned "because of their race and ethnicity and extrajudicial proceedings."
Larry Hamm, long time New Jersey social justice activist and founder of the People's Organization for Progress told the WBAI audience that restricting Kim's access to detainees was "more intentional than accidental" and part of a push by Trump to replicate El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison (Terrorism Confinement Center) here inside the United States that can hold people outside of judicial or Congressional oversight.
Back in December, 41 year-old Jean Wilson Brutus, who was originally from Haiti, died the first day he was in custody at Delaney. In the press release confirming his death, federal officials denigrated him as a “criminal illegal alien” — something his family vehemently denies asserting he had gone through a rigorous four month vetting process in order to enter the U.S., according to reporting in the New Jersey Monitor.
So far this year, 18 detainees have died in ICE or private custody across the country. Last year, 32 people died in ICE custody, the most since 2004. Others have been shot or killed and died in the process of fleeing DHS agents.
The Associated Press reported that ICE will discontinue the policy of reporting the deaths of former prisoners recently released "in a change that could obscure the full human cost of the Trump administration’s mass detention policies" and "rescinds a 2021 policy implemented by the Biden administration that required ICE to report to Congress and investigate deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release."
The purpose of the Biden era policy was to "ensure that ICE could not avoid accountability for deaths by releasing severely ill people from custody. Detainees who were brain-dead or suffering from infection, for instance, have died shortly after ICE released them in the past," AP reported.
“Tracking deaths immediately after custody is a standard approach that allows health systems in jails, prisons and immigration detention to learn about gaps in care that may occur before a person leaves a facility,” Dr. Homer Venters, former chief medical officer of the New York City jail system, told the AP. “Eliminating reporting of these deaths represents a willful act of ignoring the most serious health outcome that can reflect inadequacies in care or help track outbreaks.”
While President Trump continues to maintain that those inside Delaney Hall represent the "worst of the worst" who are killers and rapists, a recent New York Times investigation documented that only 13 percent of the several hundred being held had criminal convictions, with none being held for "homicide, sexual assault or drug trafficking."
Last week, after Kim and Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. intervened on his behalf, Emanuel Rodriguez, a construction worker with a life threatening disease that left him without the use of his legs, was released from what Kim described as solitary medical confinement for close to five months.
As reported by NJ.COM columnist Daysi Calavia-Robertson, Rodriguez was "among the many detainees who have spoken out publicly, some of them signing a letter released to the media and advocacy groups, about the inhumane conditions inside the controversial detention center. They say their food is spoiled and contaminated with worms. They’re denied medical treatment."
Starting over the Memorial Day weekend, 300 detainees like Rodriguez, went on a hunger and labor strike refusing to do the maintenance on the 1,000 bed facility for which they are paid a dollar or two a day. Sen. Kim said that close to 600 detainees are now being held.
“ICE didn’t want people to know that there was a sick person like me inside here, that they were keeping me like this inside there …it was not something they wanted people to see because it gives them a bad image, but God listened to my prayers,” Rodriguez told NJ.COM.
GEO Group, Delaney Hall's operator, has a billion dollar contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The for-profit jailor, a major Trump donor, operates close to 100 facilities here in the US, Australia and South Africa with tens of thousands of beds. GEO GEO CEO George Zoley got $15 million in compensation this year.
In a sign of the accelerating integration of the private prison system and the federal government, President Trump appointed David Venturella, a top executive of GEO Group, to succeed Todd Lyons to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
GEO's profits exploded from $32 million in 2024 to over $254 million.
GEO has been in protracted litigation with the City of Newark, over the municipality's insistence on fire inspections and a certificate of occupancy. On May 9, 2025, Mayor Ras Baraka was seized off of a public sidewalk outside of Delaney Hall and moved to a black site in Newark that bore no signage that it was an ICE facility. Several hundred protestors and the Newark Police Department amassed outside that site and Newark's Mayor was released.
While charges were ultimately dropped against Baraka, Rep. Lamonica McIver was charged with assaulting a federal immigration officer, after she and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, along with Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. attempted to embrace Baraka as he was being abducted. McIver faces 17 years in prison if convicted.
The Senate's rush to fund Trump's mass deportation machinery comes as a federal judge in Rhode Island on Friday "struck down a slate of immigration policies enacted by the Trump administration, writing that the measures had 'placed the lives of countless individuals on hold — solely by virtue of their countries of birth'", the New York Times reported.
The Times reporting continued. "In a searing 135-page opinion, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. wrote that actions to lock eligible asylum seekers out of the immigration system and deny others temporary work permits had made it functionally impossible for a broad swath of people to remain in the country. He said the measures were improperly fueled by 'anti-immigration sentiments' and contrary to immigration laws."
