Caleb Vitello, the acting head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, during operations in New York City last month.
ICE via/Getty Images
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ICE via/Getty Images
The Trump administration is expanding its immigration detention capacity, reopening a 1,000-bed detention center in New Jersey and adding beds at other privately-owned facilities around the country.
Immigration authorities say Delaney Hall, as the facility in Newark, N.J., is known, will be the first new detention center to open during President Trump’s second term.
Delaney Hall had previously operated as a detention center until 2017. Its location — a short drive from Manhattan and close to Newark Liberty International Airport — will dramatically increase the amount of detention space available for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the New York area.
“The location near an international airport streamlines logistics, and helps facilitate the timely processing of individuals in our custody as we pursue President Trump’s mandate to arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from our communities,” Caleb Vitello, the acting director of ICE, said in a statement late Wednesday.
Immigrant advocates fear it will have a significant impact in New Jersey and beyond.
“The planned opening of Delaney Hall as a private immigration detention facility presents a serious threat to New Jersey’s immigrant communities and is one of the largest immigration detention contracts our state has ever seen,” Amol Sinha, executive director the ACLU of New Jersey, said in a statement. “With rapidly increasing federal immigration enforcement in New Jersey, this announcement is a further attack on our state and only adds to the rising fear felt by people who call our state home.”
ICE arrests are up compared with the pace of arrests during the previous administration — but not enough to satisfy the White House. The Department of Homeland Security said last week that Vitello had been removed from his post, although he is still leading the office in charge of arrests and deportations.
Limited detention space has been one of the key obstacles facing the Trump administration as it tries to ramp up immigration enforcement. ICE has been running short of beds in its current detention network, with more than 41,000 immigrants in custody, according to the most recent data released by the Department of Homeland Security.
The Trump administration has already begun holding migrants at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and is developing plans to build immigration detention facilities at Fort Bliss in Texas and at other U.S. military bases around the country.
In addition to reopening the New Jersey facility, ICE is moving to expand its detention capacity at a handful of other privately operated detention centers. The private detention company CoreCivic announced this week that it has modified contracts with ICE to add more than 780 beds at existing detention facilities in Ohio, Nevada and Oklahoma, and will allow ICE to use an additional 250 beds at a county jail in Mississippi.
In 2021, New Jersey passed a law blocking public and private facilities in the state from detaining immigrants. But CoreCivic sued successfully to block the law, which is still tied up in court.
The GEO Group, another private detention company that owns Delaney Hall in Newark, filed its own lawsuit last year as it sought to reopen the facility as an immigrant detention center. The company announced Thursday that it has signed a 15-year contract with ICE that could generate as much as a billion dollars in revenue over the life of the deal.
ICE described the reopening of Delaney Hall as “imminent,” but did not give an exact date.
