New Jersey attorney general sues to gain health-inspector access to Delaney Hall ICE detention center
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New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport sued the company that operates the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark on Tuesday, demanding that health inspectors be granted full access to the facility.
The lawsuit against the private prison firm GEO Group Inc. said the facility was "the focus of well-documented concerns about inhumane and unsanitary conditions for detainees."
"GEO Group must allow our state's health inspectors to conduct a full inspection," Davenport said in a statement. "The reports of unsanitary and unsafe conditions inside Delaney Hall are extremely concerning, and GEO Group - like any other business and facility in New Jersey - must follow the law."
She said she would continue working with Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Health Commissioner Raynard Washington to "ensure that people detained inside Delaney Hall are treated with dignity and humanity."
The suit was filed only hours after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said the city would expand its own lawsuit against the company, seeking to shutter the ICE detention center that's been the site of violent protests over living conditions there.
During Memorial Day weekend, Sherrill and other elected officials went to Delaney Hall after some detainees said they had began a hunger strike to protest their living conditions. As GEO Group operators refused to respond to their demands for full transparency into conditions, Davenport said, the Health Department began trying to gain access to conduct a complete inspection.
Davenport's lawsuit, filed in Essex County Superior Court, alleges that GEO Group violated state law by refusing to allow the Health Department to conduct a full inspection of Delaney Hall. The suit seeks an expedited injunction, directing GEO Group to allow inspectors to have access to the entire facility.
An inspection, the attorney general said, would allow the Health Department to verify whether protocols or practices inside Delaney Hall pose a serious risk of harm to detainees in the facility or the public outside of it. Any unchecked spread of illness inside Delaney Hall poses a risk to detainees, and also to employees and contractors working at the facility, and to visitors who could spread illness to the public outside, she said.
Baraka's suit was also based on health and safety grounds, and cited the facility's refusal to allow health inspectors full access when they sought to conduct an inspection late last month. Instead the agency was allowed to review only a limited part of the 1,000-bed facility, lawsuits said.
"We believe they should be shut down, because we have actually, irrefutable evidence that this place is uninhabitable," the mayor told CNN.
The city of Newark has for the last year pursued the closure of Delaney Hall in court, saying in a lawsuit against the company that runs the facility that the operators have violated city codes. The new filing adds to those claims.
The GEO Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Delaney Hall is among hundreds of ICE detention centers across the United States, places where immigrants who have been arrested are processed for deportation. It is managed by the GEO Group, a private-prison firm, under a 15-year, $1 billion federal contract awarded last year.
Protesters have gathered outside the facility, with most in support of immigrant detainees and some there for ICE, amid reports of inhumane conditions and a hunger strike inside the facility. Federal officials insist that no hunger strike has occurred, and that detainees are held in safe and humane conditions.
The mayor imposed an indefinite curfew outside the center after a series of clashes between demonstrators and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who were recently supplanted by state police. Baraka closed roughly a half mile around Delaney Hall from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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