How Delaney Hall Became Ground Zero in Trump’s Deportation Wars

AT EVERY TURN SINCE DONALD TRUMP regained office, Delaney Hall, the detention center in Newark, New Jersey, has been central in the struggle against the administration’s cruel approach to immigration enforcement.

Democratic lawmakers have been arrested and physically harassed at the site. Detainees there have launched a hunger strike to draw attention to what they describe as its deplorable conditions. And as the protests have grown more regular, so too have the violent efforts by federal agents to quash them. The facility, situated in an industrial strip a stone’s throw from Newark Bay, is a composite of all that emerges from Trump’s punishing mass-deportation system.

But why Delaney Hall? What is it about that place that has made it the center of these clashes in Trump 2.0?

Part of it is that New Jersey lawmakers have proven keen to directly confront the administration.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) is one of them. He showed up at Delaney in late May to monitor a hunger and labor strike launched in response to “disease, overflowing toilets, poor ventilation, and worm-riddled food.” While on site on Memorial Day, he attempted to de-escalate a confrontation between protesters and ICE agents and got pepper-sprayed for his troubles.

Kim, who has since said that that week was one of the most difficult of his life, says violence felt almost inevitable that day. He said he hasn’t seen New Jersey so close to the edge at any point in his time in office. The problems, he added in an interview with me, start with the facility itself.

Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group. The private prison giant was last year awarded a $1 billion contract lasting fifteen years that quadrupled detention center space in New Jersey. The Delaney Hall compound is so shoddily constructed that four detainees broke out last June.

“First, the facility needs to be shut down. It’s not up to any type of standard,” Kim told me. “When there was this breakout of four detainees last year, I actually went to figure out what happened. GEO Group refused to let me in at first. Someone that worked there told me the exterior wall of that cell was just made of mesh and drywall.”

“It’s an exceedingly old building, not up to standards, which is causing so many of the problems and poor conditions—like the extreme heat detainees are complaining about now,” Kim said of the facility. Built a quarter-century ago, Delaney was used for much of the last decade as a halfway house; it reopened last year as a GEO-run immigrant-detention facility.

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The facility’s location is another reason it has become so central to the story of Trump’s immigration horrors. New Jersey is a “warehouse” state, as Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road New Jersey, which is part of the ICE Out of New Jersey coalition, noted. Which means there are ample targets for an administration looking to ramp up workplace enforcement. On top of that, Delaney Hall is close to both a major airport and the second-largest port in the country—each critical pinchpoints for ICE operations. Morsy, whose group has protested Delaney Hall and advocated for immigrant rights, described it as the ideal place for the administration “to pilot and launch the deportation matrix.”

“What we’re seeing is a symptom of the infrastructure the fascist regime has laid out in New Jersey,” she added.

In fact, the first workplace raid of Trump’s second administration occurred in Newark. The Ocean Seafood Depot was raided in January 2025, within seventy-two hours of Trump returning to office. At the time, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka described the “indignity” experienced by a Puerto Rican veteran whose military credentials were questioned after he was swept up in the raid. Four months later, Baraka, who has long sought to close Delaney Hall, was himself arrested outside it.

In Trump world, though, we cannot overlook the political component when explaining why Delaney has become Ground Zero for Trump’s deportation efforts.

Flush with confidence from Trump’s victory in 2024 and his overperformance in the traditionally blue state, MAGA allies began viewing New Jersey as a swing state. Trump installed his personal lawyer, Alina Habba, as an acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey. And she quickly looked to make a splash. Confrontations with Democratic lawmakers were a simple way to impress MAGA zealots and further press Republicans’ “advantage” on immigration. Delaney Hall was the staging ground.

It didn’t hurt matters that the site sits not too far away from New York City. The Trump administration got the major media market publicity it craved without the risk of a swell of protesters fighting back.

“There was in late 2024 and early 2025 a push by Republicans saying New Jersey is a swing state and gains have been made, and Habba had been stoking that, talking in political terms about turning New Jersey into a red state,” Kim told me. “Early on this just became a real proving ground for Alina Habba’s ambitions and her efforts to perform for President Trump.”¹

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