Shut down Delaney Hall and all ICE detention centers!

June 1. A workers’ hunger strike by 300 to 400 immigrant detainees at Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Center in Newark, New Jersey, run by GEO Group, that started May 22, has sparked daily demonstrations outside the facility, with protesters brutally attacked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs.  

Workers World supports the protest against poor ventilation, inedible food, lack of medical care and exploited labor of immigrant detainees and calls for Delaney Hall and all 225-plus active ICE centers across the U.S. to be immediately shut down.

ICE contracts are currently costing the government around $165/per person held per day.  GEO Group currently has contracts to run facilities to hold over 26,000 detainees. In the first quarter of 2026, Geo’s profits were $705.2 million, a 17% increase over last year.

At Delaney Hall, GEO Group executives maximized profits by hiring as few outside workers as possible. GEO forced the detained migrants to perform essential jobs, including cleaning and food preparation. GEO paid them as little as $1 per hour −− if they paid them at all.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, claims Geo Group can pay immigrants so little because of the federal government’s Voluntary Work Program and because of an exception in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that abolished slavery −− “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” It’s a phony pretext because the vast majority of ICE detainees have no criminal records and have not been convicted of any crime at all.

Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of the DHS, posting on X, lied, saying: “There is no hunger strike at Delaney Hall. There are no subprime conditions.” 

Many protests at ICE prisons

The Delaney Hall strike is just one of several collective actions undertaken by immigrant detainees in recent months to protest the inhumane and torturous conditions in ICE prisons. These conditions have resulted in 56 deaths in custody, including 10 alleged suicides. Earlier in May, immigrant prisoners in Torrance County, New Mexico, and at the Northwest ICE center in Tacoma, Washington, announced the formation of La Union de Secuestrados por ICE, or the Union of People Kidnapped by ICE. (laresistencianw.org)

According to a letter from detainees at Delaney Hall, made public by prospect.org on May 20, “GEO Group staff are serving decaying food that contains worms and failing to repair bathrooms, which are in terrible and inhumane condition.” The letter states that staff ignores serious health issues, failing to treat people with persistent flu, conjunctivitis, urinary tract infections, fever and coughs.

Amy Torres, executive director at the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, stated: “Conditions were bad enough for people to lose their pregnancies.  They were bad enough to start a lice infestation, to have a strain of flu that has been going around untreated. That’s what gets people to strike.”  

Delaney Hall is also located in an industrial part of Newark, surrounded by factories. The Guardian reports, “The air by the facility is putrid, smelling like sewage and chemicals.” (May 27)

Little media attention was given to the detainees’ hunger strike. It took ICE police pepper spraying politicians, including New Jersey U.S. Senator Andy Kim to get any publicity. Yet few corporate pundits noted that elected politicians like New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill and Kim have a right to tour these facilities, funded with taxpayers’ money, without any interference.

Workers World demands open access to these facilities. We demand release, without charges, of all demonstrators arrested outside the facility over the last week.

We further demand a full investigation of the profits made by GEO Group, Core Civic, and other corporations over the past year from the super exploitation of immigrant detainees.

Shut down Delaney Hall! Shut down ICE!