By Sunayana Prabhu
RED BANK – The death of an immigrant detainee at Newark’s Delaney Hall Detention Center this week – the second in less than a year – has intensified state- wide calls to shutter the facility. Those calls were echoed during a panel convened July 28 by U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-6) at Red Bank’s Borough Hall, where nearly a dozen immigration rights advocates from across the state joined borough elected officials.
Amid growing protests nationwide over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities, advocates held the Department of Homeland Security and the company managing the Delaney Hall facility, GEO Group, directly responsible for medical neglect of detainees.
The nearly 1,000-bed facility, which reopened last year, currently houses almost 800 detainees, according to Pallone, who has visited Delaney Hall numerous times. He called it “the ultimate example” of cruelty, citing “horrible conditions, bad food” and a “lack of medical treatment.”
He said the infirmary has “one doctor, one nurse” for hundreds of people and detainees report waiting a week to 10 days to be seen.
In a separate statement Aug. 4, Pallone condemned “systemic medical neglect through a combination of poor staffing, lack of equipment, and inadequate access to basic medications such as insulin” at the facility. The detainee deaths were “entirely preventable,” he said. “But this administration’s cruelty ensures it will be repeated if immediate steps aren’t taken to strip GEO Group of its billion-dollar contract and shutter Delaney Hall.”
Pallone addressed the ICE presence issue during the Red Bank panel. “We see cruelty, we see inhumane treatment,” he said.
Red Bank’s experience is “not unique in Monmouth County,” Deputy Mayor Kate Triggiano said. “Long Branch, Freehold, Eatontown, Belmar, Asbury Park are all seeing equal activity to Red Bank.”
“New Jersey has fast become the ICE capital of the United States,” said Viri Martinez of Make the Road NJ. “We’ve seen immigrant detention quadruple since Delaney Hall opened.” She said immigrants formerly covered under programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which protects young children from deportation, and Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which provides lawful immigration status and work authorization to migrants who cannot return to their countries of origin, are “fast getting denied and fast becoming undocumented on purpose in order to be funneled into the deportation pipeline.”
Pallone noted the “300,000 Haitians” who recently lost their TPS status and could face mass deportation at any point. “We have 17,000 (Haitians) in New Jersey and quite a few in our district. Asbury Park is probably the place that has the largest Haitian community,” he said.
Itzel Hernandez of the American Friends Service Committee has been working with about 300 service providers, including teachers and nurses, those wanting to help immigrants they feel are being “criminalized,” she said. There are people who want to bring food, medical workers who want to go to Delaney Hall, but access is blocked, she said. “There is no America without immigration. There’s never been. There never will be.”
Maribel Encalada spoke about her father, Pedro Robles Bias, who she said was detained by ICE while driving to work. Accord- ing to Encalada, Bias has been living in the U.S. for 41 years and has no criminal record. She said he has high blood pressure and a tooth infection but has gone without antibiotics since his arrest. “He has been contributing to this community, paying his taxes, raising his children, being a good member of society and, in return, we get separated over nothing,” she said. “Like many people in Delaney Hall, my dad right now is suffering.”
A CALL FOR ICE REFORMS
Pallone said ICE agents must have judicial search warrants before making arrests but often disregard the process. “That’s constitutional. That’s the law. They pay no attention,” he said. “There should be search warrants. There should be no masks. There should be required IDs for immigration officers. Certain locations should be completely off limits – medical facilities, schools, child care (centers), churches, polling places, courts, etc.”
He also called for ICE to “stop racial profiling.”
Many panel speakers argued enforcement disproportionately targets working-class people. Amanda Dominguez of New Labor, a New Jersey-based advocacy group, cited three warehouse raids last year, saying they involved the use of zip ties, dogs and ambulances.
“It was extremely violent,” she said. “This is very much an attack on working-class people.”
She also said 17 people were recently detained in New Brunswick, including a group at a laundromat. “I’m really tired of the rhetoric that this is going after criminals and the worst of the worst,” she said.
Pallone said a guard at Delaney Hall told him the facility doesn’t “have any criminals.” He said the comment contradicted claims that only criminals are detained. “If they’re a criminal, we send them to the Essex County Jail. They’re not here,” Pallone recalled the guard saying.
Several speakers also alleged “political intimidation,” claiming detainees have been pressured to sign voluntary departure paper-work and denied legal representation. “We are seeing a stress test for constitutional rights,” Ami Kachalia of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey said. “People are operating in an environment of a lot of fear.”
She urged residents to speak out regardless. “It’s incumbent on all of us to stand up for them (immigrants), and not just immigrant communities, but really all of us,” Kachalia said. “When we decide that our rights apply for some people but not for all people, we are actually on our own undermining our rights.”
Ivonne Salazar of La Casa de Don Pedro, a nonprofit Latinx social services agency based in Newark, argued detention is unlawful. “This is a civil matter. None of it is actually necessary,” she said, adding that immigration courts answer to the Department of Justice rather than operating independently. “The current immigration courts are a sham.”
Pallone said ICE’s expansion is fueled by funding and is worsening labor shortages. “We estimate right now they have about $270 billion available to them,” he said. And increased enforcement has strained industries that rely on immigrant workers. Shortages affect “the tourism industry, farm laborers, you name it,” he said. Pallone said he noticed that some grocery stores on Shrewsbury Avenue were unable to operate due to labor shortages.
According to Dominguez, detainees inside Delaney Hall are being “forced to work” and denied visitation rights if they refuse to clean the bathrooms or complete other duties. This is a “form of labor trafficking,” she said, noting that detainees work for roughly a dollar a day.
She called for “wage-theft litigation” against GEO Group. According to the company’s official website, GEO Group was awarded a 15-year contract by ICE last year to manage Delaney Hall.
Dominguez referred to a litigation case from Washington state that successfully recovered millions for affected families. “People who don’t care about the human cost, we have to hit them where they do care, which is in their pockets,” she said. She urged the state to divest any pension funds from the GEO Group.
GEO gives ICE exclusive use of the facility and provides security, maintenance and food services, as well as access to recreational amenities, medical care and legal counsel. The facility “is expected to generate in excess of $60 million in annualized revenues for GEO in the first full year of operations,” according to its website.
“Jail is a business,” Hazel Applewhite of the Ironbound Community Collective said.
“We need to wake up, because at some point there’ll be no more immigrants to put into jail,” she said. “This is a long-term plan. We all remember what happened with the war on drugs, where Black folks were targeted, and some of them are still sitting in jail. We all know about marijuana and how a lot of folks are still sitting there for that.” She warned the facilities being built now will outlast the current wave of enforcement. “It’s today for you, tomorrow for me,” Applewhite said.
A PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP
Pallone noted that reformed enforcement alone won’t resolve the underlying problem “unless we change the law and have a pathway to citizenship.” He backs legislation that would allow undocumented immigrants who have lived in the Unit- ed States for several years, paid taxes and avoided serious criminal convictions to obtain green cards and, ultimately, citizenship. He also said legal pathways should be expanded for future workers in sectors such as tourism and agriculture.
Pallone has signed on to a discharge petition in the U.S. House of Representatives to advance a bill that would provide a pathway to citizenship for recipients of DACA and TPS, shielding them from detention and deportation.
This article originally appeared in the August 6-12, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
