THE MAGA-LINKED ‘GEO GROUP,’ THE ENTITY BEHIND THE SCHEME TO CREATE AN ICE DETENTION CENTER IN NEWARK

Hundreds rally to fight deportation sweeps, Delaney Hall facility

In the grittiest part of Newark, amid petrochemical facilities, power plants, and sewage treatment installations, hundreds of people opposed to a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center proposed for an empty building, Delaney Hall, rallied to support political and legal efforts to stop ICE. The center would be created by a $1 billion ICE contract to the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison corporations whose questionable practices have been cited in the past, which says that the opening is “imminent.”

The rally was joined by Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor and a 2025 gubernatorial candidate running in the Democratic primary on June 10.

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have announced the opening of Delaney Hall as a 1,000-bed private immigration detention facility in Newark,” according to the ACLU of New Jersey. “The site would be the first ICE facility in the nation to open under the Trump administration.”

But not so fast.

Baraka has denounced the project, declaring that it can’t open unless it meets all of the city’s “property-use requirements, inspections, and permits.” He told the crowd that GEO Group has been “very brazen and very arrogant about telling people that they’re opening up. Giving them dates that they are going to open up. Sent us a letter saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to open up.’ Have not taken out one permit, have not gotten one inspection. Have not gone to the planning board to get a change of use. Have not done anything. They believe they’re going to open up, and we’re saying, ‘You’re not going to open up here in the city of Newark!’”

“The reality is that they have to follow the rules,” said Baraka, in an interview with The New Jersey Democrat. “I’m sure that [ICE] will go to court, so it means that they can’t open in May like they’re saying. … Right now, it’s just us and the GEO Group, [who] are getting into this to make billions.”

Speakers at the rally included people from Make The Road NJ, the Ironbound Community Corporation, the Council on American Islamic Relations, The New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, First Friends and others. Labor, including 32BJ SEIU, the Teamsters, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, was heavily represented. Co-sponsoring organizations included SOMA Action. One speaker, Evana, a young woman who only gave her first name, tearfully recounted how her father was swept up by ICE in 2018 and deported to Bangladesh.

“The same folks who are putting up this detention center are the same people who are trying to stop women from having the right to choose their own health care,” Baraka told the crowd. “These are the same people that want to ban diversity, equity and inclusion. These are same people who are attacking the 14th Amendment and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. These are the same people who want to close the Department of Education, and want to wipe away Medicaid and take away public housing…. You look at the crowd here today, and our enemies have something in common. And what they have in common is us!”

The Delaney Hall facility – if and when it opens, over the fierce local and statewide opposition – would be operated by the GEO Group, a worldwide, private prison multinational that boasts of “public-private partnerships with government agencies around the globe,” including a “3,024-bed maximum security prison in Limpopo Province,” South Africa. Its owners include Wall Street’s top institutional investors, including Blackrock, Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, State Street Corp., and Fidelity.

And they’re political. According to Open Secrets, GEO spent $690,000 to lobby the federal government in the first half of 2024. They report that GEO’s lobbying work hit all-time highs during the first Trump administration, but declined after the Biden administration issued an executive order in 2021 to phase out the Department of Justice’s contracts for private prisons. So, by 2023 they were focusing on immigration detention money and “funding from ICE [made] up nearly half of GEO Group’s total revenue.” In all, in 2024 GEO spent $1.3 million on lobbying, plus another $2 million hiring lobbying firms.

In addition, knowing whose palms to grease, in 2024 GEO donated $1 million to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) PAC.

In 2019, GEO ran afoul of the Department of Homeland Security, which found “egregious violations” by GEO after unannounced inspections at two of their detention facilities in California and New Jersey, according to a June 3, 2019 report by DHS’ inspector general. That report said: “Because we observed immediate risks or egregious violations of detention standards at facilities in Adelanto, California, and Essex County, New Jersey, including nooses in detainee cells, overly restrictive segregation, inadequate medical care, unreported security incidents and significant food safety issues, we issued individual reports to ICE after our visits to these two facilities.”

In addition to local opposition, whether or not the state of New Jersey can stop GEO Group from opening the center is also in question. State law prohibits private detention facilities from entering or renewing any contract to provide private immigration detention facilities in New Jersey. But in 2023 a district court ruled that the state did not have this authority. Attorney General Matt Platkin appealed this ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, but no date has been set to hear the case. On March 3, 2025, Platkin and Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum sent the appeals court a letter urging them to set a hearing date. “So long as this appeal remains pending, the state is prevented ‘from effectuating statutes enacted by representatives of its people,’” they wrote.