Photographs by Klaus GalianoIt was probably inevitable that the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, would become a battleground in the broader fight over President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The privately run jail reopened last year as the only sizable facility of its kind in the New York City metro area, with capacity for 1,000 ICE detainees. Trump officials have been threatening for months to intensify ICE enforcement in New York, making Delaney Hall essential to their plans. It’s also smack-dab in a blue sea of state and local governments dominated by Democrats whose constituents are furious at ICE.Protesters have rallied outside Delaney Hall since May to denounce poor conditions inside the facility, operated by the GEO Group on a $1 billion, 15-year contract. Trump officials say that complaints about the facility are overblown and that protesters’ true goal is to drive out ICE.New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill and other prominent Democrats have joined calls for Delaney Hall to be shut down, and they’re suing the Trump administration to block ICE plans for a larger jail in another part of the state. In recent years, blocking or limiting ICE jails has generally been an effective tactic for immigration activists because it constrains the government’s ability to arrest and hold large numbers of immigrants. It also drives up costs by forcing ICE to relocate detainees. Squeezing ICE’s capacity has worked in tandem with so-called sanctuary policies adopted by state and local jurisdictions that try to limit or prohibit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The result is a geographic imbalance in ICE infrastructure: There are relatively few detention centers close to northern and coastal cities with large immigrant populations, while a disproportionate number of the agency’s jails are concentrated in Texas and Louisiana. But the keep-ICE-out approach has downsides that Democrats rarely acknowledge. And now that ICE is swimming in cash, a strategy that relies on starving ICE of resources might turn out to be not just futile, but counterproductive. Klaus GalianoA protest outside Delaney Hall on May 28Since Trump returned to office, Republicans have used the budget-reconciliation process to channel more than $100 billion in additional funding to ICE, 10 times the agency’s annual budget. ICE opponents can make it harder to open new immigration jails in blue cities and states, but the administration now has all the money it needs to ship detainees to southern states, where detention costs are generally… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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