WASHINGTON — During an unannounced visit in 2018 to a now-closed immigrant detention facility in Newark, which had been an Immigration and Customs Enforcement site, inspectors found food in revolting conditions.

“During dinner service, we observed facility staff serving detainees hamburgers that were foul smelling and unrecognizable,” the inspectors wrote. Other sights included “chicken leaking blood all over” a fridge, moldy bread and “meatballs that smell like fecal matter.”

Inspections of the Essex County Correctional Facility also discovered a guard had left a loaded handgun in a bathroom where a detainee found it.

In a different audit, inspectors discovered medical staff at ICE sites had performed hysterectomies on noncitizens when “medical files did not demonstrate that a hysterectomy was the most appropriate course of treatment and was medically necessary.”

Lost children, forced labor

And two recent audits of ICE — one published last year, the other in March — found the agency routinely loses track of tens of thousands immigrant children, leaving them vulnerable to trafficking, forced labor or other exploitation.

Conducted by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, these investigations provide rare glimpses of the inner workings of the immigration detention sites central to the Trump administration’s hardline immigration agenda and the agency, which is under intensive public and political focus, and is in line for a massive funding increase from Congress, that runs them.

Overall, ICE operates 155 sites nationwide, according to the latest available agency data, and two of those sites are in New Jersey — Delaney Hall in Newark and the Elizabeth Detention Center.

Delaney Hall’s $1B contract

With its 1,000-bed capacity, Delaney Hall is one of the largest ICE holding sites in the country.

The Trump administration in February finalized a $1 billion, 15-year contract with the private firm that runs Delaney Hall, GEO Group, which donated to President Trump’s inauguration in January. So did CoreCivic, another private prison company, which runs the Elizabeth site.

GEO Group’s publicly funded contract to run Delaney Hall is not a public record, though it is “approximately 2,300 pages long,” according to court records.

In its budget request to Congress, the Trump administration demanded funding for 100,000 more detention beds — a significant expansion of ICE capacity.

“Under the contract terms, GEO needs ICE’s explicit approval before it can release any language from that contract,” the company said in April court records. “Despite GEO’s best efforts, the process of coordinating the necessary redactions and obtaining ICE’s approval is not yet complete.”

In a separate court filing, GEO employee Amber Martin said the “contract is expected to generate in excess of $60 million in annualized revenues for GEO in the first full year of operations.”

GEO Group did not respond to questions from NJ Spotlight News about its Delaney Hall contract or demographic details about who is held inside.

A spokeswoman for ICE referred questions about the contract to DHS, which did not respond to emailed questions.

Growing ICE

In its budget request to Congress, the Trump administration demanded funding for 100,000 more detention beds — a significant expansion of ICE capacity.

Credit: (AP Photo/Richard Drew, file)

The large tax proposal Republicans are currently pushing through Congress would also allocate $45 billion in a one-time payment alone for immigration holding sites, called in the bill “adult alien detention capacity and family residential centers.” That sum is three times more than the current funding level for immigrant detention.

Even before these new portions of funding, ICE was operating 30% more facilities in May than it did in October, according to TRAC, a nonpartisan research group that analyzes federal records. “This can be partially attributed to the number of new agreements signed by ICE with both private companies and local law enforcement agencies,” TRAC wrote in a brief note last month.

ICE has also expanded its footprint by signing cooperation agreements with state and local police — deals known as 287g agreements, after a section of federal law — that let those police agencies hold immigrants at local jails.

Van Drew: More detention space needed

Republicans in Congress have largely backed the Trump immigration agenda, endorsing the push for more detention space.

“Facilities like Delaney Hall are desperately needed to help prevent dangerous criminal aliens from remaining on our streets,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd) said at a recent congressional hearing, when he criticized Democrats protesting ICE arrests. “Right now, ICE needs more detention space than it ever [has].”

‘Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now.’ — Damon Hininger, CoreCivic CEO

By contrast, Democrats, most prominently Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-10th), have pushed for more transparency and information from ICE sites like Delaney Hall.

After a scrum between federal police, McIver, Reps. Rob Menendez (D-8th) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12th), as well as Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, outside Delaney Hall last month, McIver was indicted on federal charges. She is scheduled to be arraigned next week.

Members of Congress are allowed under ICE policy and U.S. law to conduct their own inspections of agency sites.

Grim conditions

Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat from California, described grim conditions Tuesday after she visited an ICE site in Adelanto, California, inland from Los Angeles.

Credit: (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Chu and other House Democrats talked to detainees swept up in recent federal immigration raids in Los Angeles, she said.

“These were just workers in stores. These were people who’d gone to their court hearings. These were people whose documents had expired,” Chu said in a social media post. “These were not criminals.”

They were deprived of basic sanitation standards and legal help, she said. “They were not able to change their underwear for 10 days,” Chu said, adding that people she met had not been able to use a phone to call for legal help or to call family.

About 51,300 people were in ICE detention as of June 1, according to TRAC, which updates its records on a rolling basis. Of those people, 43.7% had no criminal record, according to TRAC.

“Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” Damon Hininger, the CEO of CoreCivic, said on an earnings call last month.