NEWARK, N.J. — A woman says in court papers that guards starved her for five days straight. A man claims “conditions violate basic standards of human dignity.” And several plead for help as the drinking water tastes like “raw sewage.”
The mistreatment of immigrant detainees that has led to daily protests outside a privately-run ICE jail in New Jersey is laid bare in lawsuits describing deplorable conditions as well as first-hand accounts of wretched treatment some believe is intentionally cruel.
NOTUS visited the site on Thursday just as the Delaney Hall detention facility released Emanuel Rodrigues, a Brazilian man with a rare life-threatening medical condition, who spent what he says were 130 excruciating days in solitary confinement — labeled “medical isolation” by officials.
His wife, Anna Lucas, feared venturing beyond the retractable metal gate topped with barbed wire, leaving NJ.com journalist Daysi Calavia-Robertson to fetch Rodrigues and his wheelchair as he clutched his black Bible.
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Lucas fell to her knees and wept when she finally saw her husband. They embraced as protesters cheered.
In an interview conducted in Portuguese and Spanish, Rodrigues described what he called “psychological torture” by guards who flipped on bright lights all night, opened and slammed heavy doors when detainees were sleeping, and blasted the volume on televisions at all hours — but made sure to leave the remote control just beyond inmates’ reach.
“They wouldn’t let us sleep,” Rodrigues said. “Everything there is to maximize suffering to pressure us to deport ourselves. … Many of them are bullies; bad in the heart. We had to bang on the door for water and wait for more than six hours. Some are OK, but most are cruel.”
As he spoke, he held on to drawings he made during his captivity. One features the perspective of someone trapped deep inside a well — capturing what he said was the utter despair he felt when the chronic aches from his rhabdomyolysis, which breaks down muscle all over his body, went largely untreated. Another is a sketch of his hand, which he said was reaching out to God in his darkest moments.
“I was going crazy from the pain,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about the conditions at Delaney Hall.
However, the agency issued a statement saying that “for many illegal aliens, this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”
Delaney Hall has become the latest example of the Trump administration’s deportation policies crashing head-on into local resistance.
The same kind of sustained protests seen outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolisare now taking place in Newark. This time, the facility is a recently reopened jail run by the prison contractor GEO Group with roughly 1,000 beds that has been described as the largest of its kind on the Eastern Seaboard. It is also unwelcome by the city government, which tried but failed to get a judge to block its use by pointing to missing permits.
When ICE agents attacked protesters outside the jail in recent days, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill deployed state police — who showed up at night in armor, riding horses, and beat demonstrators with metal batons and choked them with tear gas. Sherrill has since faced tough questions from New Jersey residents and local journalists about her actions that only escalated violence against the people who’ve set up a single white tent outside the jail, hold up signs and shout at employees that they’re fascists.
Aleixa Diaz, a organizer with the group Spirit of Liberation in Jersey City, told NOTUS she had to take two days off to recover from the harrowing experience protesting that night. She described how state police blocked the north end of the street and ordered everyone to evacuate within 15 minutes — even though the south side of the street was blocked by ICE vans. She said ICE agents shot at them with rubber bullets while state police gassed them.
“They tricked us,” Diaz said. “Sherrill hasn’t given us an answer to that.”
Newark police have since tried to take control of the scene, forgoing riot gear and showing up in regular police uniforms to monitor the crowd, which tends to swell up in size every night. It’s the latest attempt to temper the rising tensions, as temperatures spike into the 90s and advocates say detainees inside continue a hunger strike in protest of the conditions.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who has protested outside Delaney Hall and was arrested by federal agents during a visit, spoke to NPR earlier this week after he issued a temporary curfew there. He called the situation “untenable,” noting that some protesters had set fire to tires in the street but saying that ICE was still to blame for escalating the confrontations. However, he emphasized that more attention should be paid to the situation inside the facility rather than outside of it.
Lawsuits filed by those inside the jail paint a distressing picture, according to hundreds of pages of restricted court filings reviewed by NOTUS.
So far this year, detainees have filed more than 531 lawsuits challenging their detention at Delaney Hall — a rate of more than three per day. Just the claims against that one facility make up more than a third of the habeas corpus lawsuits across the entire state, even though more than 5,000 inmates are held at two other federal prisons and another ICE detention facility.
Danixa Ondina Urbina-Yanes, a 38-year-old Honduran mother of five children — four of whom are U.S. citizens and the other who now has legal status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — was driving to her babysitter when she was stopped by ICE agents last month. Her lawsuit describes being subjected to “absolute food deprivation for five consecutive days where she was forced to survive on the leftovers of her 10 cellmates.”
Her lawsuit alleges that after she placed a meal order on May 22, the jail simply “took all her commissary money and canceled her order.” She didn’t eat until May 27 and “became very ill.” During that time, she noticed that two of her cellmates were pregnant — one miscarried and another fainted, the suit states.
A lawsuit filed on Tuesday by Jorge Luis Rivera Rivera — who was at work delivering Amazon packages when a police officer arrested him and turned him over to ICE — alleges his three stepchildren have been suffering anxiety attacks since he was taken from them in January.
“My detention conditions violate basic standards of human dignity. I have experienced lack of nutritional food, lack of cleanliness and sanitation, mistreatment and disrespect from guards, inadequate medical care, unsanitary living conditions,” his lawsuit states.
A lawyer for Freiman Xaviel Hamui Morales, a Venezuelan who received temporary protected status that legally allowed him to remain in the United States, described how his client worked in construction and volunteered as a camera operator at church until he was arrested by ICE in March. The lawsuit he filed listed numerous problems at Delaney Hall: “food quality, sanitation, overcrowding, limited medical care, communication restrictions.”
Dozens of other lawsuits list similar complaints, while some highlight detainees’ length of stay. A 27-year-old Guinean man identified simply as A.M.D. — to hide his real name in case he is deported back to the African nation where he was tortured — has been held since October. Ivan Emilio Millan Enriquez, who fled the café he opened in Colombia when he was threatened by leftist guerillas and was working as a bike mechanic and Uber Eats delivery driver when ICE arrested him, has been at Delaney Hall since October as well.
Federal judges are sorting through claims, but mirroring the crush of lawsuits filed in Minneapolis earlier this year, the judicial system is overwhelmed.
It took five days for Leonardo Adrian Albarracin Bonifaz — who has an 8-year-old daughter and worked as a dishwasher at a Charlie Brown’s Fresh Grill in the suburban town of Scotch Plains, New Jersey — to get intervention from U.S. District Judge Georgette Castner, who ordered him released within 48 hours. He was released at 6:05 p.m. that same day, according to a memo from Assistant U.S. Attorney John Crosby.
DHS said there is no detainee hunger strike at the detention center and that “all detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”
Several lawyers countered that last point, saying that clients have had phone and tablet access taken away in recent weeks as punishment for shedding light on the conditions there.
During House testimony this week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullins said the federal government would not allow New Jersey state health inspectors to go beyond a narrow site visit in which they were denied access to sleeping areas, bathrooms and medical units.
Mullins has dismissed Delaney Hall as “a political topic” and, when speaking to reporters, said of hunger-striking detainees: “Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want. … The fact is, we’re giving them the calories they want. This isn’t Holiday Inn.”
Sterling Santamaria, a local immigration attorney who represents detainees, said her clients now routinely snatch apples and bananas from the cafeteria and stuff them into their pockets to avoid ever having to eat prepared food riddled with worms and mold.
“I think it’s done on purpose. They want to make it as miserable as possible so detainees just decide to give up and take the removal order,” she said. “If I have a guy from Guatemala and he decides to leave, he’ll tell whoever is in his hometown not to come here.”
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