The mayor of Newark staged a predawn protest on Tuesday outside an immigrant detention facility that was expected to become central to the Trump administration’s ability to enact mass deportations.
The mayor, Ras J. Baraka, has been trying to stop the facility, which is expected to hold up to 1,000 migrants a day, from opening. In court, the city has argued that the detention center’s owner, GEO Group — one of America’s largest private prison companies — had begun operating without the required permits.
The early morning public pressure led to a tense, hourslong standoff. As activists held signs and chanted and the mayor waited in a misty rain, a GEO Group worker used a chain to lock the front gate.
At around 9 a.m., Newark fire officials issued the prison company three citations for code violations — and Mr. Baraka, a Democrat running for governor of New Jersey, vowed to return to the facility daily.
“We want them to follow our rules, follow our laws,” he said, noting that city officials had also been barred from entering the property on Monday to conduct fire and health inspections.
“They’re keeping us out through the gates and the fences and all this other kind of stuff,” he said. “But we’re going to come down here every day and we’re going to get in one way or the other.”
In February, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency awarded GEO Group a 15-year, $1 billion contract to hold migrants facing deportation in a squat, gray jailhouse known as Delaney Hall that sits on a busy industrial corridor in Newark.
The facility’s location is ideal for the Trump administration’s deportation efforts: It is near Newark Liberty International Airport, where the federal government stages many deportation flights, and just across the river from immigrant-rich New York City.
The center does not yet have a valid certificate of occupancy, according to Newark officials. Yet federal officials told The New Jersey Globe on Sunday that the facility had already begun housing detainees, prompting the standoff that began at dawn on Tuesday.
GEO Group and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
The administration is scrambling to improve its detention capacity as it continues to increase immigration arrests nationwide, yet not at the pace necessary to fulfill President Trump’s campaign promise of deporting millions of people living in the country illegally.