NJ official says ICE facility in Newark evacuating some detainees after 4 escape

A New Jersey congressman said some detainees are being evacuated from a privately run immigration detention center in Newark after an uprising at the facility Thursday night. Federal officials say four people escaped.

After reports of a detainee uprising Thursday night, U.S. Sen. Andy Kim and Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. visited the facility and said detainees had escaped by pushing out a piece of drywall and tying sheets together to descend to the ground outside. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is offering a $10,000 reward for any information on the four men, whom they described as “public safety threats.”

Kim said he’d been informed of “mass movements of detainees out of these facilities,” though he said he didn’t know for sure whether all detainees were being relocated. “They did not confirm it to me directly, but they were alluding to the idea that they were going to move all detainees out of this facility,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security and GEO Group, the private contractor that runs the facility, hadn’t returned messages Friday afternoon seeking details of any evacuations.

Kim also said the site’s future could be in doubt.

“It shows just how shoddy construction was here — what happens when we’re paying for billions of dollars of for-profit prisons that are skirting the responsibilities that they have and trying to pocket as much of that money as possible,” said Kim, a staunch opponent of the detention center.

Delaney Hall was recently reopened as a private prison contracted by DHS to be an immigrant detention facility. It has been the site of ongoing protests and was where Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested last month after trying to tour the facility — an incident that also ultimately led to charges against U.S. Rep. Lamonica McIver, whom DHS alleges interfered with Baraka’s arrest. The site now has become a focal point of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation policy and its closure would be a significant victory for Trump critics and local leaders.

DHS said the four detainees who escaped were Franklin Norberto Bautista-Reyes and Joel Enrique Sandoval-Lopez, both from Honduras, and Joan Sebastian Castaneda-Lozada and Andres Pineda-Mogollon, both from Colombia. All four men had criminal records involving weapons, burglary or violence, DHS officials said.

Kim said he would ask ICE and DHS leadership about the site’s future.

“Essentially right now this facility in there is a crime scene, as they are doing investigations into what happened with the breach,” Kim said.

The Department of Homeland Security also did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the site’s potential closure. GEO Group denied there was widespread unrest in a statement.

"We remain dedicated to providing high-quality services to those in our care," spokesperson Christopher Ferreira said.

Multiple news outlets and organizations representing some of the detainees reported that Thursday afternoon’s unrest was started by detainees frustrated over inadequate food, missed meal times and other concerns, including boiling water in the pipes and a lack of family visitation.

Immigration attorney Mustafa Cetin said he spoke Thursday evening to one of his clients detained at Delaney Hall. He said his client told him a group of about 50 detainees protested conditions, like lack of food, and some attacked guards. Some of them pushed down a exterior wall, and escaped to the ground by tying bedsheets together into a rope, he said.

Kim described the wall that had been knocked down as “ essentially just drywall with some mesh inside, and that that actually led to an exterior wall.” Baraka, in a statement Friday, said GEO Group never got permits from Newark to build the interior wall in the first place. City officials have long maintained GEO does not have the proper local permits to operate the facility, which DHS denies.

“This incident is yet another outrageous validation of the negative consequences of a federal government that believes it is above the prudence and practicality of working within legal parameters, and encourages reckless operations of its collaborators.”

Videos posted to social media showed federal agents confronting protesters on Thursday , who were apparently blocking vehicles from entering and exiting the premises.

Advocates accused GEO Group of providing inadequate food at “irregular intervals,” missing meal times, and leaving detainees “hungry and weak for hours.”

This is a developing story and has been updated with more information.

Correction: This story and its headline have been updated to correctly describe statements by Rep. Andy Kim about detainee evacuations. The story has also been updated to clarify details of charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver.