Unrest and protests have erupted in and around a controversial immigration detention center in New Jersey, with police and federal officials clashing with protesters after detainees reportedly pushed down a wall in revolt at the conditions they were being held in.
About 50 detainees pushed down a wall in the dormitory room of the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, on Thursday night, according to an immigration lawyer representing one of the men held there.
“It’s about the food, and some of the detainees were getting aggressive and it turned violent,” the lawyer, Mustafa Cetin, told NJ Advance Media. “Based on what he told me, it was an outer wall, not very strong, and they were able to push it down.”
Following the uprising, a crowd of protesters gathered at the facility, and videos posted on social media show them blocking vehicles being driven by law enforcement officials and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents who sought to quell the disturbance.
Amid the chaos, there were reports that four detainees were unaccounted for on Friday morning. A group called NJ Alliance for Immigrant Justice said that there were “reports of gas, pepper spray, and a possible fire” inside the center.
On Friday afternoon, the US Department of Homeland Security said that authorities were looking for four detainees who escaped from the federal detention center and additional resources were bring brought in to look for them, the Associated Press reported.
Delaney Hall is run by a private prison company called GEO Group, which holds a $60m contract with the Trump administration to hold as many as 1,000 people at a time within the facility and has a controversial history over conditions at centers.
The center reopened following a refurbishment last month but has faced controversy, with local politicians claiming that it doesn’t hold the correct work permits and certificate of occupancy, posing safety risks. GEO Group has denied this.
Shortly after its reopening, LaMonica McIver, a Democratic representative, was arrested after joining an oversight visit of the center. On Wednesday, McIver was indicted and charged with assaulting and interfering with immigration officers, charges which she has called “a brazen attempt at political intimidation”.
Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, was also arrested at the site in that incident, for trespassing, but those charges have been dropped.
In a statement Friday, Baraka said he understood that the four escaped detainees had managed to get out “by kicking though an interior wall”.
“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,” Baraka said.
An earlier statement from Baraka said: “We are concerned about reports of what has transpired at Delaney Hall this evening, ranging from withholding food and poor treatment, to uprising and escaped detainees.
“This entire situation lacks sufficient oversight of every basic detail, including local zoning laws and fundamental constitutional rights.”
Ice has yet to comment on the situation at Delaney Hall. The clashes follow protests in several US cities over the detention of immigrants and others by the Trump administration, most notably in Los Angeles, where Trump has deployed the military, a extremely rare and controversial move that is being challenged in court by the state of California.
