Immigration and Customs Enforcement is set to reopen an immigrant detention facility in Newark that will nearly double the agency’s capacity to detain people in the New York City region, the agency announced in a press release late Wednesday evening.

The private prison contractor The GEO Group said the 1,000 bed facility would open this spring, and that the company had signed a 15-year contract with ICE worth $60 million a year. According to the Federal Procurement Data System, the contract, dated Wednesday, is worth a total of $1.2 billion. 

The reopened Delaney Hall, which had detained a smaller number of immigrants between 2011 and 2017, will be by far the largest detention facility in the region.

“This detention center is the first to open under the new istration,” acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello said in the release. “The location near an international airport streamlines logistics, and helps facilitate the timely processing of individuals in our custody as we pursue President Trump’s mandate to arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from our communities.”

George Zoley, executive chairman of The GEO Group, called it an “unprecedented opportunity to help the federal government meet its expanded immigration enforcement priorities,” adding they’d expanded bed capacity since the facility was last used.

“Our company-owned Delaney Hall Facility will play an important role in providing needed detention bedspace and services for ICE in the Northeast,” he said. An analysis from Open Secrets found that people d with GEO Group contributed $1 million last year to Make America Great Again Inc, a PAC that ed Trump.

In a quarterly earnings call on Thursday morning, Zoley told shareholders that the company anticipated that President Trump’s mass-deportation agenda would lead to a massive increase in the number of ICE detention beds — to as many as 160,000 from the current 41,000 —along with a surge in deportation flights and electronic monitoring. 

“ We expect the upside potential from all these opportunities to represent as much as $800 million to $1 billion in incremental annual ICE revenues” as new contracts  open up, Zoley said, on top of the $2.42 billion in revenues the companies had been projecting.

The Trump round-up would create “an unprecedented time in our company’s history,” GEO Group CEO David Donahue said on the call. 

“ We believe the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced.”

‘A Very Scary Time’

Reopening the Delaney Hall facility has been in the pipeline for months, triggering alarm among local immigrants rights activists, who argue that the easier it is for ICE to detain immigrants, the more the agency moves to do so. The Biden istration first solicited proposals for a new detention facility back in July. 

“It is a very scary time for New York City residents,” Karla Ostolaza, the managing director of the immigration practice at Bronx Defenders. “It’s very concerning that there is going to be a much more direct pipeline from the city into detention centers that are across the river and what that will mean for New York City families.”

While there was an initial surge in arrests in the days after President Trump’s inauguration, arrest numbers have sunk back down to Biden-era levels, according to the most recent data available through mid-February.

Still, the number of people in detention is climbing and is now at its highest number early 2020 after a 5% rise in the past month.  As of Feb. 9, immigration detention centers nationwide held 41,169 people, more than half of whom had no criminal charge or conviction according to data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that maintains immigration data online. 

New York State has three jails — in Buffalo, Orange County and Clinton County — housing about 600 detained immigrants, according to the most recent TRAC data available. 

The only existing detention center in New Jersey, located in Elizabeth, houses 270 detained immigrants, while the largest detention center in the northeast, Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, where New York City residents are sometimes sent and about 1,100 people are currently held, is a four-hour drive away.

New Jersey tried to bar public and private immigration detention centers with a 2021 law signed by Gov. Phil Murphy. But The Geo Group and CoreCivic, another private prison contractor, sued and a judge deemed the law partially unconstitutional in 2023. 

The Biden istration took the side of private prison companies in that case, arguing in federal court papers that ICE needed detention centers near airports to expedite operations. 

“Without a nearby facility, turnaround cases would either remain in the airport for days waiting for their return flight, or be released into the United States with little hope that they would actually depart as required by law,” a statement of interest written by Robert Guadian, Deputy Assistant Director for Field Operations at ICE and DHS in July of 2023. “Second, forcing ICE to close the Elizabeth facility would likely prevent ICE from detaining noncitizens with violent criminal histories that are released from state and local facilities.”

In a statement, U.S. Senator Cory Booker slammed GEO group’s new contract, saying he’d urged the Biden istration not to reopen Delaney Hall last year. 
“GEO Group has a documented history of gross neglect, including malnourishment, inhumane living conditions, forced labor, and the physical and sexual abuse of people detained at its facilities. Yet this istration is cutting them a $1 billion check,” said Booker, a former Newark mayor.

“Put plainly, the reopening of the Delaney Hall Facility is an insult to immigrant communities and advocates in New Jersey, New York, and around the country who have fought tirelessly to document the human rights abuses at private detention centers and repeatedly pushed istration after istration to ensure the humane treatment of detained people.”