WASHINGTON — Federal labor investigators in May inspected Delaney Hall in Newark, where detainees staged recent hunger and labor strikes to protest the conditions.
Staff from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which had received a complaint about the site, opened the investigation on May 22 and conducted an inspection, without advance notice, that day.
The inspection of both the site and the company that runs it, Geo Group, remains open, according to OSHA enforcement data. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement site, Delaney Hall holds about 900 detainees, according to federal data.
Spokespeople for OSHA did not respond to a request for comment from NJ Spotlight News. Geo Group spokesman Christopher Ferreira referred questions to ICE.
The inspection of Delaney Hall is the first that OSHA has opened into a Geo Group location in this Trump administration. The second is of a prison that the publicly traded company, a significant Trump political donor, runs in West Texas.
‘Gulags shouldn’t exist’
Tensions erupted at the Newark facility over Memorial Day weekend in late May, after immigration agents pepper sprayed demonstrators including Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), who, like other New Jersey Democrats who represent the state in Congress, has called for broad reforms to the facility.
“These gulags shouldn’t exist in our country in the first place,” Rep. Herb Conaway (D-3rd), referring to immigrant detention sites, told NJ Spotlight News last week. People held at Delaney have issued five open letters reporting rotten food, inadequate health care, and forced labor. One woman said she was sexually assaulted, another said she miscarried at two months because of medical negligence and a third said her infant doesn’t recognize her when family brings him for visits.
“I believe that most Americans, if they saw who is being held and the conditions under which they’re detained, would agree that this facility is a moral stain on our nation,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said in late May, after a visit to Delaney Hall.
Of the 27 inspections OSHA has conducted of Geo sites in the last decade, seven turned up violations. Among them is an open case against a Geo-run site north of Bakersfield, Calif., that resulted in six violations with potential penalties of more than $100,000.
On-site OSHA inspections can be triggered by any of eight conditions, such as a report of imminent danger, a whistleblower referral, allegations of physical harm or a written and signed complaint from a current employee.
In 2014, Geo Group agreed to a company-wide settlement with OSHA after the agency cited the company for workplace safety violations at a Mississippi prison. The findings included a failure to provide enough correctional officers, to fix broken cell door locks and to provide “required training and personal protective equipment to protect employees from incidents of violent behavior by inmates, including stabbings, bites and other injuries,” OSHA said at the time of the settlement.
Geo Group and CoreCivic are the two dominant private-prison contractors that run ICE detention centers across the nation. CoreCivic oversees the Elizabeth Detention Center, another New Jersey ICE facility.
Geo Group, based in Boca Raton, Fla., has a market capitalization — or value of outstanding shares as an estimate of its worth — of $3.8 billion. Its profit margin has surged on detention contracts.
President Donald Trump last week signed legislation into law to provide $70 billion in new funding for federal immigration enforcement and his mass deportation agenda.
The injection will be added to the roughly $170 billion in immigration and border enforcement funding that Congress provided through a 2025 budget law, which cleared the House and Senate on largely party-line votes in the summer.
That law, the legislative centerpiece of the second Trump administration, capped the number of federal immigration judges at 800, further slowing a daunting backlog of more than 3.9 million immigration cases nationwide.
New Jersey this month sued Geo Group in state Superior Court, demanding complete access to Delaney Hall, including bathrooms, sleeping quarters and medical facilities. State health inspectors were permitted access only to food-service areas, state prosecutors said in court papers.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd) toured Delaney Hall recently and found it in fine shape. “I saw good conditions, clean facilities, basic care, and a detention center where ICE and DHS are doing a hard job that keeps our communities safe,” Van Drew said. Van Drew’s reelection campaign received $3,000 in 2025 from Geo Group’s political action committee, a corporate entity, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Under the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security — the parent agency of ICE — has tried to wipe out its internal watchdog staff responsible for detention safety.
