New Jersey attorney general opens civil rights probe into Delaney Hall detention center

Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said her office had issued subpoenas and opened a civil-rights investigation into whether employees at Delaney Hall violated detainees’ rights. The move puts New Jersey’s power to compel records and testimony at the center of a widening fight over a privately run immigration detention center in Newark operated by The GEO Group.

Delaney Hall has been a flashpoint since February 2025, when GEO Group said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had awarded it a 15-year, fixed-price contract for the company-owned, 1,000-bed facility. The ACLU of New Jersey said at the time that the contract amounted to about $1 billion and warned that reopening the center as an ICE detention facility would deepen civil-rights and accountability concerns. Those concerns sharpened as families of detained people rallied outside the facility on May 22, 2026, citing reports of dangerous conditions and a hunger and labor strike inside.

The pressure intensified in June. On June 2, 2026, New Jersey sued the operator after it refused full access to state health inspectors, and state officials said the Department of Health had been barred from parts of the facility needed to evaluate sanitation and safety. The next day, Human Rights Watch published a report titled New Jersey Hunger Strikers Allege Abysmal Detention Conditions, after the American Civil Liberties Union said hundreds of people at Delaney Hall had joined a hunger strike over what it described as inhumane conditions. The Department of Homeland Security denied allegations of poor conditions.

The dispute drew Congress into the fray as well. On July 22, 2026, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight held a hearing titled False Narratives Surrounding Conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE Detention Center, and Amol Sinha, the executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, submitted written testimony. By then, Delaney Hall had become a test case for how far a state can push for transparency inside a private ICE facility when federal detention contracts, private operators and state oversight collide.