ICE's Delaney Hall is being slammed with lawsuits

Ras Baraka suing over detention conditions while Newark has had consent decrees, water issues, and murder rates that would embarrass a third world city is a level of selective outrage that takes real nerve.

Newark mayor calling a detention facility a health hazard while his city been a health hazard for thirty years and nobody sued about THAT.

The "converted prison" framing matters because facility conversion without the required standards compliance is exactly what triggers constitutional conditions-of-confinement claims. That is not a political argument; that is the legal standard established in Estelle v. Gamble and extended to civil detention in Youngberg. If the facility failed to meet those thresholds during conversion, the lawsuits are not slams, they are the mechanism working as intended. What I have not seen addressed is whether DHS conducted an independent facility inspection before accepting detainees, which is the step where these problems are supposed to get caught.

If the conditions are bad enough that a mayor is calling it a health and safety issue, that's not a partisan talking point, that's just a building problem. I don't care if you think every person in there deserves to be deported or none of them do, you still have to keep people in a facility that isn't going to make them sick. That part shouldn't be controversial.

Every single enforcement tool this administration uses to actually secure the border gets buried under an avalanche of lawsuits the moment it starts working. That is the playbook. Not reform, not legislation, not a competing policy vision. Just lawyers and mayors with press releases. Ras Baraka calling anything a health and human safety crisis is rich coming from a city that has spent years under federal scrutiny for its own failures to protect the people actually living there. The people filing these suits are not interested in conditions inside Delaney Hall. They are interested in making detention so legally painful that ICE cannot detain anyone at all. That is the goal. Not humane treatment. Abolition dressed up in civil rights language. Americans who want the border enforced should understand that every one of these lawsuits is a vote against the idea that the United States has the right to remove people who are here illegally. That is what is actually being litigated. Not health codes.

Delaney Hall is worth tracking closely because the legal theory behind several of these suits isn't just "bad conditions" in the abstract, it's that CoreCivic reopened the facility under a contract that bypassed the normal detention standards review process. That procedural shortcut is what gives the ACLU and the detainees' rights orgs a foothold beyond the usual Eighth Amendment arguments, which are harder to win in civil immigration detention because courts have been reluctant to apply the same standard to civil detainees as criminal ones. The Newark mayor's statement is politically useful but the litigation is where the actual leverage is. If a court issues a preliminary injunction on health and safety grounds before the contract dispute is resolved, that's the scenario that actually forces DHS to make a decision about whether to defend the facility or quietly move people out.

My parents came here with nothing and spent decades terrified every single time a cop drove past. That fear was a feature, not a bug, for people who designed these systems. Delaney Hall is not an anomaly. It is the point. You take a building that was already failing people as a prison, you rebrand it, you stuff it with human beings whose only crime was crossing an invisible line, and then you act surprised when a mayor shows up and calls it what it is. Health and human safety. Those are the words. Not "operational concerns." Not "processing challenges." Health and human safety. The lawsuits are good. Keep filing them. But we should say clearly what this is: a government that is deliberately making conditions brutal because brutality is the deterrent they want. They are not trying to fix it. They are trying to scare people out of coming. And they do not care who gets hurt in the process.

Scully and I have a file on Delaney Hall that's already three inches thick, and the same guy who won't release the Epstein Files built his whole 2024 run on locking people in converted prisons with no working toilets. The Truth is out there.