4 men escape from NJ federal detention facility
Four detainees escaped from a New Jersey federal detention center Friday, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
'DHS has become aware of 4 detainees at the privately held Delaney Hall Detention Facility escaping,' the agency wrote in a statement to The Hill.
'Additional law enforcement partners have been brought in to find these escapees and a BOLO [be on the lookout] has been disseminated,' he added.
The DHS is offering a $10,000 reward for those who come forward with information that leads to their arrest.
Newark, N.J., Mayor Ras Baraka (D) said he'd heard reports of chaos at the Delaney Hall detention center and plans for an uprising Thursday as protestors gathered outside the facility. Demonstrators eventually railed through barriers surrounding the premises drawing attention to frustrations with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said constituents previously reported issues related to food and water on site, according to The Associated Press. In early May, Democratic New Jersey Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, LaMonica McIver and Rob Menendez visited the facility to conduct congressional oversight amid concerns.
Afterward, lawmakers were told to disperse as protests bubbled outside the facility. A physical altercation occurred resulting in a federal indictment for McIver as federal officials allege she impeded and interfered with law enforcement officers, which she has vehemently denied.
The Delaney Hall detention site is managed by the GEO Group after its $1 billion contract with ICE was finalized in February.
GEO contracts with ICE for the provision of secure residential care services at 20 different facilities in the United States with a total capacity of about 19,000 beds, according to legal filings.
The company's CEO said the company would invest $38 million to renovate existing facilities in addition to $16 million for additional GPS tracking devices and $7 million to expand their secure transportation fleet to help the Trump administration carry out mass deportation plans, according to a previous earnings call transcript.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. If the past week has shown us anything, it's that President Donald Trump is desperate. He wants to deport 1 million immigrants from this country by the end of his first year in office, a level no modern U.S. president has ever hit. His administration has made it clear they're more than willing to push the limits of the law to try to make it happen, whether it's through invoking obscure wartime laws, baselessly revoking people's visas, or calling in the National Guard against civilian protestors. These acts of desperation are highly unlikely to result in 1 million deportations in 2025, but there's a bigger reality here: Trump's deportation targets were always extreme, absurd, and impossible to hit. Even as his administration ramps up attacks on civil society, it seems like Trump himself is beginning to realize this. 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Over the past several months, we've witnessed the Trump administration mistakenly deport at least four immigrants: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, Daniel Lozano-Camargo, and at least one other Guatemalan man. And despite admitting its errors and judges ordering these men be brought back to the U.S. to receive their due process rights, the federal government has often simply refused. 'We just have to look at the front pages of the newspapers today to understand how the administration plans to accomplish its goal,' Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, told me. 'They intend to violate the law and the Constitution, terrorize communities, and mislead the public about instigators of violence. These are all really concerning tactics that obviously are correlated to warning signs of a government that is increasingly authoritarian in nature.' Characteristic of this situation was the report that deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller pressured ICE agents to arrest at least 3,000 immigrants a day, to hell with a warrant or honoring due process. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has shown it is unfazed by cruelty. Despite their stances on immigration, nearly every U.S. president has allowed in a certain number of refugees. Trump, on the other hand, completely gutted the refugee resettlement program so not a single refugee would be legally authorized to enter the country—minus a group of white Afrikaners. That decision left thousands of refugees stranded after going through a rigorous vetting process that often takes years to complete. Then there's the termination of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, a program that the federal government has the legal authority to oversee. Trump directed Homeland Security Secretary Kristin Noem to revoke TPS from migrants by removing their home countries from the program despite ongoing civil wars, political persecution, and other atrocities. These actions, though technically legal, have not been done by previous administrations because they are inexplicably cruel. Families get torn apart, U.S. communities lose integral members, and critical labor is lost. The chaos unfolding in Los Angeles is another predictable result of Trump's delusional deportation goal. As immigration agents raided workplaces, residents of California took to the streets to protest. The Trump administration, unable to withstand any criticism of its agenda, forced National Guard members onto Los Angeles, going against the authority of the city's mayor and governor. 'This is intentional chaos,' Karen Bass, mayor of Los Angeles, said. A district judge recently ruled that it was also an unconstitutional commandeering of forces meant to be under the control of the state's governor, Gavin Newsom. The reality underlying this chaos is that immigration has no correlation with public safety threats. Crime data from 1980 to 2022 found immigrants—including people in the country without legal permission—are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born people, according to a report by the American Immigration Council. Even as the share of immigrants has increased within the U.S. population over the years, national crime rates have trended downwards. And the AIC concluded that 'there's no evidence to suggest that more aggressive immigration enforcement policies lead to less crime.' The Marshall Project came to a similar conclusion after analyzing crime rates between 2007 and 2016, finding that most types of crime, including robberies, murders, burglaries, and larcenies, had a nearly flat trend line even as the population of people without permanent legal status fluctuated. We know that the president rode a wave of xenophobia back into the White House, selling voters on a vision that immigrants are rapists and killers who are causing crime and 'poisoning the blood of our country.' But Trump is proving through his administration's own futile deportation efforts that this imagined threat could never be as dire as the president claimed. On Thursday, Trump himself told supporters in farming and the hospitality business that more 'common sense' was needed in how the Department of Homeland Security approached removals of 'very good workers, they have worked for [American farmers] for 20 years.' Trump further acknowledged that his administration 'can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back.' Given the escalating situation in Los Angeles and Trump's own hostility to immigrants, it's extremely unclear that this promise means anything. Either way, Trump's mass deportation plans will continue to go up in smoke, whether he likes it or not.
