**Delaney Hall: What’s Actually Happening Inside Newark’s Most Controversial Detention Center**

A federal contract. A private prison company. Nearly a thousand people locked up without trial. And a U.S. Senator who got pepper-sprayed trying to find out why. Here’s The Rundown.

How This Started

Delaney Hall sits at 451 Doremus Avenue in Newark, New Jersey, a hulking industrial building on the edge of Newark Bay. It’s run by GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies. The facility first held immigrant detainees from 2011 to 2017, then closed. In February 2025, ICE awarded GEO Group a 15-year, $1 billion contract to reopen it. By May 2025, people were being held inside. It’s now the largest immigration detention facility on the East Coast, with an authorized capacity of 1,196 beds.

The reopening was immediately contested. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said GEO Group hadn’t complied with standard municipal building and safety regulations. The city sued in March 2025, alleging the facility lacked a valid certificate of occupancy. A federal judge ordered both sides to mediation, with a deadline of June 15 to resolve it. Baraka got arrested outside the facility in May 2025 while attempting an inspection with other lawmakers. The trespassing charges were dropped. The questions they came to ask were not.

Who Is Actually Inside

The administration’s public framing has consistently leaned on criminal threat language. “Dangerous criminal aliens,” worst of the worst. The data tells a more complicated story.

DHS’s own figures, reported by NJ Spotlight News, showed that roughly 10% of detainees at Delaney Hall had criminal records. The other 90% did not. That number is consistent with broader national detention trends. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research group that analyzes federal data, about 71% of people in ICE detention nationwide have no criminal record. A Jersey Vindicator year-end report put the figure even higher. Approximately nine in ten Delaney Hall detainees had no criminal convictions.

The people inside are primarily Latino, Central and South American, predominantly from Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and El Salvador. These are the nationalities that dominate ICE detention nationally, and they track with Delaney Hall’s population. A letter signed by detainees themselves, published by La Huelga, described people fleeing Uganda, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and countries across Latin America. The population is almost entirely male, given Delaney Hall’s classification as a standard detention facility rather than a family facility.

Some detainees have pending legal cases. Some arrived through official ports of entry. Some have been in the U.S. for years, have families here, and were arrested near immigration courts after showing up for their own hearings. A letter written collectively by detainees described judges issuing 40 or more hearings in a single day, leaving less than a minute per case. Many hearings get canceled outright, leaving people waiting months for a new court date. We are supposed to be granting due process. What these people are seeing is a production line with minimal quality control supervision.

The Conditions Inside

Here’s the list. Frozen and inedible food. Water that’s described as metallic and undrinkable. Cells kept frigidly cold. Commissary shelves stripped bare, with no toothpaste, no shampoo, and no toilet paper. Inconsistent access to prescription medication. Guards in riot gear patrolling inside the building. Guards who reportedly goaded detainees into physical confrontations and retaliated against anyone who complained.

The Jersey Vindicator, which has provided some of the most detailed on-the-ground coverage, reported that detainees described meals arriving at random hours and going long stretches without food at all. In June 2025, the flashpoint came: roughly 50 detainees pushed down a dormitory wall after being denied food for 20 hours. Four men escaped through the resulting gap, climbing out using bedsheets over the razor wire. All four were eventually recaptured. The four who broke out, two from Colombia, two from Honduras, did have serious pending criminal charges. The administration highlighted this loudly. Less highlighted: what pushed 50 men to push down a wall in the first place.

Medical access has been a recurring flashpoint. Detainees with cancer and diabetes reported being unable to get to their medications consistently. One congressman who visited described detainees being given small portions of food that “very often” contained maggots. Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian national, arrived at Delaney Hall on December 11, 2025. He died the next day at University Hospital in Newark. ICE said he showed no signs of distress during intake and had no known cardiovascular history. His family disputed the characterization of his background entirely, saying he had undergone a rigorous four-month vetting process to enter the U.S. He was the first detainee to die at Delaney Hall since it reopened.

GEO Group has consistently denied these accounts. The company’s spokesperson said the facility provides around-the-clock medical care, dietitian-approved meals, access to legal and general libraries, and opportunities for religious practice. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin flatly denied there was any hunger strike occurring. ICE’s own policy defines a detainee as being on hunger strike after 72 hours without eating, at which point they must be referred to medical staff.

The Hunger Strike and Memorial Day Weekend

On or around May 22, 2026, more than 300 detainees at Delaney Hall began refusing food and refusing to participate in facility labor, protesting what they described as inhumane conditions and a lack of due process. The following weekend, things escalated fast.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill went to Delaney Hall on Memorial Day to conduct an inspection. She was denied entry. Senator Andy Kim gained access as part of his congressional oversight authority. What he found, he said, was chaos. Detainees protesting inside, families rallying outside, and a facility that was clearly not under control. “Detainees protesting the lack of due process, the disgusting food and poor treatment while their families and advocates stood outside calling for help,” Kim wrote in a statement that night.

ICE’s response was to send in an armored vehicle and a line of armed agents. Pepper balls were fired into the crowd. Kim was caught in the spray when he attempted to intervene between detention officers and demonstrators. That should be highlighted. A congressman attempted to intervene between detention officers and demonstrators, attempting to deescalate a situation, and was pepper sprayed. A civilian volunteer poured water into his eyes on camera. DHS acknowledged pepper ball deployment but claimed no individuals were directly struck by projectiles. Video evidence showed otherwise.

Tuesday night, May 26, the protests went another round. Demonstrators blocked vehicles from exiting the facility. Some did so out of fear that the vehicles were being used to transfer hunger strikers to other facilities without notice, a practice that had been reported before. ICE deployed pepper spray again. DHS called the demonstrators violent rioters. About six arrests were made.

By Wednesday, May 27, Representatives Jerry Nadler, Daniel Goldman, and Adriano Espaillat made official congressional visits. They used the oversight authority, lawfully held by members of Congress. They described conditions as dire: medical neglect, spoiled food, a population in distress. Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman reported that her staff on the ground was receiving information about ICE retaliating against hunger strikers directly by pepper spraying and beating people inside their cells.

Senator Kim pressed federal officials to restore family visitation privileges that had been suspended, speed up stalled immigration court cases, and conduct a full medical audit of the facility. His request has not been acknowledged publicly by DHS.

By Friday, May 29, the New Jersey State Police took over the perimeter outside to establish what the governor called a “peaceful, protected protest zone.” DHS called that a win for law and order. Both sides claimed the other had refused to cooperate.

The Access Problem

This is one of the most legally concrete issues here, and it keeps getting glossed over.

Members of Congress have a statutory right to conduct oversight inspections of federal detention facilities. Multiple members have been stopped, delayed, or turned away at Delaney Hall and at other ICE facilities around the country. When Reps. Nadler, Goldman, and Espaillat showed up Wednesday night, one of them reportedly had to hold up a court order confirming his right to enter. When Baraka arrived in May 2025 with other officials, he was arrested. The charges were dropped but the message was loud and remained.

The New Jersey Department of Health sought to conduct a full health inspection of the facility in late May 2026. They were denied full access and allowed to inspect only a limited portion of the building. Governor Sherrill’s response was blunt: “Refusing to provide full access raises serious questions about what ICE is trying to hide from public view.”

DHS argued that the governor doesn’t have legal authority to order an inspection of a federal immigration facility, which is technically accurate. What’s less clear is whether the facility’s refusal to allow a state health department inspection of a building operating within state boundaries is defensible. That legal question has not been resolved.

Family visitation was also restricted around the time the hunger strike began, a move that advocates said was retaliatory. Families reported learning their relatives had been transferred to other facilities with no notice and no documentation. An open letter signed by detainees described the situation as being “kidnapped” and moved like cargo.

The First Amendment Problem

Peaceful protest is legal. Blocking a public or private driveway is not. The line between those two things is where most of the legal tension at Delaney Hall sits.

Critics have raised two separate First Amendment concerns. The first is the use of force against protesters who were not engaged in violence. Specifically, the deployment of pepper balls against a crowd that included a sitting U.S. Senator. The second is the charges filed against politicians who were there exercising oversight functions. Congresswoman LaMonica McIver faces charges of assaulting officers during Baraka’s arrest in May 2025. She faces up to 17 years. She has called the charges purely political. No other person in that crowd was charged.

Civil liberties attorneys have noted that aggressively charging a member of Congress for actions taken during an official oversight visit raises serious constitutional questions. DHS has not explained why McIver was singled out while others were not.

Then there’s the protest zone. On May 29, Governor Sherrill announced that New Jersey State Police would establish a “peaceful, protected protest zone” outside Delaney Hall, a designated area where demonstrators are permitted to demonstrate. The framing was well-intentioned: reduce clashes, cool the temperature, prevent the federal government from having a pretext to escalate further. The attorney general described it as protecting civil rights. But think about what a “First Amendment zone” actually says. The First Amendment doesn’t grant rights in a box. It doesn’t say Americans may speak freely and assemble peaceably inside the designated area. It says Congress shall make no law abridging those rights. Full stop. The concept of corralling constitutionally protected activity into a government-approved perimeter has been challenged in courts repeatedly, particularly around political conventions and federal events, with mixed results depending on the specifics.

Courts have generally allowed time, place, and manner restrictions on protest provided they are content-neutral and leave open alternative channels. But the optics are hard to separate from the reality: the government pepper-sprays people for standing in the wrong spot, then draws a line on the ground and tells them to stand here instead. DHS called the protest zone “a win for law and order.” What it actually represents is a negotiated retreat. The state stepping in because federal agents had been firing chemical irritants at crowds that included sitting U.S. senators, and something needed to give.

That something was the sidewalk. Whether boxing protest into an approved zone protects rights or quietly diminishes them is a question worth sitting with, because the same logic that says you can protest here and not there can be applied anywhere there’s something someone would rather you not be looking at too closely.

Camp East Montana, Alligator Alcatraz, and Dilley: A Pattern

Delaney Hall is only one center, but it’s part of a rapidly expanding national detention infrastructure, and the conditions being reported there are nearly identical to what’s being documented at facilities across the country.

Camp East Montana is an ICE detention facility on Fort Bliss, a U.S. Army base in El Paso, Texas. Opened in August 2025, it’s now the largest immigration detention facility in U.S. history, with space for up to 5,000 people. Within its first 50 days, ICE’s own internal oversight unit documented 60 violations of federal detention standards. By February 2026, a second inspection found 49 more violations, including failures to document suicide prevention checks and inadequate medical care. Three people have died there since it opened. A congressman who conducted an oversight visit in April 2026 reported that detainees told him 98% of the population had no criminal record. Guards reportedly placed bets on which detainee would die next, according to NPR’s April investigation. The facility was initially run by a company called Acquisition Logistics LLC, which had no prior detention experience and had secured a $1.3 billion federal contract.

Alligator Alcatraz is the nickname for the Everglades Detention Facility in South Florida, a tent compound opened in July 2025 with capacity for 3,000 people. The name was embraced, not resisted, by state officials who publicly praised the facility as frightening for potential escapees because of alligators and pythons in the surrounding environment. Amnesty International visited in September 2025 and documented physical and sexual abuse, medical neglect, and what they described as systematic intimidation to pressure people into signing voluntary deportation orders. A federal judge ordered it shut down. A federal appeals court later overturned that order, allowing it to stay open.

Dilley, formally the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, holds a different population: families, including women and children, primarily from Central America. Operated by CoreCivic, it reopened in 2025 with a capacity of 2,400. A joint report by Human Rights First and RAICES, released in April 2026, documented conditions that the authors called pervasive and systemic: families routinely held longer than the legal limits set by the Flores Settlement Agreement, children experiencing worms in food, fluorescent lights that never turn off fully, guards who screamed at small children and confiscated toys, and hours-long waits for basic medication. The median age of children interviewed was 7. Their median detention period was nearly two months. DHS filed competing court documents saying conditions were fine.

The thread connecting all of them: private companies managing facilities under minimal oversight, detainees with limited access to attorneys and family, health inspectors being blocked or delayed, and congressional oversight being treated as an obstacle rather than a legal obligation.

The Historical Question Nobody Agrees On

The word “concentration camp” has been applied to this network of detention facilities by the ACLU, by scholars, and by Japanese American advocacy organizations. The Trump administration called such comparisons “deranged and lazy.” The Japanese American Citizens League, whose predecessors lived through World War II internment, rejected that pushback firmly and said the ACLU was right to draw the parallel.

This is a debate that deserves an honest look at the actual historical record.

During World War II, Executive Order 9066 authorized the forced removal and incarceration of more than 125,000 people of Japanese descent, including American citizens, from the West Coast. They were held in camps operated under military authority, with no criminal charges, no trials, and no individualized assessment of danger. The stated justification was national security. The actual driving force, as later government investigations confirmed, was racial prejudice. The Supreme Court upheld it in Korematsu v. United States in 1944. Congress formally apologized and paid reparations in 1988.

Fort Bliss, where Camp East Montana now sits, previously held people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent as “enemy aliens” in 1942. Two compounds surrounded by barbed wire with guard towers. The ACLU described the current facility as “another shameful chapter in Fort Bliss’ history.” Ann Burroughs, president of the Japanese American National Museum, said: “It is inconceivable that the United States is once again building concentration camps, denying the lessons learned 80 years ago.”

A group of scholars published an analysis in The Conversation in April 2026 arguing that current ICE detention centers meet the technical definition of concentration camps: civilians confined en masse without the typical trial protections that apply to criminal detention, in facilities that exist outside the normal prison system, where the state controls who enters and exits and under what conditions. They noted: hundreds of U.S. citizens have been detained by ICE without justification; access has been restricted for lawyers, family members, journalists, and members of Congress; and 23 people have died in ICE detention between October 2025 and March 2026.

The key distinction historians typically draw is intent: Nazi concentration camps were systems designed for mass extermination. Japanese American internment camps were systems designed for incarceration and control. The current ICE detention system is not designed for extermination. But that is a narrow bar and is not beyond contestation.

The U.S. has run detention systems that it later officially condemned before. The Chinese Exclusion Act, enforced starting in 1882, led to Angel Island detention facilities where Chinese immigrants were held for months while their paperwork was scrutinized under a presumption of fraud. The government officially apologized for this in 2012. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. The mass deportation of Mexican Americans and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent during the 1930s “Repatriation” campaigns. Each of these was legally authorized at the time. Each targeted a specific ethnic population disproportionately. Each was later condemned by the same government that authorized it.

The population currently held at Delaney Hall and facilities like it is overwhelmingly Latino. The enforcement patterns that fill these facilities draw primarily from Latino communities. That’s a data point with historical precedent.

Sexual Abuse, Pregnant Detainees, and the Collapse of Accountability

This section is difficult to write, and should be difficult to read. What follows is documented, sourced, and cross-referenced against court records, congressional investigations, federal agency reports, and peer-reviewed research. The people these findings describe are real. Many are still inside these facilities.

- The Scale of Reported Abuse

Sexual abuse inside immigration detention is not a fringe allegation. It is a documented, recurring, and structurally enabled pattern spanning multiple facilities, multiple operators, and multiple administrations. Freedom for Immigrants, which analyzes complaint data obtained through federal records requests, documented over 1,000 complaints of sexual abuse across ICE facilities. That figure includes more than 400 complaints of coerced sexual contact, nearly 200 of sexual harassment, and 380 of physical or sexual abuse lodged directly against ICE. A 2013 Government Accountability Office report found that facility officials were failing to report 40% of sexual abuse allegations to ICE headquarters, and that was before the current detention expansion, which has placed far more people in custody under far less oversight. Since January 2025, detention numbers have increased by more than 25%, with ICE regularly holding over 68,000 people in a system that was not built, staffed, or inspected to handle that volume.

In January 2025, Senator Jon Ossoff launched a formal congressional investigation into human rights abuses across the U.S. detention system. His staff conducted site inspections, interviewed 46 detainees directly, and compiled credible reports from correctional staff, law enforcement officers, attorneys, doctors, and nurses. Among their findings: 41 credible reports of physical and sexual abuse of people in immigration detention, 14 credible reports of mistreatment of pregnant women, and 18 credible reports of children being mistreated, some as young as two years old, including U.S. citizens held in DHS custody. DHS disputed the findings and called them false.

- Staff-on-Detainee Abuse: Confirmed Cases

The most legally documented category of abuse is staff-on-detainee assault, cases where facility employees, guards, or medical staff are the perpetrators. These are not allegations that were dismissed. Several have resulted in criminal convictions.

In December 2025, David Courvelle, a 56-year-old contract detention officer at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, a GEO Group facility, pleaded guilty in federal court to sexual abuse of a ward in federal custody. The facility houses women and detainees of various gender identities. According to prosecutors, Courvelle had developed what he described as a personal relationship with a Nicaraguan woman detained on an immigration matter. Initially denying the relationship to ICE Office of Inspector General investigators, he eventually admitted to it. He faces up to 15 years in federal prison.

At the Berks Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania, a detainee, a 19-year-old asylum seeker and domestic violence survivor from Honduras who was detained alongside her 3-year-old child, was sexually assaulted by a facility employee. The employee pled guilty to criminal institutional sexual assault under Pennsylvania law. The detention center’s legal position in the civil case that followed was that the assault was “consensual” and that the facility could not be held constitutionally liable. A federal court ultimately considered that argument. The case is E.D. v. Sharkey. It did not end in accountability for the facility. It ended in procedural dismissal.

At the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, operated by GEO Group, a May 2026 report from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights reviewed approximately 6,000 pages of internal records and documented 172 separate reports of alleged sexual abuse or assault between January 2015 and March 2025. Of those, GEO Group and ICE’s own internal investigations substantiated 19. Ninety were labeled unsubstantiated, meaning not enough evidence was found to confirm or deny the assault. Thirty-six were labeled unfounded. Among those deemed unsubstantiated: a case where a detained man reported being forced to perform oral sex on another detained man four separate times over a month in 2024. That case was later upheld by DNA evidence analyzed by the Tacoma Police Department. ICE and GEO Group had labeled it unsubstantiated before the DNA results existed. Across more than a decade of reported abuse at that facility, only two cases resulted in prosecution, both involving GEO Group employees as the alleged victims, not detainees.

At the Otay Mesa detention center in San Diego, run by CoreCivic, at least seven reported sexual assaults went uninvestigated by local law enforcement in 2025. The reason: a memorandum of understanding between the San Diego County Sheriff’s office and CoreCivic grants the facility’s private warden, not law enforcement, the authority to decide whether rape allegations warrant investigation. The warden works for CoreCivic. CoreCivic collects federal detention contracts. The people who were assaulted had no recourse outside the private company whose employee may have been the perpetrator.

- Pregnant Detainees and Minors

Between January 1, 2025, and February 16, 2026, ICE detained and then released or deported 498 pregnant, postpartum, or nursing women. Sixteen miscarriages were recorded in detention during that period. As of mid-February 2026, 86 pregnant women remained in active ICE custody, including 9 in their third trimester. ICE’s own written policy states that pregnant, postpartum, and nursing women are generally not to be detained for administrative immigration violations unless legally required or under exceptional circumstances. That policy is routinely not followed. After President Trump took office in 2025, the administration stopped providing Congress with routine reports on the number of pregnant women in ICE custody. This was the sole reporting mechanism that had previously allowed oversight to function.

Among those detained are pregnant teenagers. The Center for Reproductive Rights, in a March 2026 federal filing, stated specifically that pregnant teenagers in ICE custody include survivors of sexual assault and that those minors are being held in facilities or states where they cannot access abortion care. This is not a hypothetical. The Trump administration centralized all pregnant unaccompanied minors apprehended by immigration enforcement into a single group shelter in South Texas, a decision made over documented objections from the administration’s own health and child welfare officials, who flagged that the facility and surrounding region lacked adequate specialized medical care. Federal guidance requires that unaccompanied pregnant minors be placed in states where they can access abortion care if they request it. In July 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion revoking the prior policy framework that had ensured this access. Girls who became pregnant through assault, before or, in documented cases, during their time in the custody system, were being held in facilities in states where they could not legally terminate those pregnancies. Some were held in Texas, where abortion is banned with narrow exceptions. The administration did not comment publicly on this arrangement.

The broader treatment of pregnant detainees in the system is also documented in ways that go beyond sexual assault. A pregnant Tennessee woman was arrested by ICE while her husband was being detained; she later suffered a stillbirth while held at a Louisiana ICE facility. Her repeated requests for medical attention were denied until it was too late. Doctors who reviewed her case noted that the loss was a direct result of not receiving the prenatal care she had repeatedly asked for. Members of Congress who visited Louisiana ICE facilities in 2025 described witnessing a pregnant woman with medical risk factors and staff who were entirely unprepared for the possibility of a birth. They also described women afraid to speak to members of Congress, shaking with fear of retaliation if they said anything.

- The Irwin County Precedent

No examination of medical and sexual abuse in immigration detention is complete without the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, and what happened after it was exposed matters as much as what happened inside it.

In September 2020, a whistleblower nurse named Dawn Wooten filed a federal complaint alleging that women detainees at Irwin were being subjected to invasive and non-consensual gynecological procedures. More than 40 women ultimately came forward. A bipartisan Senate investigation lasting 18 months, led by Senator Jon Ossoff, concluded that women detainees at Irwin “appear to have been subjected to excessive, invasive, and often unnecessary gynecological procedures.” The Senate’s report found the specific allegation of mass hysterectomies was not substantiated. What it did find was serious, documented misconduct: procedures performed without women’s full informed consent, a pattern the investigators described as systemic. Forty-three women filed or participated in related legal action. The Biden administration stopped detaining immigrants at Irwin in 2021 and terminated the facility’s contract. The case settled in January 2025, with no admission of liability.

By October 2025, ICE had renewed a contract with Irwin County Detention Center. The same facility. The women who testified against it had been deported or released. Most of their legal claims had been dismissed on procedural grounds before the settlement. The building was reopened for federal detainees.

- Why Reporting Fails

The structure of these facilities makes reporting assault almost impossible for the people who experience it. A detainee cannot leave. They often cannot speak English, cannot access a phone without a guard present, and have no independent relationship with any law enforcement agency outside the walls. If they report, retaliation is documented and common. Freedom for Immigrants notes that people who report sexual abuse are routinely retaliated against and then re-victimized by an investigative process that either doesn’t exist or is run by the same private company that employs their abuser. Many are deported before any investigation concludes, which renders their complaints unresolvable by design.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed in 2003, was designed to address exactly this kind of systemic failure in detention settings. The problem is that the Department of Justice excluded immigration detention centers from PREA’s full protections. ICE facilities fall under DHS standards instead … and ICE has issued waivers exempting some individual facilities from even those reduced standards. The oversight gap is written into the regulatory framework. ICE’s formal position is zero tolerance for sexual abuse and a commitment to investigating all allegations. In practice, ICE and GEO Group are permitted to investigate themselves, are not required to involve law enforcement, and face no mandatory external audit when investigations are closed without findings. The UW Center for Human Rights director put it plainly: “Any agency, whether it’s government or private business or anybody interested in accountability, has to understand the importance of there being external oversight.” That oversight has been narrowing as detention numbers grow.

Delaney Hall has not been the subject of specific published sexual abuse investigations of the kind conducted at Tacoma or Irwin. That does not mean abuse is not occurring there. It means that the same barriers that suppress reporting elsewhere, such as no independent investigations, no mandatory law enforcement involvement, and restricted access for outside observers, apply at Delaney Hall too, arguably more acutely given that health inspectors and congressional oversight teams have been actively turned away at the door. What is confirmed at Delaney Hall is that medical care is inadequate, that detainees are afraid to speak out, and that the private company operating the facility is the same GEO Group whose facilities have generated documented sexual abuse findings at Tacoma, documented abuses in Louisiana, and criminal guilty pleas from its own employees. The absence of a published investigation could potentially be evidence of how hard it is for anything to get out.

Where Things Stand Right Now

As of Friday, May 29, 2026, Delaney Hall is still open. The hunger strike has not been resolved. The New Jersey State Police have taken over the perimeter outside, which has reduced immediate confrontations between protesters and ICE agents. The mediation between Newark and GEO Group over the certificate of occupancy has a June 15 deadline.

Congresswoman McIver still faces federal assault charges. The governor is still calling for the facility to be shut down. Family visitation is still restricted. The health inspection that was blocked has not been rescheduled. Senator Kim is still pushing for a full medical audit.

DHS says the facility is fine. ICE says detainees are getting three meals a day and access to lawyers and medical care. GEO Group says its services are monitored around the clock. The detainees inside say something different. Three members of Congress who conducted oversight visits this week said conditions are dire.

There’s a reason this keeps getting called a controversy rather than getting resolved. The government controls the facility. Independent inspectors have been turned away. The people inside can’t leave. Their accounts reach the outside world in fragments, through lawyers, through family members standing in an illegally-parked car on a four-lane truck route because the facility offers no visitor parking, through a letter that got smuggled out and posted online.

There’s not a functioning oversight system, only a wall that the truth has to scale in order to find daylight. The search for that truth is exactly why people are still showing up every night on Doremus Avenue.