Analilia Mejia

Rep. Analilia Mejia says she's seen with her own eyes what the Trump administration insists is not happening.

In an interview, Mejia, a Democrat representing North Jersey's 11th Congressional District, said she visited ICE's Delaney Hall detention center — site of a hunger strike and chaotic protests in recent days — and heard firsthand from detainees about poor conditions at the Newark facility, including spoiled food and medical care denied.

That's directly in contrast with the Department of Homeland Security, which has insisted that detainees get top-shelf care and that stories otherwise are just so much political posturing.

But the troubling tales that Mejia and other New Jersey representatives have shared in recent days don't come in a vacuum. They line up with two investigative reports issued in recent days by national media. Together, and with past reporting, they paint a picture of a federal detention system failing to protect those in its custody — sometimes with fatal consequences.

"I know what I saw," Mejia said of her visits to Delaney Hall and ICE's Elizabeth detention center. "I saw pregnant women gripping their bellies in pain and not receiving the kind of care that one deserves. I met individuals who are injured, who are not being given the care that they deserve. I heard many, many individuals, in multiple languages, tell me, that the food is such that it is, many times, not edible."

With the violence we've seen outside Delaney Hall in recent days, it has become easy to forget that this is a debate about what's going on inside the facility.

Delaney Hall is an emblem of negligent federal care for detainees

Delaney Hall joins a growing pile of evidence of negligent care in the federal deportation machine. More evidence came on May 27, in an Associated Press investigation that found ICE detainees are dying by suicide at an unprecedented rate in the second Trump administration.

The AP documented the deaths of at least 10 men held by ICE or one of its contractors since January 2025, with suicides rising at a pace that far outstrips the growth in detainee numbers over the last two years. The seven deaths classified as suicides since October are the most for any fiscal year in ICE's history, after years in which the agency typically recorded no more than one a year.

The deaths suggest ICE is failing to take basic steps to keep those in custody from harming themselves, corrections and mental health experts told the AP. The report cited instances where officials failed to meet ICE's promise to screen people within 12 hours of arrival for medical, dental and mental health conditions.

“It’s clear that ICE has taken very few steps to ensure the safety of these people,” attorney David Rankin, whose Chinese immigrant client died in a privately run Pennsylvania facility, told the AP. “They appear to want to make this process as cruel and inhuman as possible. It’s completely unacceptable.”

In New Jersey, Mejia said she met a detainee who said he had hit his head in a fall and was suffering from chronic headaches and a loss of hearing. "He wasn't given any kind of intervention or care" or allowed to return to a hospital for a checkup, she said.

She met with pregnant women who did not have access to prenatal treatment, another woman who said she had a miscarriage but did not receive follow-up care, and detainees with chronic medical conditions like diabetes who Mejia said did not get the proper medication or diet.

Delaney Hall, which can house up to 1,000 people, "frankly isn't suited to the number of people with the varied conditions that they have," Mejia said. Families of detainees and advocates have called for the release of 100 sick, young or elderly detainees there.

Instead, Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, initially denied the existence of a hunger strike and then dismissed the warnings of "New Jersey sanctuary politicians."

Detainees get medical, dental and mental health services "as available" and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care, the agency said in a May 25 statement.

“All detainees are provided with three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries" it added. "Certified dieticians evaluate meals."

Not the first concerns at Delaney Hall

These weren't the first signs of trouble at the facility, which is operated by a private company, the GEO Group. A year ago, four detainees escaped amid a riot over alleged food shortages and poor living conditions. In December, Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian national, died just one day after arriving at Delaney Hall, inviting more scrutiny.

In another telling report, National Public Radio on May 26 noted a new Trump administration tactic designed to speed up deportations. The Justice Department has begun to rapidly accelerate the timeline for immigration hearings and combine them together in ways that make it easier for judges to order non-citizens' removal, NPR said, in a report that cited immigration lawyers.

The department is rescheduling immigrants into mass court appointments, known as "mega masters." that may include more than 100 people at a time and come far sooner than expected. The practice targets people without lawyers representing them and provides a justification for judges to issue removal orders to those who show up late or miss the sessions altogether, NPR said.

That echoed stories that U.S. Sen Andy Kim, New Jersey's junior senator and a Democrat, recounted after visiting Delaney Hall on Memorial Day weekend. Detainees described a "judicial process [that] is clearly not fair, clearly not in line with our Constitution," Kim said.

Kim was pepper-sprayed when he tried to intervene in a physical conflict between demonstrators and federal officers outside Delaney Hall.

"They showed me a piece of paper," Kim said. "This judge has 74 cases in front of her in one day. How are they to feel like they're going to have someone actually listen to their circumstance and take them seriously? It makes you really wonder: What is the dynamic there? I was doing the math — that's about six minutes per case."

But the math is clearly about maximizing removals, not fairness.

The standard response from ICE supporters, beyond denying that problems exist, is to wonder why anybody should be so concerned about the hardened criminals the government is supposedly rounding up. "They should be thanking our law enforcement for removing these murderers, pedophiles, rapists and drug traffickers from their state," DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted in response to the Delaney Hall protests.

The numbers don't really back up that portrait. Among the 60,000 people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as of April 6, 71% had no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The research center at Syracuse University keeps a public, running tally based on data released by ICE.

"These are not criminals," Mejia said of the people she encountered. "These are individuals who, yes, may have overstayed visas, may have been in the middle of their process, many of them detained as they were following the law. And we are holding them in conditions that honestly no one should be held under."

Trump's two election victories show that a sizable chunk of the American public shares at least some of his concerns about immigration. We can have reasonable debates about how many migrants come to this country and how to deal with those who broke the law to get here.

But immigration status should be irrelevant when it comes to treating people humanely. So should a criminal record, frankly. Legally and morally, the government has an obligation to provide a basic standard of safety for those whose freedom it takes away in the American people's name.

It's not a matter of the detainees' worthiness, but of ours.

Alex Nussbaum, a veteran New Jersey journalist who has worked as a reporter and an editor covering the environment, business and local news in the Garden State, is opinion editor for NorthJersey.com and The Record.