Andy Kim

Delaney Hall, a federal immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, has been the site of escalating clashes in recent days as demonstrators have gathered in support of detainees on a reported hunger strike over poor conditions in the facility, only to be met with force from federal agents. Numerous arrests have taken place, including of nine demonstrators who were taken into custody last Thursday.

New Jersey senator Andy Kim was involved in one of these skirmishes last Monday when he visited the site to conduct oversight and was hit with pepper spray alongside protesters. Kim is just the latest local politician to find himself on the front lines of the fight over Delaney Hall, which was reopened as a detention facility last year. LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey representative, is currently facing federal charges after being accused of assaulting an ICE officer during an attempted oversight visit last year, allegations she denies.

I spoke with Kim on Friday about what he learned during his visit to Delaney Hall and whether anything has really changed at the Department of Homeland Security since Kristi Noem’s firing.

Could you walk me through what you experienced during your visit to the facility?

I went to Delaney Hall — I’ve gone several times, but I went in particular because of the reports of protests inside. I wanted to hear why this hunger strike was happening. I showed up on Monday and, first of all, was not allowed inside even though I had an appointment. Geo Group, the company that runs Delaney Hall — the guards just decided they weren’t going to let me in, which just shows you they just don’t care at all about what the American people or Congress thinks about them, or about oversight. I actually had to call Secretary Markwayne Mullin directly and talk to him personally to be able to get access into the facility. And when I went inside and told the Geo Group head about being denied entry, he actually just looked me in the eye and called me a liar. Just said that I was making the whole thing up, which is, again, just absolutely mind-boggling that taxpayers are giving them a billion dollars to run Delaney Hall.

I went and talked to the detainees. Trump often calls them the worst of the worst, saying that these are the violent criminals. But the people I met were a pregnant woman that’s not getting the medical care that she needs. She’s being held there indefinitely and she literally just asked me, like, does she need to be prepared to have her baby in Delaney Hall? There was an 18-year-old high-school senior who just wants to go to prom and graduate. A stage-three lung-cancer patient who actually wants to leave the country. He wants to just go back home and spend whatever remaining months he has with his family, but he’s stuck and can’t even go. These are the people that I met.

The other thing I just want to hit, because the detainees were very clear with me, is that they have concerns about the conditions, but the main thing they’re protesting is the fact that there’s just no movement when it comes to their cases — that they are not having anything that resembles some type of opportunity to have their cases heard. They showed me this document on a bulletin board in the hallway where it said that one judge has 74 cases before her in just one day. Many of them have been there eight months to a year, if not longer. That’s costing the taxpayer dollars. That’s just more and more money we’re wasting here, and it’s lining the pockets of Geo Group and these for-profit companies that are experiencing the best business in their company’s history.

Can you tell me about the detainees’ hunger strike, which is still going on?

A number of them are doing a hunger strike; others are more broadly protesting alongside them. But they are being retaliated against. A number of the people participating in the protests talked about how the guards there were threatening them, saying that if they don’t stop the protest, they’re going to be transferred elsewhere. One person said their wife is vocal outside, calling for his freedom, and the guards told him that he needs to shut his wife’s mouth. So threats not just for his actions, but for hers. And, actually, that detainee was forcibly transferred in the middle of the night, and others have been as well. There were reports yesterday about four detainees who were transferred in an ambulance. We are trying to get an understanding of what happened, but there were reports of physical force that was used against them, as well as potential pepper spray used inside the facility.

I just want people to understand about the conditions. I’m hearing so many people talk about the difficulty they have getting medical care. They have one full-time doctor there for 800 detainees, and many of them have significant medical needs. And this is something Geo Group could fix. Geo Group could hire more doctors if they wanted to, but then that’s less profit for them. Geo Group could get better food, could get food that is able to deal with people’s allergies and dietary restrictions, but that’s less profit for Geo Group. The extreme heat that many are facing or the lack of hot water in the bathrooms and the filthiness of the floors, that’s all fixable. But then that’s less profit for Geo Group. And Geo Group is making many of these detainees work, clean up. Sometimes they pay them maybe $1 a day or a couple dollars a day. Others just don’t get paid at all. Again, it’s a big racket, and that’s taxpayer dollars going into it.

The DHS is denying much of what’s been reported, maintaining that there’s no hunger strike, that detainees are receiving proper care and food, and that the standard of care at Delaney Hall is better than other prisons. From your experience, how unusual is this level of obfuscation where you have a federal agency saying you’re not seeing what you’re seeing?

I wish I could tell you that this is rare and uncommon, but when we’re also seeing a Pentagon that’s been shooting missiles at boats in the Caribbean and calling them terrorists with no evidence, no proof, no authorization from Congress … We see this illegal, unconstitutional war in Iran; we see Health and Human Services making a mockery of the vaccine-approval process. This is a systemic problem all across the board. Assault on our rule of law is part of the culture of this administration.

Again, the Geo Group, I told you, they couldn’t care less about congressional oversight like that. But you want to know who else worked for Geo Group? Tom Homan. You want to know who else worked for Geo Group? The new head of ICE who they just appointed came straight from there. This is a revolving door of corruption. Geo Group gives the Trump campaign millions of dollars. They give the inauguration millions of dollars. They have an investors’ phone call talking about how this is the greatest time of their company’s history and how people that were on their payroll are now in leadership. They’re getting big billion-dollar contracts, and I’m sure a lot of people who work at ICE will go work at Geo Group and CoreCivic afterward. They’re doing their time so that they can get their big payout later, their reward for all of the efforts that they did within the administration to funnel that money to these for-profit companies causing so much human misery as the output for that profit.

That’s what’s happening, and I want the American people to see it because it’s not just theoretical. I’m going to be heading back to the Capitol soon, and the business of next week is about a reconciliation bill that would give $70 billion–plus dollars to ICE and CBP on top of all the money they got through that reconciliation bill last year. There’s not a dollar in that bill that’s about helping Americans pay for health care, not a dollar in that bill for grocery prices or gas. But there’s a lot in there for Geo Group, a lot in there for ICE with no reforms, no accountability, nothing since the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti that we see not as just a one-off. We’re seeing that same type of behavior in Newark, New Jersey, right now and elsewhere around the country.

So I want the American people to see it. They see the violence in the streets in New Jersey right now and what’s happening at Delaney Hall, but I want them to also see that Congress is gathering to enable and further that through this legislation, and I want to stop it. I want the American people to have that outrage that they had from Minnesota and put this Trump administration back on their heels for a period of time. I want the colleagues of mine in Congress, the Republicans who are going to put their name next to their vote, to feel this, and I want to do everything we can to stop it. And if we can’t stop it, I want every American to have this in their minds when they go vote in November.

In recent weeks, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has been threatening to pull department agents from airports in sanctuary cities. Now, he’s levying the same threat against Newark Liberty Airport, claiming agents there would be used to help respond to the Delaney Hall protests. What’s your reaction to that?

I wish I could tell you that cooler heads will prevail, but this is an administration that has raised the costs for the American people through tariffs so they can try to have an extortionary foreign policy that bullies other countries to do deals with Trump’s family. This is an administration that is costing the American people upwards of $44 billion to $45 billion more in gas and diesel costs since the start of this war. You hear it from Trump. He doesn’t care. He says it point blank that he doesn’t care about the personal finances and the struggles of American families. So when I hear the secretary or others use those types of threats, I’m concerned, because I’ve seen this administration shut down and stop funding for the Gateway Tunnel and for other things in the past. We have to be concerned about these types of actions. And they would rather do that than actually try to solve the problem, which is about bettering conditions and giving people their time in court.

You previously served with Secretary Mullin in the Senate before he replaced Kristi Noem at DHS. Her time there was chaotic and drew widespread criticism. Have you seen a change in how DHS operates under his tenure?

I haven’t necessarily seen a change in the policies. I have been able to engage with him more. He and I talk, and I can tell him what’s happening in New Jersey. For instance, during his confirmation, I raised real concerns about their efforts to try to build a warehouse detention facility in Roxbury. He said he understands that is something that does not have local support and, as a result, has raised his own concerns about that. I’m going to continue to press him and hopefully get a full change in policy. They’ve paused that for furtherance, but I want them to just shut that project down once and for all.

He acknowledges that maybe we shouldn’t be doing things against the will of local communities, and I want him to know, in the same vein, that Newark doesn’t want Delaney Hall. The same holds for Elizabeth, which doesn’t want a detention facility there. That’s what I’m going to continue to push for. So he and I, we have our differences when it comes to policy and execution. We had those differences as senators. We continue to have those differences, but my job is to try to solve this problem. I’m earnestly trying to solve this problem for the detainees and their families, for the people of New Jersey. These detainees, they can’t wait for some new president to come into office two and a half years from now.

We really need to try to do this, but this administration has only really responded when the American people expressed deep outrage as they did during Minnesota after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We need the American people to focus in on what’s happening in Delaney and elsewhere around the country and raise that outrage, especially when the Republicans and the Trump administration are about to flood ICE with tens of billions of dollars more of taxpayer dollars to perpetuate this lawlessness and unaccountability.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.