Andy Kim

Tensions over Newark’s Delaney Hall immigration detention center escalated again this week, with U.S. Sen. Cory Booker calling the facility a “moral stain” and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blaming U.S. Sen. Andy Kim for a pepper-spray confrontation.

Booker, D-N.J. criticized the facility during a visit, saying he would refuse to vote for funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I will not approve one more dollar for a chaotic, cruel, and I believe corrupt immigration system,” he said. “This is the standoff we have in Congress right now and I will continue to stand firm on that point.”

U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat from New York’s 13th Congressional District, who is also the Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair, arrived at Delaney Hall for an oversight visit just after 11 a.m. Wednesday and was allowed to enter the facility at 11:28 a.m. after speaking to reporters.

Espaillat said he would introduce legislation giving governors the same authority as members of Congress to enter federal facilities, after New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill was turned away Monday when she tried to access Delaney Hall.

“The governors are the representatives of the people of the state,” Espaillat said.

Espaillat said he was looking into conditions inside the facility, including spoiled food, lack of medical care, and extreme temperatures.

“We are going to win this fight,” he said. “ICE has been a runaway train for a long time.”

The comments come as concerns about conditions inside Delaney Hall have grown among Democrats.

“The majority of the people we encountered have no criminal charges for the kind of violence or criminality that Donald Trump said he was going to be focusing his attention on,” Booker said. “This is unacceptable to me. From the very beginning when the GEO Group — this for-profit private prison — said they were coming to our community I joined with others to try to stop them.

“They bullied their way into this community, violating even the basic facility obligations,” the former Newark mayor said.

The comments came after Kim was pepper sprayed during a melee Monday.

During the protest, tactical officers were sent out to meet protesters. Kim tried to broker an agreement between protestors and ICE officers where they would agree to let him and a protest representative inspect outgoing vehicles to ensure prisoners were not being transferred out of the facility as retaliation for the hunger strike.

Mullin criticized Kim’s presence at the protest during a White House conference Wednesday.

“You have one of the Senators complain because he got splattered with a pepper ball — I’m sorry, you probably shouldn’t have been there,” Mullin said.

Out-of-state members of Congress continued to visit Delaney Hall later Wednesday, when Reps. Gerald Nadler and Dan Goldman, Democrats who represent parts of New York City, entered the facility just after 2 p.m.

“Congress members have a standing right to go in,” Nadler told as reporters gathered around him and Goldman outside the gate at the main entrance to the facility.

Goldman said they were drawn by reports of the hunger strike and substandard conditions inside the facility.

“The stories we’ve heard is that conditions inside these detention centers are horrific,” said Goldman, who questioned his GOP counterparts’ support for expanding ICE’s budget.

“Why on earth are Republicans trying to give ICE more money to brutalize and terrorize our residents,” he said.

Nadler and Goldman emerged from Delaney Hall at 4:30 p.m., after being inside for about two hours, and told reporters what they had heard from detainees.

Nadler said, “the food was very scarce” and that detainees were woken starting at 4 a.m. for breakfast.

Medical treatment was all but non-existent, Nadler said, describing a woman with a lump on her breast and a man with colon cancer who said their pleas for treatment were ignored. Nadler and Goldman said they were told by Delaney Hall’s operators that a doctor was present and on duty weekdays during working hours, and yet no doctor was there on Wednesday afternoon.

“No matter what the problem is, all you get is Tylenol,” Nadler said.

Goldman noted that undocumented status is a civil offense, not criminal, and among the dozens of detainees the congressmen polled, none indicated they had a criminal charge or conviction. Even so, Goldman said Delaney Hall could only be described as a “jail,” and that the detainees were being held “illegally and unjustly.”

“If you are human, if you are American, you cannot support what is going on here,” Goldman said. “It is simply un-American, and it is unacceptable.”