Inmates at New Jersey ICE detention facility riot, tear down wall
Detainees reportedly protest food shortages, poor living conditions
HOUSTON, United States
About 50 inmates at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in the state of New Jersey staged an uprising on Thursday, tearing down a wall in one of the dormitories at the facility, according to media reports.
An attorney for one of the detainees at Delaney Hall said his client reported growing unrest over food shortages and poor living conditions at the ICE detention center.
“It’s about the food, and some of the detainees were getting aggressive and it turned violent,” said attorney Mustafa Cetin, speaking to NJ Advance Media. “Based on what he told me, it was an outer wall, not very strong, and they were able to push it down.”
Cetin said his client described seeing bedsheets hanging out the windows of the third floor in an apparent escape attempt.
Local law enforcement responded in riot gear, wearing masks and carrying plastic handcuffs and pepper spray, reports said.
About an hour before the uprising took place, a detainee at the facility reportedly called an emergency immigration hotline run by Deportation & Immigration Response Equipo (Dire) and said the inmates were lashing out at the dismal food conditions at the detention center.
"People were hungry and got very angry and started to react and started to rebel against what was going on in the detention center," DIRE volunteer Ellen Whitt told the New York Times. "When we were on the phone with him, we could hear screaming and yelling in the background."
Following the unrest, a crowd of protesters gathered outside the facility, blocking the entry and exit gates.
FBI agents and deputies from the county sheriff’s department arrived to oversee crowd control.
Delaney Hall is run by one of the largest private prison companies in the US, the GEO Group, which has a contract with the Trump administration to hold as many as 1,000 migrants at a time.
The facility was also the site of a protest last month that turned violent, resulting in the arrests of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and US Rep. LaMonica McIver, a Democrat representing New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District.
On Wednesday, McIver was indicted by a federal grand jury on felony assault charges against immigration officers.
Trespassing charges against Baraka were later dropped by federal prosecutors.
Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options.
