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| the chairs provided by volunteers |
Forgive me for going off-topic once more to report what I’ve witnessed at Delaney Hall, the immigration detention center in Newark, NJ, operated by Geo Group. I am a regular visitor to one young man detained at Delaney, as well as a member of the volunteer coalition that provides on-site services to visitors —particularly to mothers of babies and small children whose husbands and partners are detained inside.
My wife and I recently published an op-ed about the rich array of support services for detainees’ families provided immediately outside Delaney Hall by a coalition of volunteer organizations and individuals*. That’s a remarkable tale (I’m speaking as a foot soldier, not an organizer), but my focus here is on the experience of visitors when they go inside Delaney. Their treatment under Geo Group procedures is a mixture of systemic abuse and accommodation that I have often mused over. If the U.S. is transitioning to hard-core fascism (jury’s out, IMO). the visitor experience here is a peculiar halfway house.
The visiting set up run by Geo Group at Delaney is truly bizarre-- it has elements not only of cruelty and incredible inefficiency, but also humanity.
First of all, it's communal. When Essex County ran immigrant detention in Trump 1.0, visits were 1-on-1 behind glass. At Delaney, visits are in what feels like a giant lunchroom, with sometimes over 100 voices reverberating. There are five or six rows of long tables. Detainees sit on benches on one side; visitors face them. Lately the room has sometimes been packed, so that visitors are almost hip to hip (there can be up to four visitors per detainee).
Visitors are usually let into the room before the detainees. As 50-80 people flow in, a lot of them line up immediately at four vending machines to buy drinks and snacks for their loved ones. (When visitors go through security they must empty their pockets of everything but an i.d. — and a credit card.) Fascism…with vending machines.
When the detainees flow in and the visits start, it’s an emotional place. There’s lots of smiles and tight hugs— and lots of tears. As carceral visits go, it’s pretty loosey-goosey. People can touch. Detainees can hold their babies and children. The din creates privacy, as you have to lean in to hear the one person you’re focused on. Junk food flows (at vending machine prices). A handful of guards watch and circulate. Occasionally they yell directives — there’s no PA system.
When the hour (or half hour, on weekdays) is up, a guard shouts at everyone to get up. Some allow more separation time than others. Here there is often some real sobbing and clinging— and the full gratuitous cruelty of ripping these families apart hits home with particular force. The detainees line up against one long wall and the visitors start filing out along the other. The two sides wave, as when a ship is about to depart.
Procedures of studied callousness
The setup for the visiting hour itself could be a lot worse. It’s the intake and processing of visitors that’s marked with callousness and egregious inefficiency.
Famously, Delaney has no immediate indoor intake for visitors. From May 2025 to mid-to-late January 2026, visitors had to wait outside, in two stages. First, visitors (who were told to arrive an hour before the scheduled visit) congregated outside the gate and were let in en masse anywhere from a half hour to just minutes before the scheduled visiting time — or past visiting time, when prior groups ran late. Once admitted, they would line up again at a 20’ x 20’ security booth, where staff would let in 5-10 people at a time and slowly, painstakingly, write in information from each visitor’s i.d. In December and early January, when the weather was really freezing, an hour-plus wait outside at these two stages was pretty standard, and two hours was not unusual.
In mid-January -- just when Essex County put up a wedding tent for visitors on adjacent property a few hundred feet from the gate -- Geo Group eased the process in two ways. First, people were let through the gate pretty much as they arrived and sent to the security booth. Second, the longest part of the intake process — registering the visitors by hand, writing their i.d. info in a log — was moved indoors. Visitors passed through the security booth relatively quickly and proceeded to a holding area — the Delaney gym— to register.
While torture-by-weather is mostly done, the intake process is still laborious and unpredictable. Visits are at a set hour for each unit, and delay usually accumulates by the hour. You can easily wait 1-2 hours in the gym (use of the gym for this purpose means that it’s of no use to detainees four days per week). That’s with no phones, no reading material, no food, no drink. You can go back to the bathroom that’s between the security booth and the gym.
Because the visiting hours back up, there can be more than 100 people waiting in the gym — and there’s usually only 10-20 chairs available. People stand, or sit against the wall, or wander around.
The feeling is congenial. There's kids running around, parents holding babies. People talk, often with strangers. Those whose loved ones are in the same unit sometimes get to know each over time, as each unit has its designated hour. Some people look stricken, some look like they’re waiting to get into a movie. In an hour or two of waiting, most humans pass through a range of thoughts, emotions and facial expressions that have little to do with the larger situation. Former detainees are sometimes in the crowd — and greeted with hero’s welcomes when the visit begins.
People help each other, e.g., through ridiculous turnstiles you must pass through to leave the security booth, which require a button press that often doesn't work. They share stories. When new visitors come in looking confused, others guide them, e.g., to to the right sign-in line (sometimes when the schedule backs up, two units are being signed in at once).
Geo Group employees run the gamut from callous and petty to compassionate and helpful. There's many of the latter. It's the system that sucks. One regular in the security booth says “Enjoy your visit” to everyone as they pass through. The phrase feels a bit out of place — this isn’t Disney World — but it’s kindly meant.
I know that many of the guards are decent to and have compassion for the detainees. Many probably don't. I don't know the proportions. I get the impression from the person we visit that the callousness, the disregard for people’s needs, comes mainly from (some) supervisors. And it’s systemic. Treatment of visitors by individual employees also runs a gamut, from indifferent to friendly and helpful. When visitors arrive in clothing that doesn’t meet the dress code, security booth personnel point them to the volunteers immediately outside providing loaner clothes (loose shirts, pants and shoes in all sizes).
Conditions in Delaney are terrible -- bad food, bad water, rampant medical neglect (I've heard it said that detainees arrive at University Hospital almost daily), 8-12 people to a room, one tablet to a room. But as one visitor who had a friend transferred to a detention center in Louisiana told me, compared to that facility, Delaney is a 5-star hotel.
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* Volunteers operated on the sidewalk outside Delaney from May 2025 to mid-January 2026, at which point Essex County responded to a longstanding volunteer request and erect a wedding tent on adjacent county property a few hundred feet away. The tent is now the support hub. The original and most basic service provided — and this is still on the sidewalk, immediately outside the gate — is loans of clothing for visitors who arrive in clothes that don’t comply with the ICE dress code (no hoods, no exposed arms, no tight leggings or tight tops for women, legs covered to the knee, no open-toed shoes). Other services include free coffee and food, toys and drawing materials for children, information about support services and vetted lawyers, diapers and grocery gift cards, and rides to and from the detention center. Band-aids and balms for lives torn apart, but often warmly appreciated.
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