Newark Mayor Ras Baraka wants to halt plans to open new ICE jail

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said opening a new detention center for immigrants could drive many of his city's undocumented residents "into the shadows." (Jake Hirsch, Governor's Office.)

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said all legal avenues are on the table to prevent a private prison company from opening an immigrant detention facility in the city.

“To see them coming back is shocking and frustrating, that they continue to look at us as an opportunity to open up these ICE facilities that we rejected once, and we want to reject it again,” Baraka said in an interview with the New Jersey Monitor. 

Baraka, a Democrat who is seeking his party’s nomination for governor next year, said he was surprised to hear about GEO Group’s attempt to open a 600-bed facility in Newark in light of a 2021 state law that bars state, local, and private jail operators from entering contracts to detain immigrants. 

“These guys need to know that we don’t want them here before they even try to get here, and hopefully that changes their mind,” Baraka said. 

GEO Group filed a lawsuit in federal court last week arguing the 2021 law is unconstitutional and may block the company from signing a $100 million contract with U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement to house migrants in a detention center at Delaney Hall, located next to Essex County’s jail.

A federal judge already deemed the state’s law partially unconstitutional in August, a move that allowed private company CoreCivic to continue jailing immigrant detainees in its Elizabeth facility. The state has appealed that decision. 

Baraka said there have been no negative impacts on the community since Essex County severed its contract with ICE in 2021 and stopped housing immigrant detainees in its jail. Activists who celebrated then are now planning protests to keep ICE away from the community, Baraka said. 

The mayor touted immigrants’ contribution to the economies of Newark and New Jersey. Baraka signed an executive order in 2017 declaring Newark a “sanctuary city” for immigrants and criticized ICE raids under the Trump administration. In a 2018 op-ed, he called for Essex County to cease cooperation with ICE and for other counties to end their own contracts with the federal agency. 

Newark is a city of immigrants — nearly 35% of residents are foreign-born, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Baraka said he fears how the return of a migrant detention center in Newark would affect many of the city’s most vulnerable residents.

“We don’t want to be used as an opportunity to stop every person that folks believe is a migrant, that they think may be here without papers, undocumented, and it becomes a problem for folks and drives them further into the shadows,” he said. “We need more and more folks to be engaged in the city.” 

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