For more than a year, New Jersey officials have tried to assert some control over the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark. Their efforts have mostly failed.

The city sued to stop it from opening; it opened anyway. Local fire, health and code enforcement agencies tried to inspect the premises; they were turned away. State lawmakers passed a law banning any private immigration detention contracts; it was struck down. Congressmembers demanded oversight visits as allowed under federal law; they were delayed.

Nearly a week after detainees began a hunger strike, officials are scrambling for any lever of authority that might actually work.

Detainees and their advocates say conditions inside the 1,000-bed facility are dire, describing inadequate food, limited access to medical care, poor ventilation and violations of due process — all of which the Department of Homeland Security denies. The strike has drawn dayslong protests outside the gates, and a parade of appearances by public officials — including Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who was denied entry on Monday. The protests have escalated into clashes with federal agents, including one in which two demonstrators were arrested Tuesday night. In another, U.S. Sen. Andy Kim, the New Jersey Democrat, was among several people exposed to pepper spray.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has asked Gov. Mikie Sherrill to empower state Attorney General Jennifer Davenport to investigate the facility and called for the state Department of Health to conduct an independent inspection. So far, the governor has not made any comment on whether she’ll deploy state authorities to those ends.

Federal vs. local authority

The strike and standoffs with protesters — who have erected barriers to try and keep ICE from transferring out strike leaders, which immigrant advocates say amounts to retaliation — is the latest flashpoint in a national pattern. The Trump administration is moving to dramatically expand immigration detention capacity, around the country — including in Roxbury, New Jersey, where Sherrill’s Democratic administration has partnered with the township’s all-Republican leadership to oppose a new detention center in court, with some limited success.

The underlying tension, said Rose Cuison-Villazor, a Rutgers Law School professor who studies state immigration policy, is a fight over who has authority over a facility like Delaney Hall.

“On the one hand, the federal government will say, ‘Well, the U.S. government has the power to enforce immigration law, and these detention facilities are just part of the enforcement mechanism,’” she said. “The state and local government will say, ‘Well, these detention facilities are located in our borders. … It doesn't mean that these detention facilities can ignore laws that are about health and safety of people who are in the state.’”

In practice, New Jersey officials acknowledge, the fight has played out almost entirely on the federal government's terms.

“They have the keys to the facility, and you can't get in to do what you're legally entitled to do without them,” said Rep. Rob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, who said he waited roughly 15 hours outside Delaney Hall on Sunday night before being allowed in for an unannounced oversight visit. “That's just a s---ty reality, but it's the reality.”

Where locals draw the line

Baraka, who was himself arrested outside Delaney Hall in May 2025 on a federal trespassing charge that was later dropped, said in an interview Wednesday that the city's hands are largely tied. The facility is run for ICE by the GEO Group under a 15-year, $1.2 billion contract, and the city says it has been blocked from sending health, fire and code enforcement officials inside despite an ongoing lawsuit arguing the operator never obtained the required municipal approvals.

Baraka has also drawn a line at how far the city will go to help manage the chaos outside. Newark police are monitoring the nightly protests and are prepared to step in if the situation escalates. Baraka said, but beyond that “we're not gonna be involved in enforcing federal immigration codes.”

DHS, in a statement to Gothamist, said local police had “refused to answer calls to help our law enforcement.” Baraka pushed back. “ Their calls were for us to come and move people. …That's their jurisdiction. They created that so they have to move people. We're not gonna engage and get our police officers hurt.”

Under similar circumstances earlier this month in Brooklyn, where anti-ICE protesters blocked the street outside of Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, members of the NYPD cleared the road of debris and protesters, allowing a U.S. government vehicle with a detained immigrant inside to leave the hospital. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has defended New York City’s sanctuary protections for immigrants, said afterward the NYPD was not assisting with immigration enforcement but, rather, responding to a protest.

New Jersey's most direct attempt to block facilities like Delaney Hall, a state law banning private immigration detention contracts, was struck down by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals last summer.

Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a constitutional law professor who studies state and local authority in immigration matters, said states generally cannot single out the federal government for regulation. A state cannot, for example, ban private detention contracts specifically for federal immigration purposes while continuing to use private contractors for its own incarceration needs, he said.

“You cannot sort of gerrymander or specifically discriminate against the federal government,” Gulasekaram said.

The state isn't powerless

Cuison-Villazor, the Rutgers law professor, said New Jersey could try other routes — including some Baraka has now requested. California passed a law during the first Trump administration empowering its attorney general to conduct yearly inspections of immigration detention facilities and publish reports on what was found. New Jersey has no equivalent, but Sherrill could potentially issue an executive order granting Davenport that authority, Cuison-Villazor said.

The state could also lean on its public health powers, she said, much like Baraka suggested.

On Wednesday, Baraka said he had not heard from the attorney general’s office, but said the New Jersey Department of Health would be requesting access for an inspection. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“These people are complaining that they're sick, HIV patients, folks with cancer that are being denied medicine, people that are pregnant that can't get the services that they require,” Baraka said. “They're complaining about the food, the cleanliness of it, the healthiness of it, the scarcity of it. And so that's enough. If it was a state institution or local institution, we would have to investigate.”

Any pushback by the Sherrill administration could have political and practical consequences. In January, President Donald Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from jurisdictions resisting his immigration policies, an effort courts have repeatedly blocked. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said this week he’s “drawing up plans” to halt processing international travelers at airports in “sanctuary cities,” including Newark and New York — though he said nothing was in motion so far.

Rep. LaMonica McIver, Democrat from New Jersey, who has made multiple visits to Delaney Hall in recent days, said she was able to corroborate at least some of the conditions detainees have described.

She has been at the center of the fight over oversight at the facility for more than a year. McIver was charged last May with assaulting federal officers during the chaotic incident that led to Baraka's arrest — charges she’s still fighting.

Now McIver has introduced legislation she's calling the No Delay for Immigration Oversight Act, which would codify in statute lawmakers' existing right to inspect detention facilities and bar ICE from delaying or obstructing visits.

“This  president continues to try to stop members of Congress from conducting oversight and holding him accountable,” McIver said. “... But, at the end of the day, we still have a job to do. We still have to show up for our constituents. We still have to go and inspect and call out these abuses.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correctly identify the current New Jersey attorney general, and to correctly identify the New York hospital that had been the site of an anti-ICE protest.