Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is looking to prevent a private prison company from opening an immigrant detention facility in the city — and has said all legal avenues are on the table, according to the New Jersey Monitor. “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. The GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the nation, wants to contract with U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement to house up to 600 immigrant detainees at a detention center it owns in Newark, next to Essex County’s jail.
A 2021 state law in New Jersey bans state, local, and private jail operators from entering contracts to detain immigrants, but it has been subject to ongoing challenges. A federal judge already deemed the state’s law partially unconstitutional in August, which allowed private prison company CoreCivic to continue jailing immigrant detainees in its Elizabeth facility. The state has appealed that decision. And last week, GEO Group filed a lawsuit in federal court 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 the Newark detention center. 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.”