The mayor of Newark led a predawn protest outside an immigrant detention facility on Tuesday, trying to keep the jailhouse from becoming a critical part of the Trump administration’s ability to enact mass deportations.
The mayor, Ras J. Baraka, has been trying to stop the facility, which is expected to hold up to 1,000 migrants a day, from operating. For weeks, Newark officials had been arguing in federal court that the detention center’s owner, GEO Group, was in violation of city laws because it had failed to obtain required permits or a valid certificate of occupancy.
Then, Mr. Baraka said, city officials learned that GEO Group, one of America’s largest private prison companies, had already begun housing detainees — a development that set off a tense, hourslong standoff on Tuesday. As immigrant rights activists held signs and chanted and the mayor waited in a misty rain, a GEO Group worker used a chain to lock the facility’s front gate.
At around 9 a.m., Newark fire officials issued the prison company three citations for code violations. Mr. Baraka, a Democrat running for governor of New Jersey, vowed to return each day until city officials were allowed inside to reinspect the facility.
“We want them to follow our rules, follow our laws,” he said, noting that city officials had also been barred from entering the property on Monday to conduct fire and health inspections.
“They’re keeping us out through the gates and the fences and all this other kind of stuff,” he said. “But we’re going to come down here every day and we’re going to get in one way or the other.”
In February, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency awarded GEO Group a 15-year, $1 billion contract to hold migrants facing deportation.
Known as Delaney Hall, the two-story facility is ringed with fences topped with barbed wire, and has been used on and off for years as a jail, halfway house and migrant detention center. Its location is considered ideal for the Trump administration’s deportation efforts: It is near Newark Liberty International Airport, where the federal government stages many deportation flights, and just across the river from immigrant-rich New York City.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said that the detention center had “valid permits” and that there were “no safety issues.”
“The mayor has been informed that he is more than welcome to enter the facility, as long as he follows security protocols like everyone else,” she said. “He keeps refusing to do so, presumably in an effort to stage press opportunities to help him in his bid for governor.”
In an earnings call in February, GEO Group told investors that renovations of Delaney Hall, which had been empty for more than a year, were underway.
According to the city, the lengthy vacancy, the renovations and the changed usage plan had rendered the original certificate of occupancy, issued in 2007, invalid.
Christopher Ferreira, a spokesman for GEO Group, confirmed that it had begun housing detainees at Delaney Hall last Tuesday and argued that its certificate of occupancy was valid. He said the company had advised Mr. Baraka that ICE, not GEO Group, was in charge of access to the facility, but that the mayor had ignored the established processes for requesting entry.
“This publicity stunt by the mayor is another unfortunate example of a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open-borders politicians in New Jersey to interfere with the federal government’s efforts to arrest, detain and deport dangerous criminal illegal aliens in accordance with established federal law,” Mr. Ferreira said in a statement.
Mr. Baraka said city officials had the right to show up and gain entry to all buildings in Newark to conduct inspections. He said the city regularly conducted safety inspections at other buildings used by federal officials, including the F.B.I.’s headquarters.
“If there’s something that happens here, and our first responders have to respond to this property, and we don’t know anything about it, we put everybody at risk, right?” the mayor said.
Kathy O’Leary of Pax Christi USA has been among a group of activists who for years have fought against using the facility as a migrant detention center, including during the administrations of former Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama, both Democrats.
“We have no idea what the renovations entailed,” said Ms. O’Leary, one of about two-dozen protesters outside the detention center on Tuesday.
“People who are incarcerated are vulnerable. They are at risk of abuse,” she added. “And here you’re adding in a layer of profit. The motive becomes: How much can I produce for my shareholders? Not how good of a job can I do taking care of people.”
The Trump administration is racing to improve its detention capacity as it continues to increase immigration arrests nationwide. ICE is currently holding about 50,000 immigrants in facilities across the country, including local jails and private detention centers, an increase from the agency’s typical maximum capacity of about 42,000 at the beginning of the year.
The federal government has already taken extraordinary deportation measures. It sent more than 200 migrants to a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador and has flown about 500 migrants to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba over three months.
But ICE still needs to significantly scale up its capacity to fulfill the president’s campaign promise of deporting millions of people living in the country illegally. The agency is hoping to receive a large windfall from Republicans in Congress so it can spend as much as $45 billion over the next two years on new detention facilities, a more than sixfold increase from what ICE typically spends to detain migrants.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.