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Four men escaped from an immigration detention center in New Jersey on Thursday following several days of turmoil over conditions in their lockup.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The New York Times, “additional law enforcement partners have been brought in to find these escapees.”
The Delaney Hall detention center went into lockdown on Thursday night after a large number of law enforcement officials responded to a disturbance report, attorneys with clients at the facility told the paper. The unrest stemmed from concerns about the punctuality and quality of meals, attorneys and relatives of detainees said.
“People were hungry and got very angry and started to react and started to rebel against what was going on in the detention center,” a volunteer at the emergency immigration hotline DIRE, Ellen Whitt, told The Times.
A staff member at DIRE got a call at about 6 p.m. from a detainee, Whitt noted.
“When we were on the phone with him, we could hear screaming and yelling in the background,” she said, adding that people were trying to break windows and that guards appeared to have left their posts at one point.
The missing men appeared to have escaped via an unhinged piece of exterior siding, a law enforcement official said.
Shortly after 7 p.m., masked officers with pepper spray and plastic handcuffs were spotted entering the building. People in the vicinity said they could smell something pungent. Protesters attempted to barricade the entrance to the detention center.
On Friday morning, officials announced that phone calls and visits had been suspended, according to the managing director of Bronx Defenders, an immigration practice.
Karla Ostolaza told The Times, “We have no idea what is happening with our clients right now.”
Mustafa Cetin is an attorney who has been representing a man from Turkey working to get citizenship. He said he received an email at 7.37 a.m. on Friday telling him that “all movement,” such as meetings with attorneys, was canceled “until further notice.” His client had been detained about two weeks previously during a court appearance in Newark.
Delany Hall is operated by the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the U.S. The company has a contract with the Trump administration to hold as many as 1,000 migrants.
The facility began housing detainees last month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered into a contract with the GEO Group worth $1 billion.
New Jersey Democrats have opposed the opening of the facility, prompting a lawsuit, protests, and a confrontation outside the building that resulted in the arrest of Newark’s mayor and assault charges being filed against Rep. LaMonica McIver. She’s set to be arraigned on Monday and has said that she’ll enter a plea of not guilty.
McIver said on Thursday that the Trump administration had been “stonewalling efforts to learn the truth” about conditions at Delaney Hall.
“I have serious concerns about the reports of abusive circumstances at the facility,” she said.
Relatives with appointments set for Thursday said they hadn’t been allowed inside. Many remained outside the facility when a fire truck and police from several agencies appeared.
Following sunset, a K9 unit, FBI agents, and officers from the Hudson County Sheriff’s Office started arriving at the scene while protesters blocked the gate of the facility. The crowd was later dispersed by law enforcement officials using pepper spray.
Dominican immigrant Francisco Castillo told the paper over the phone from the detention center that some detainees had been forced to sleep on the floor and that they had been served subpar meals at odd hours of the day. He claimed that detainees were often served small cartons of expired milk for breakfast and that dinner was at times not served until about 11 p.m.
“Every day is a disaster with the food here,” he told the paper in Spanish.
