Update on September 2, 2025: Subsequent reporting from the New Jersey Globe uncovered the reason for the anomalously low number of detainees reported by ICE: the statistics ICE release are yearly running averages, and since Delaney Hall only reopened in May, its average detainee statistics include a number of months where the facility was empty.
The number of Delaney Hall detainees cited in this story, then, is incorrectly low; the true number was likely closer to 1,000 as of early July. However, the underlying point remains accurate: convicted criminals and detainees with high threat levels only make up a very small portion of the overall Delaney Hall detainee population.
When Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and three of New Jersey’s Democratic members of Congress got involved in a scuffle with immigration officials outside the Delaney Hall immigrant detention facility in May, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials had a simple message: Democrats were taking the side of violent criminals over hardworking Americans.
Newark’s Delaney Hall facility, Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, housed dangerous lawbreakers like Dennis Josue Saravia-Santamaria, an El Salvador native with a “known and verified” affiliation to the MS-13 gang, and Adonis Estevez Bello, a native of the Dominican Republic with felony convictions for drug trafficking and weapons possession. “Why are these Democrats so hell-bent on getting these heinous actors out of this facility?”, McLaughlin wondered on CNN.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), though, keeps data on who is detained in its nationwide network of detention facilities – data that paint a significantly different picture of Delaney Hall and the Elizabeth Detention Center, New Jersey’s other immigrant detention facility, than the one put forward by President Donald Trump and his administration.
ICE statistics list 89 detainees in Delaney Hall, which reopened in May, as of July 7 (the most recent data available). Of those 89 detainees, 85 of them – 96% – were listed as having “no ICE threat level,” meaning that they have no criminal convictions. Three detainees had an ICE threat level of 3, the lowest level of severity; one had a threat level of 2; and zero had a threat level of 1.
Notably, the total number of detainees cited in the statistics is far less than the 1,000-bed facility can hold, and it’s far less than what activists and the relatives of detainees have seen and heard. Nedia Morsy, the director of the immigrant rights group Make the Road NJ, said that she had heard the number of detainees was in the hundreds and had perhaps even exceeded one thousand; she said ICE’s numbers “feel wildly off from what we’re hearing on the ground.”
When reached for comment on this story, DHS took issue with the ICE figures the New Jersey Globe cited and implied that they discredited the Globe’s reporting. (The New Jersey Globe’s request referred to prior ICE data from from June 23 that showed a slightly higher number of Delaney Hall detainees, 96, of whom 91 had no threat level.)
“I don’t know where you’re getting these numbers, but they are nowhere near accurate,” McLaughlin said in a brief statement. “There are hundreds of detainees in Delaney Hall, which puts into question the rest of your reporting.”
McLaughlin and DHS did not respond to a follow-up email noting that the data came from ICE itself, nor did they answer a question on where data on the “hundreds of detainees in Delaney Hall” could be found. A local ICE spokesperson in Newark also failed to provide the Globe with figures on approximately how many people are detained at Delaney Hall.
ICE’s statistics for the Elizabeth Detention Center, which has been operating for far longer, better match the facility’s capacity: the 300-bed facility is listed as housing 276 detainees as of July 7. And there, too, the data point towards a largely non-criminal, non-violent detainee population; 250 detainees, or 91%, had no ICE threat level, and only five had the highest threat level of 1.
Other methods ICE uses for measuring the danger levels of detainees tell a similar, if slightly inconsistent, story. 70 out of 88 detainees (80%) at Delaney Hall and 215 out of 278 detainees (77%) at Elizabeth were listed as “non-criminal”; it’s not clear why the totals don’t exactly match ICE’s threat level totals for both facilities.
Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), who was one of the Democratic representatives who visited Delaney Hall on May 9 and who is now facing federal assault charges stemming from that incident, said that the data match up with the stories she heard from detainees when she conducted her oversight visit.
“When we went inside Delaney Hall that day, me and [Rep.] Bonnie Watson Coleman had the opportunity to speak to one of the detainees,” McIver said. “She was saying, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. Yes, I’m undocumented, but at the end of the day, I haven’t committed any crime.’”
Asked why the Trump administration would instead promote the image that Delaney Hall and other detention facilities are primarily housing murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals, McIver said it’s simple: that’s an easier message to sell.
“That’s a more catchy story for them,” McIver said. “They know that the American people are not happy with what they’re doing, with picking up your local grocer, or your local housekeeper or farmer. The American people are not happy with that. [Trump] promised the American people that they would get violent people who are undocumented out of our country, and that’s not what they’re doing.”
“We’re living under this propaganda shadow of criminals and rapists so that they explain away why all this stuff is happening, without looking under the cover,” Morsy concurred. “You become desensitized.”
The statistics at the New Jersey facility are largely in line with data on ICE detainments on a national scale. Trump campaigned for president last year on deporting violent criminals and gang members and his administration continues to insist they remain the focus, but an AP analysis published earlier this week found that 84% of detainees nationwide had no ICE threat level as of June 23.
McLaughlin told the AP, which relied on the same ICE database as this story, that it’s “false” to say her department isn’t focusing on criminals, and that its mission remains “to target the worst of the worst – including gang members, murderers, and rapists.”
Democrats, shell-shocked at first from their 2024 losses, have increasingly attacked Trump’s broad deportation policies as cruel and counterproductive after many of them voted for parts of it like the Laken Riley Act early this year. And a few Republicans, too, have begun to grow wary of the Trump administration’s agenda; in a letter to the acting ICE director last month, six Hispanic House Republicans expressed concern that ICE’s “limited resources may be stretched to pursue individuals that do not constitute an immediate threat to public safety,” per Axios.
But Trump and his top immigration officials show little sign of slowing down. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has heavily promoted “Alligator Alcatraz,” a brand-new detention center buried in the Florida Everglades that is allegedly riddled with problems; DHS’s official social media accounts have also been posting memes bragging about the scale of its deportations.
Delaney Hall, too, has remained in the news lately thanks to the escape of four men from the facility in June. Their escape, as well as related protests inside the facility against poor living conditions, led to renewed attention on whether the privately owned and operated facility is providing basic services like regular meals, clean water, and beds. (A lawsuit from the city of Newark alleging that the facility is being operated without proper permits remains ongoing.)
The fact that ICE and DHS are apparently unable to state how many people are housed in Delaney Hall adds another angle to the reporting on the facility’s conditions.
To a certain extent, it’s to be expected that the numbers ICE is able to provide on immigrant detention are fuzzy and prone to shift. Detainees are constantly being entered into the system, transferred to other facilities, and released or deported, making any database like the one ICE maintains a flawed snapshot in time that might not reflect each facility’s full reality.
Indeed, of the five “dangerous criminals” DHS cited in its May 9 release on Delaney Hall, three have since been transferred to other facilities and two don’t seem to show up in ICE’s detainee tracker at all. (Another well-known figure who briefly passed through the Elizabeth Detention Center: Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia graduate student and lawful permanent resident who was ordered released by a New Jersey judge last month after being detained for 104 days.)
But McIver, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said that from her perspective, the detainee statistics represent just one more example of the Trump administration’s lack of transparency.
“We have not been able to get any concrete, transparent information from this administration since they came into office,” McIver said. “They fail to give it to us, or they point us to their website for statistics that are not even right, that they say are not right. But at the end of the day, it’s on their website!”