1. United States
2. N.J.
3. Letter

I am your constituent, writing to demand you use your federal oversight power against ICE’s conduct at Delaney Hall in Newark — a for-profit detention center where civil, non-criminal detainees are being harmed and hidden from view. Delaney Hall is owned and run by the GEO Group under a 15-year, roughly $1 billion ICE contract. Nearly three in four of the people detained there have no criminal record. For over a week, hundreds have been on hunger strike over reported medical neglect, rotten food, and inhumane conditions — and ICE has made the allegations impossible to check, denying the Governor entry, giving state health inspectors only limited access, and delaying members of Congress conducting lawful oversight. When a federal agency walls a facility off from every form of oversight, that obstruction is itself the scandal, and it is squarely your jurisdiction. The constitutional floor is settled. In E.D. v. Sharkey, 928 F.3d 299 (3d Cir. 2019) — governing this federally contracted facility — the court held immigration detainees are owed the same Fourteenth Amendment protections as pretrial detainees, applying Bell v. Wolfish (1979) and Kingsley v. Hendrickson (2015): no punitive conditions, no objectively unreasonable force. ICE cannot contract its way out of the Constitution, and GEO cannot profit its way around it. Federal agents have also turned their force on the public and the press. ICE pepper-sprayed U.S. Senator Andy Kim. Photojournalists have reported being deliberately targeted by ICE agents — broken fingers, smashed cameras. Fields v. City of Philadelphia, 862 F.3d 353 (3d Cir. 2017) protects the right to record law enforcement in public, and the retaliatory force used here is exactly what this Circuit condemns: conduct that would deter a person of ordinary firmness from exercising First Amendment rights (Suppan v. Dadonna, 203 F.3d 228 (3d Cir. 2000)). When federal agents gas a sitting Senator and assault journalists, they are attacking a co-equal branch and the free press. Use the powers only Congress holds: • Demand an immediate DHS Office of Inspector General investigation into conditions at Delaney Hall and the use of force against detainees, civilians, press, and lawmakers. • Subpoena ICE and GEO Group leadership, and scrutinize GEO’s contract and its political spending. • Push for appropriations riders — and if you sit on Appropriations, introduce them directly — to condition, restrict, or defund the ICE Newark Field Office until unobstructed access is restored for the OIG, counsel, congressional monitors, and press. • Demand the immediate release of vulnerable detainees, and use your leverage over ICE’s funding to force it. ICE cannot lawfully compel New Jersey to assist it — the Supreme Court established that in Printz v. United States (1997) — and Washington’s response to the state’s resistance has been to threaten it, with DHS warning it may pull agents from Newark airport. That tells you who is driving this. The federal government is the aggressor, and you are one of the few with the power to check it. I will be watching what you do.