Four people detained at a notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark, New Jersey, escaped Thursday night amid a massive detainee uprising over reportedly poor conditions.
“It’s about the food, and some of the detainees were getting aggressive, and it turned violent,” Mustafa Cetin, a lawyer representing an immigrant detainee, told NJ Advance Media.
According to Cetin, his client said about 50 inmates at the immigration facility, Delaney Hall, came together to push down the wall of a dormitory room because they had grown dissatisfied over the quality and timeliness of food at the facility. His client also said inmates on the third-floor dormitory had hung bed sheets in an apparent escape attempt, the lawyer told the outlet.
A man who has been detained at Delaney Hall since last week told The New York Times that “every day is a disaster with the food here.” He described detainees being served small cartons of expired milk for breakfast and meals coming at irregular hours, with dinner sometimes not arriving until 11 p.m.
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The Department of Homeland Security confirmed in a statement that it is aware of four detainees escaping the GEO Group-owned detention facility and said additional law enforcement partners have been brought in to locate them.
DHS identified Franklin Norberto Bautista-Reyes, Joel Enrique Sandoval-Lopez, Joan Sebastian Castaneda-Lozada and Andres Pineda-Mogollon as the men who escaped. The department offered a $10,000 reward for any information leading to their arrests.
The department also said that prior to being held at Delaney Hall, the four men had each been arrested by different law enforcement agencies on various charges.
The uprising happened amid a protest outside the facility over the reportedly poor conditions, according to PBS. Amy Torres, executive director of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, told the outlet some demonstrators were pepper-sprayed, tackled and dragged away by officers.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was arrested outside the ICE facility in May before his case was dropped, released a statement on Friday expressing concern over what was reportedly occurring at Delaney Hall, which he said ranged from “withholding food and poor treatment, to uprising and escaped detainees.“
“This entire situation lacks sufficient oversight of every basic detail — including local zoning laws and fundamental constitutional rights,” Baraka said. “This is why city officials and our congressional delegation need to be allowed entry to observe and monitor, and why private prisons pose a very real problem to our state and its constitution.”
The GEO Group and DHS denied “any widespread unrest at the Delaney Hall Detention facility” and disputed that conditions there were poor for detainees.
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Lawyers representing Delaney Hall detainees told The New York Times on Friday that phone calls and visits had been suspended following Thursday’s chaos.
“We have no idea what is happening with our clients right now,” Karla Ostolaza of the Bronx Defenders told the outlet.
