Second Statement to the Union County Board of Commissioners
Administration Building
Elizabethtown Plaza
Elizabeth, New Jersey
July 24, 2025

The last time I was here, I said that the Board had handed the jail off to ICE. That may have sounded misleading or uninformed. Resolutions 290 and 291 aren’t an unrestricted auction to the highest bidder, you might say. They’re a solicitation of interest in a sale relative to a set of constraints. The constraints restrict the potential bidders so as to exclude immigration detention. What more could you ask?

Well, I would ask: how constraining are these constraints? And I would answer: not very. 

One Commissioner voted for the Resolutions on the assumption that you can open the bidding to both carceral and non-carceral operators and end up with a non-carceral facility. 

Anti-ICE protester, Delaney Hall, Newark, New Jersey (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

That’s a stretch. Suppose you open the bidding to both carceral and non-carceral bidders. Now take the most financially attractive of the non-carceral uses for this facility, healthcare. I don’t dispute that a conversion of the jail into a health care facility is both possible and desirable. What I dispute is that a bid to make the jail a health care facility can win an auction on financial grounds against a private prison company. Private prison companies have huge capital stacks; health care organizations don’t. Inmates are a good per diem monetary investment; medical patients aren’t. A prison company has low renovation costs in buying a jail; a health care facility has big ones. So if you open the bidding to both bidders, the carceral bidders win.

Now suppose a carceral bidder wins. How constraining is the assertion that any correctional use will be limited to “housing individuals involved in the criminal justice system”? 

Start with the fact that the jail closed four years ago for lack of such individuals to house. The only reason to re-open it is that there are new ones to house. Where’d these new people come from? A crime wave? No. Get-tough policies for drug crimes? No. The only new demographic is the one ICE has created out of thin air, the demographic of migrant-criminals who supposedly have to be deported.  

Delaney Hall Detention Center, Newark, New Jersey (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

This is where the legalisms and loopholes begin, far too many to cover in full.  Of all the many loopholes, I’ll just mention one: Suppose the Board sells the facility to a carceral bidder with the stipulation that the owner is only allowed to house individuals “involved” in the criminal justice system. The bidder agrees, buys the jail, but then later sells it to GEO in contract with ICE. GEO wasn’t a party to the first sale, and so, isn’t bound by its terms. The Board isn’t party to the second sale, and so washes its hands of the matter. No immigrant detentions were involved in the first sale, but the result is another Delaney Hall. 

So was I wrong? I don’t think so. If you really want to constrain ICE, you have to put real constraints in place. If you don’t, they’ll find a way in. There are, so far, no real constraints here. Until there are, my claim stands.

Postscript, July 29, 2025. Though I’d intended to make the preceding statement in person at the Board’s July 24 meeting, I ended up being unable to go, having been held up at the last minute by a pressing matter at work. I’ve since emailed the statement to the Commissioners.

As it happens, I wrote the “Second Statement” on the evening of July 23rd, and posted it early on July 24th. Later that evening (the 24th), the Commissioners issued a much-celebrated statement of their own, assuring the public that the forthcoming “RFP will include language that prohibits any use of the site as a private detention facility, such as an ICE facility, immigration detention center, or similar operation.”

Though heartening in some ways, this language really just reiterates the County Manager’s similar remarks back on March 27 of this year, prefacing the vote on the Resolutions themselves. So I personally don’t regard it as conclusive. As I said in my letter to the Commissioners, “I’m reluctant to celebrate an RFP I haven’t seen,” much less a proposal that hasn’t been made. I’ll address the complexities involved here in a separate post or series of them.