Politico Gets It Wrong, GEO Group Evades Another Inspection
Here are a couple of footnotes on yesterday’s post critiquing Holly Schepisi’s views on Delaney Hall. I argued there that Schepisi had egregiously misrepresented the facts about the New Jersey Department of Health’s (NJDOH) May 28, 2026 inspection of Delaney Hall.

Footnote 1: Though my primary target in that post was Schepisi, whose misrepresentations are grotesque and egregious, I mentioned a secondary target in passing: Politico. Recall that Schepisi had cited a June 8 Politico article in defense of her interpretation of the NJDOH report. Here is Politico’s headline:

This is incompetent reporting at best. As I argued at length in my post–and is obvious from the NJDOH report–the inspectors’ overall evaluation of the facility was “Conditionally Satisfactory,” not “Satisfactory.” “Satisfactory” means that the facility is substantially in compliance. Conditionally Satisfactory means that the facility is out of compliance, is required to put itself back into compliance, and will be inspected in the near future for compliance. 

The difference between these two statuses is the difference between being in compliance and being out of compliance with the state’s health regulations. Since being in compliance and being out of compliance are contraries, so are “Satisfactory” and “Conditional” or “Conditionally Satisfactory.” Contrary to superficial appearances, “conditionally satisfactory” is not a type of satisfactoriness, but the reverse: it’s a state that falls short of satisfactory, not one that exemplifies it. 

I don’t know how the reporter or his editors missed this. It’s not an easy thing to miss; you’d really have to work at it. Nor is it a minor detail. It’s the single essential point of the controversy. Though the Politico piece is generally better than Schepisi’s Facebook post (not a high standard to meet), it’s hard to read the piece without wondering about the mental contortions involved in choosing a headline that gets the story exactly wrong.  

This is the sentence in the NJDOH report that drives the Politico headline:

Overall sanitation and physical condition of the production kitchen and warehousing areas were observed to be satisfactory and free from signs of rodent or vermin activity at the time of this inspection. 

This sentence doesn’t mean that the facility had achieved a status of “Satisfactory.” It means that other than the violations noted, the sanitation and physical condition of the production kitchen and warehousing areas were observed to be satisfactory. But the violations noted were precisely the ones that obviated a status of Satisfactory. So it’s very hard to understand how Politico managed to convert an unsatisfactory verdict into a satisfactory one. 

I don’t know what’s worse, that the reporter read the NJDOH report, or that he didn’t. Either way, I think Politico has some explaining to do. 

Jean Wilson Brutus, who died in Delaney Hall this past December under suspicious circumstances

Footnote 2: As just remarked, a Conditionally Satisfactory judgment implies, in law, that the facility judged Conditionally Satisfactory must be inspected again to ensure compliance. By coincidence, that inspection took place yesterday, the very day I put up my post. The aim appears to have been to inspect the parts of Delaney Hall that were not inspected on May 22. According to the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General (NJ-OAG), the owners of Delaney Hall refused to allow the inspection to go forward.

From the NJ-OAG’s press release:

TRENTON — Governor Mikie Sherrill, Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, and Department of Health (DOH) Commissioner Raynard E. Washington today are providing the following update after health inspectors were not allowed to conduct a full inspection of Delaney Hall, the immigration detention center operated by the GEO Group, Inc., in Newark, and were allowed entry only to see limited parts of the facility.

“Today, my health inspectors were once again denied full access to Delaney Hall, including the medical unit. This is unacceptable and continues to raise serious questions about what DHS and the GEO Group are hiding at Delaney Hall,” said Governor Sherrill. “I have long opposed private detention facilities and will continue doing everything I can to secure a full inspection and improve conditions for detainees and their families.” …

On June 2, New Jersey filed a lawsuit alleging that GEO Group has violated state law by refusing to allow DOH to conduct a full inspection of Delaney Hall. The lawsuit was filed after DOH inspectors were barred from inspecting crucial areas of the facility on May 28. During that first visit, inspectors were allowed inside Delaney Hall for a limited inspection of food service areas. But they were not allowed to visit the medical unit, toileting and shower facilities, and sleeping areas, and they could not inspect ventilation and HVAC systems.

By statute, the DOH Commissioner is allowed to enter and inspect public and private detention centers as well as to have “full access” to any premises if there is any reason to believe a public health violation may be occurring. DOH is responsible for protecting the health of the people of New Jersey, including identifying any practices that would allow for the unchecked spread of communicable illnesses, including but not limited to unsafe food preparation or storage, inadequate ventilation, and other unhygienic conditions.

In other words, the same people who claim to venerate the rule of law, and particularly states’ rights, now feel free to violate the law at whim, with particular disrespect for Tenth Amendment federalism. We need Delaney Hall, we’re told by anti-migrant types, to house those “illegal aliens” who have broken “our laws.” How do we do this? Well, by breaking our own laws in turn. Laws must be broken that legality may come. Injustice must be done so that further injustice may come. 

What this proves, at the end of the day, is that MAGA is less an expression of concern about borders or the rule of law than a wholesale expression of plain old nihilism. Its adherents don’t care about legality, constitutionality, policy, rights, or reality. What they care about is the subjugation of human beings by any available means, be it force, fraud, manipulation, or concealment. Totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt famously argued, is a project aimed at the destruction of the “juridical person” in us, the thing in us that makes us responsible moral agents protected by the claims of justice. This is what MAGA aims to destroy. The question is whether they’ll get their way, or whether the rest of us have what it takes to stop them.