Congressman George Latimer, whose New York 16th Congressional District covers parts of Westchester and the Bronx, after having inspected the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, says that with the Republicans controlling Washington it is unlikely legislation forcing closure of Delaney Hall could pass let alone be signed into law by President Trump. Nevertheless, Latimer called for the facility to be shut down.
Senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim, both New Jersey Democrats, proposed the Delaney Hall Closure Act after the Aug. 1 death of Edwin Lopez-Cornejo at Delaney Hall, the third prisoner held there to die in the past nine months. Delaney Hall has been called out for having dangerous and inhumane conditions, inadequate medical care, and other systemic failures.
Latimer and Congressmen Ritchie Torres of the New York 15th Congressional District conducted a Congressional oversight visit at Delaney Hall on Aug. 4. Delaney Hall is the largest immigration detention facility on the East Coast. The facility is owned by the GEO Group, which operates it for ICE.
“The Trump administration is wasting $1 billion on a facility that should not exist,” Torres said. “When we saw the faces of the detainees, they were visibly traumatized and shocked. I’m concerned about the lack of medical care. There’s only one doctor for 893 detainees, which, to me, is woefully insufficient.”
Complaints about conditions at Delaney Hall have focused on a lack of food quality and quantity, poor sanitation, poor air quality, overcrowding and physical and mental abuse.
“These detention centers are not appropriate,” Latimer told Westfair’s Westchester County Business Journal. “There’s no due process; most of these people have not gone before a judge. What I see at Delaney Hall is a dehumanizing situation, a situation in which people are ‘warehoused.’ It’s like an Amazon distribution center only instead of having boxes that are coming from one location and being sent to another you have human beings. You have people there who don’t know where they’re going, when they’re going.”
Latimer said that when he was at Delaney Hall he asked about the criminal status of the people being held there in view of the Trump administration’s contention that ICE was arresting ‘the worst of the worst.’
“I asked ‘had they done any serious crimes, had they done anything that warranted incarceration,’ and the answer was basically ‘no,’ none of these people had done a violent crime and the vast majority had committed no crime other than being here without proper authorization,” Latimer said. “The whole thing left me with a sense that this is one more example of how this administration is trying to change America.”
Latimer said that he had heard about ICE picking up people in New Rochelle and Mamaroneck recently who were working and law-abiding. The Business Journal learned that ICE claimed to have arrested six immigrants in White Plains so far in 2026 who were criminals but when asked by the Business Journal for details ICE did not respond. Latimer said that local officials are not informed about ICE operations in their communities, with the exception of a few municipalities that have cooperation agreements with ICE.
“Nassau County under Blakeman (Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who is running for governor against Kathy Hochul) that’s a classic one,” Latimer said. “They have an arrangement under Blakeman where they’re using the Nassau County jail to house some of the people they pick up.”
Latimer mentioned that when he was serving as Westchester county executive in 2018 he signed the “Immigration Protection Act,” which said that the county was not going to cooperate with ICE unless it had a warrant obtained after presenting a proper case to a federal judge.
Latimer said that in Westchester, “If somebody commits a crime and they’re an undocumented immigrant they face the criminal justice system the way any other criminal does not because they’re an immigrant but because they’ve done something criminal that warrants incarceration.”
Latimer also noted that immigrants have a history of contributing to society in the U.S. and that’s sometimes drowned out by rhetoric.
“We need immigrant labor in the functioning of the business economy,” Latimer said, mentioning agriculture, restaurants, gardening, health care and construction as some of the areas where immigrant labor plays a significant role.
“When you take this attitude toward immigrants it’s a racist attitude,” Latimer said. “You’re not taking into account the economic element of the work that they do and as residents they’re consumers of services and products. When you create this climate of fear, they don’t go out. There is more than one example of people who have been picked up by ICE because they looked like somebody who was not a registered person. It turned out they were perfectly legal.”
Latimer said that the Democrats in the House are in favor of the elimination of ICE detention centers such as Delaney Hall.
“We now have a larger budget for ICE than for the United States Marines,” Latimer said. “You need some enforcement entity for immigration but people need to view this from the standpoint of what’s moral and what isn’t.”
