Jeffries vows accountability for Delaney Hall concentration camp

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries arrived in New Jersey on Tuesday with a simple message: President Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation agenda is “unjust and inhumane.”

The Democratic leader visited Morristown and Newark to denounce conditions at the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility, a privately operated center that has faced near-constant controversy since reopening last year. Joined by members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation, Jeffries met with former detainees and their families to demand accountability and push for the facility’s closure.

“Delaney Hall should and will be shut down,” Jeffries said during a news conference at Calvary Baptist Church in Morristown, where he appeared alongside U.S. Reps. Analilia Mejia and Rob Menendez.

Stories of trauma and loss

The roundtable was closed to the news media, a decision organizers said was intended to protect the privacy of former detainees and family members caught up in the immigration system. But Margarita Cielo Balbuena, a woman who had been detained at the nearby Elizabeth Detention Center, spoke publicly about her experiences, describing rancid food, inadequate medical care and physical abuse of her husband.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Congresswoman Analilia Mejia, and Congressman Robert Menendez Jr. outlined a Democratic-led effort to alter ICE’s “inhumane” processes systematically. Former detainee Margarita Cielo Balbuena told reporters that individuals were held without proper medical care and given spoiled food. Lawmakers voiced concerns about the privatization of detention centers and called for Delaney Hall to be permanently closed.

The testimony came after the recent death of Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, a Salvadoran man who died at Delaney Hall earlier this month. Relatives have accused facility operators of failing to provide vital medical attention to Lopez-Cornejo, who suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes and epilepsy and relied on several medications to control those conditions.

“Even now, I feel traumatized by this experience,” Balbuena said through a translator as she fought back tears. “I’m afraid to drive. I’m afraid to leave and go out in the street. I’m afraid to leave my husband. I’m afraid to be away from my children.”

His mother, Maria Cornejo, said her son called the day before his death and told her he had lost feeling in half of his face and one arm. Three Delaney Hall detainees have died over the past year, bringing renewed scrutiny to the facility.

Jeffries calls Trump’s claims ‘an obvious falsehood’

Jeffries rejected the Trump administration’s characterization of people targeted for deportation.

“President Donald Trump said he wanted to deport the ‘worst of the worst.’ We now know that was an obvious falsehood,” Jeffries said.

Balbuena, the owner of a Mexican restaurant in Dover, was arrested and detained as her son, a U.S. citizen, watched. She was recently released after spending two months at the Elizabeth Detention Center.

Jeffries criticized the use of taxpayer money to fund what he described as a system that “brutalizes and kills law-abiding immigrants and at times American citizens.”

“Tax dollars should be spent to help people, not to brutalize and kill law-abiding immigrants and at times American citizens,” he said.

Calls for oversight and accountability

All nine Democratic members of New Jersey’s House delegation sent a letter last week calling for the facility’s closure, citing inadequate medical care and unsafe conditions. State Attorney General Jennifer Davenport has opened a civil rights investigation into the treatment of detainees at Delaney Hall, issuing subpoenas to GEO Group, the private prison company that operates the facility.

“The inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall shock the conscience,” Jeffries said in a statement released before the visit. “The majority of detainees at the facility have no criminal record and are being served rotten food, denied medical care and forcibly confined in unsafe conditions.”

Jeffries said at least 48 people have died in immigration custody since the start of the Trump administration.

“That is unacceptable,” he said.

A fractious relationship with progressives

Jeffries came to Morristown at the invitation of Mejia, a progressive Democrat who won a special election in an upset earlier this year after campaigning on a message of abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mejia, who has not said whether she will support Jeffries for speaker in January, said a Democratic House majority should use all the oversight tools at its disposal.

“Once we are in the majority, we can compel the kind of investigation and oversight that these issues in fact entail,” Mejia said. “So we would have more bite and reach in what we’re aiming for.”

Menendez, whose district includes Hudson County and has a large Hispanic population, offered a stark warning.

“No one is safe in Trump’s America,” Menendez said.

Democrats look to November

With the midterm elections less than three months away, Democrats are hoping to win control of at least one chamber of Congress, which would give the party greater leverage to conduct oversight of the Trump administration.

Jeffries said affordability, along with immigration, would be a major issue in the campaign. In the meantime, he said Democrats would proceed with “intensity” and do as much as possible while in the minority.

“We drove Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem out of town,” Jeffries said, taking credit for recent Cabinet changes despite Democrats’ minority status.

But Jeffries offered fewer specifics about what Democrats’ immigration agenda would look like if the party wins control of the House. He cited an immigration working group led by Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar but declined to commit to specific measures such as oversight hearings or an overhaul of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“We’ll have a conversation about what dramatic change looks like” after November, Jeffries said. “What unites the entirety of the House Democratic Caucus family, from progressives to New Dems to Blue Dogs and all points in between — because it unites the country — is that immigration enforcement should be fair, just and humane in this country.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the detainees’ allegations. DHS has previously denied allegations of abuse and mistreatment at Delaney Hall, saying after Lopez-Cornejo’s death that ICE “has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”