They told the mayor to stand down. He stood in front of the gate instead.
On the morning of May 9, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside a newly reopened ICE detention center, the kind of facility he’d spent months trying to keep closed. The federal agents didn’t just cuff a protester. They took a sitting mayor off the street like a trespasser.
He didn’t resist. He didn’t storm a building. The video shows him standing still on public property, talking to reporters—until agents surrounded him and led him away.
“They didn’t arrest anyone else. They wanted to make an example out of the mayor.”
Delaney Hall is no ordinary facility. It’s a privately run detention center, revived by a billion-dollar contract between ICE and GEO Group—one of Trump’s biggest campaign donors, and one of the most notorious names in the prison business. The building hadn’t passed inspections. It didn’t have the right permits. It opened anyway.
Baraka tried to shut it down the usual way. Citations. Stop-work orders. Lawsuits. Then he tried showing up. That’s when the feds made their move.
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The message was unmistakable: stay in your lane. Immigration is a federal game now. Local officials—especially those who resist—are just obstacles.
But Baraka’s arrest didn’t shrink the spotlight. It widened it.
“You don’t need to cross a line to get arrested. You just have to refuse to disappear.”
Delaney is one node in a national map of profit and power—ICE facilities contracted out to private corporations, often operating without oversight, but always with political cover. Since Trump’s return to office, these contracts have exploded. So have the profits.
GEO’s stock jumped 42% after the election. CoreCivic’s rose 29%. Their CEOs bragged to investors about coming waves of detainees. They weren’t guessing. They were planning.
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Trump’s first move in office was to reverse Biden’s ban on private prison contracts. Then came the raids. Then came the money.
GEO executives didn’t just donate to Trump. They stayed at his hotels, moved their conferences to his golf clubs, and made sure the profits circled back. Every new detention bed is revenue. Every arrest, a transaction.
“This isn’t law enforcement. It’s logistics. It’s capacity. It’s throughput.”
And for detainees, it’s danger.
Delaney isn’t an outlier. It’s part of a system where cost-cutting is the business model. Where guards ignore assaults, where suicide watch lasts days, and where families vanish into facilities that exist in legal gray zones. The worse the conditions, the better the margins.
Baraka didn’t just call it out. He got in the way.
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ICE says protestors stormed the gate. They didn’t. Members of Congress say they were shoved. They were. The mayor? He got five hours in custody, a misdemeanor charge, and a media circus. Delaney got to keep operating.
“A city raised the alarm. The federal government sent cuffs.”
The story isn’t over. Lawsuits are pending. Baraka’s campaign for governor just got national attention. But Delaney’s gates are still open. The buses are still running. The business of detention continues—bigger, richer, more brazen than ever.
And if they’re willing to cuff a sitting mayor in broad daylight, what exactly are they doing inside?
