By Courtney Rozen
WASHINGTON, May 31 (Reuters) - After two nights with arrests of activists outside a New Jersey immigrant detention center, law enforcement officials have expanded the area off-limits to protesters even as the facility started allowing detainee visits to resume.
Families escorted by police will be able to visit their relatives at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, Governor Mikie Sherrill said on Sunday. That announcement came several hours after Newark Mayor Ras Baraka imposed a nightly
curfew in the half-mile area surrounding the facility.
Sherrill, a Democrat, ordered state police on Friday to take control of the area around the facility after days of tense confrontations between protesters and federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. State police have now secured a "broader area than just outside Delaney Hall" for safety reasons, state Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said at a Sunday news conference.
The clashes pose a challenge for Sherrill's administration, which is wary of giving the federal government grounds to justify deploying federal agents to New Jersey on a larger scale. Since returning to power in January 2025, President Donald Trump has cited protests against immigration enforcement as a rationale for sending federal law enforcement into U.S. cities.
ICE "is not a law enforcement agency we want on our streets in any way," Sherrill told reporters on Sunday.
She also repeated her previous call for demonstrators to "bring the temperature down" by remaining peaceful. State police said they arrested three people on Saturday night during demonstrations, after detaining six protesters on Friday.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency that oversees U.S. immigration enforcement and Delaney Hall, said in a statement on Sunday that operations will "continue as normal."
Delaney Hall is a 1,000-bed facility operated by the private company Geo Group on behalf of ICE. Critics, including immigrant advocates, Sherrill and other Democratic politicians, have called for closing the facility, which they have described as a poorly run site with inhumane conditions.
"The situation is unacceptable," said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, in a statement on Sunday morning after visiting the facility with three members of New Jersey's congressional delegation. "Delaney Hall must be shut down immediately."
Sherrill on Saturday said out-of-state agitators inflamed tensions at protests outside the detention center, adding the majority of protesters "want to be there peacefully."
Senator Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, described the level of tension related to the ICE protests as unprecedented.
"I've not seen my state with this level of precariousness through my entire time in elected office," Kim told CNN's "State of the Union" program on Sunday.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who oversees security at the nation's airports, on Thursday threatened to curtail processing of international travelers at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport because local law enforcement in the state was not assisting federal immigration officials. The airport is a major gateway to New York City.
Closing the airport is an idea that "makes no sense," Kim said. "That would be just shooting ourselves in the foot," he said, in reference to restricting international travel.
(Reporting by Courtney Rozen; Editing by Sergio Non and Chris Reese)
