Newark's Delaney Hall detention facility has spent August at the center of two separate legal fights over how New Jersey treats immigrants in federal custody — one over masked ICE agents, the other over conditions inside the jail itself — even as a new national analysis shows the state occupies a middle ground between the strictest and most cooperative approaches to handing detainees over to immigration authorities.
A Death Inside Delaney Hall
The most immediate flashpoint involves Edwin Jovanny Lopez Cornejo, a 39-year-old Salvadoran immigrant who had lived in the United States for more than two decades before he died inside Delaney Hall, six weeks into his detention. His family says the privately run facility, operated by GEO Group, went days at a time without giving him the medication he needed for a longstanding case of diabetes and hypertension, and dozens of supporters gathered at a Highland Park church days later demanding the jail's closure. "I'm going to grow up without a father," his 12-year-old daughter, Ashley, told the crowd.
Other families who spoke that day described similar breakdowns in care. Maribel Encalada said her father, 58, has gone without care for his hypertension and an aching molar since arriving at Delaney Hall, and has been served moldy bread. "Access to basic medical treatment is not a privilege, it's a basic human right," she said. Nationally, ICE has recorded at least 22 in-custody deaths over 2026's first seven months, roughly double the dozen reported in the same span a year earlier — a rise advocates say is harder to track since the agency stopped requiring reports on deaths that occur within a month of someone's release. ICE maintains that Cornejo was seen regularly by medical staff, and the Department of Homeland Security has described in-custody deaths as a fraction of a percent of the total detained population.
A Mask-Ban Law Heads to Court
Detention conditions aren't the only front. New Jersey is also defending a law Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed in March that bars law enforcement, including federal immigration agents, from covering their faces during operations. In April, Trump administration lawyers filed suit claiming the statute illegally regulates federal officers, and on Aug. 24 the state answered with a 195-page brief built on roughly a dozen sworn witness statements — among them a Camden County school superintendent describing ICE vehicles speeding past a school bus that had already stopped for children, and a Cumberland County woman recounting how agents smashed her husband's car window outside a courthouse. New Jersey's odds aren't guaranteed: a federal judge blocked a similar law in New York earlier this month, predicting the challenge would ultimately succeed on the argument that states can't dictate how federal agents dress on the job.
New Jersey's Sanctuary Law Took a Longer Road Than It Looks
The state's broader framework for limiting police cooperation with ICE is often described as one package Sherrill signed, but the record is more tangled. Three related bills passed the Legislature in January, in the final days of Gov. Phil Murphy's term. Murphy signed only one, the Safe Communities Act, which directs the attorney general to set rules for how schools, hospitals and houses of worship handle federal immigration activity. The other two bills — a data-privacy measure and one codifying the 2018 Immigrant Trust Directive that limits voluntary police assistance to ICE — went unsigned, a pocket veto Murphy attributed to worries that added language could expose the directive to a court challenge it might not survive.
Lawmakers reworked both bills once the new session began, loosening some of the original limits along the way: police gained the ability to flag someone's upcoming release based on pending charges instead of just prior convictions, and to alert ICE when a federal judge had already ordered a person removed. Sherrill put her signature on both reworked bills March 25, alongside a third, freshly drafted measure — the mask-ban law now being fought in federal court. In other words, that mask ban, not the original Safe Communities Act, occupied the third spot in Sherrill's spring package, a distinction worth keeping straight when sorting out what New Jersey's sanctuary framework actually restricts today.
Jail Exceptions and a Case the Trump Administration Got Wrong
Even with the codified directive in place, New Jersey jails can still notify ICE about someone with a final removal order, or hand over people charged with or convicted of an extensive list of serious offenses — the compromise that let the bill survive its second attempt. The Trump administration cited an Ocean County case to argue those exceptions endanger the public, pointing to a man charged with sexually assaulting a child under 15 and suggesting he could have gone free. Court records show otherwise: he remained in custody throughout and pleaded guilty, with sentencing set for September.
Where New Jersey Fits Nationally
The Stateline analysis found states with the tightest limits on jail-to-ICE handoffs — Washington, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Oregon — post the lowest rates of custodial immigration arrests, while states that restrict or ban sanctuary policies altogether, among them Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia and Wyoming, post the highest. New Mexico is an outlier, logging a high jail-arrest rate despite statewide cooperation limits. The dataset runs only through March and doesn't capture a surge in arrests that began in June or newer airport enforcement targeting expired visas, so it likely understates how aggressive enforcement has become since. New Jersey isn't part of the 39-state 287(g) program that deputizes local officers for immigration arrests — a program concentrated most heavily in Texas and Florida — and a separate federal lawsuit targeting sanctuary policies in Newark, Paterson, Jersey City and Hoboken was tossed by a district judge in June, a ruling the Justice Department is now asking an appeals court to revisit.
Republicans Say the Exceptions Don't Go Far Enough
Senate Republican Leader Tony Bucco has pushed since January for New Jersey to go further, arguing that limiting routine contact between local police and ICE makes communities less safe rather than more. He's pointed to a Morris County episode in which he says ICE made arrests without notifying local officers first: "it would have gone a lot easier and a lot better," he said. ICE's Washington field office director, Robert Guadian, made a similar case when he issued a statement Aug. 6 saying, "Sanctuary policies continue to disregard U.S. immigration law." Bill sponsor Sen. Raj Mukherji has countered that nothing in the law stops federal agents from notifying local police of their own operations, and that the real safety gain comes from immigrant victims and witnesses trusting officers enough to come forward.
The Stakes for New Jersey's Immigrant Communities
The debate carries particular weight in places like Newark's Ironbound, home to generations of Ecuadorian, Brazilian, Peruvian and other Latin American families, and in the networks now organizing around Delaney Hall. Only California is home to more immigrant residents than New Jersey, and the families speaking out about detention conditions and courthouse arrests — Cornejo's, Encalada's, and others' — are largely the same communities the sanctuary debate in Trenton was meant to protect. With the mask-ban case pending before a federal judge, the sanctuary-cities dismissal on appeal, and Cornejo's official cause of death still unconfirmed, New Jersey's fight over immigration enforcement is far from settled.
