A 41-year-old man from Haiti who had been detained by immigration officials died last week after a medical emergency, federal officials said, in what is believed to be the first death linked to the troubled, privately run migrant detention facility in Newark where he was held.
The man, Jean Wilson Brutus, was taken to a hospital within hours of arriving at Delaney Hall, a two-story jailhouse where six months ago four men escaped through a flimsy wall during unrest over crowded conditions and a lack of regular meals. He died last Friday, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Mr. Brutus was one of four men detained by ICE and facing deportation to die in custody in the past week across the country. Deaths of migrant detainees have spiked this year as ICE has ramped up its deportation campaign, filling detention centers to record levels. The agency was holding more than 65,700 people as of Nov. 30.
The three other men, who were 39, 46 and 56 years old, were being held in detention facilities in Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Delaney Hall is run by one of the country’s largest private prison companies, GEO Group, which in February was awarded a 15-year, $1 billion contract to hold as many as 1,000 migrants at a time. Located only a short distance from New York City, less than a mile from Newark Liberty International Airport, the facility has become a flashpoint in President Trump’s efforts to increase deportations from the United States.
Relatives of detainees line up outside the facility during visiting hours, four evenings a week, and protesters gather daily. In May, Newark’s mayor was arrested and charged with trespassing outside the perimeter of the facility after a clash with immigration agents that also resulted in federal charges being filed against Representative LaMonica McIver, a first-term Democrat. The case against the mayor was later dropped.
“Here’s a facility that hasn’t even been open a year, and we’ve already had an uprising and a death,” said Kathy O’Leary of Eyes on ICE New Jersey, an immigrant rights group that formed soon after migrants began being held at Delaney in April. “What more do people need?”
Sally Pillay, of Hackensack, N.J., said she watched as two ambulances drove through the facility’s locked front gates just after 8 p.m. on Dec. 11. They drove out at about 8:30 p.m., she said. A woman who was visiting a loved one inside the facility at roughly the same time said she overheard workers on walkie-talkies discussing a man having a seizure, Ms. Pillay said.
“It was a brutally cold night, and we had a lot of family members visiting — it was very chaotic,” said Ms. Pillay, the director of the Mami Chelo Foundation, an immigrant rights group, and a member of Eyes on ICE New Jersey. She said detainees complain regularly about inadequate medical care.
A spokesman for GEO Group, Christopher Ferreira, referred questions to ICE.
A news release from ICE said that Mr. Brutus had entered the country illegally through Texas in 2023 and had since been arrested several times in New Jersey on trespassing charges.
“ICE is committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments,” the release stated. “Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay.”
ICE officials said that emergency medical workers who were called to the facility performed “lifesaving measures” before taking Mr. Brutus to University Hospital in Newark, where he died the next day of what appeared to be “natural causes.”
Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, noted ruefully that the ICE news releases about the week’s four deaths described the men’s criminal histories in detail yet offered little information about how they died.
“It’s really telling that there’s more about the purported things that people have done than how did these people die,” Ms. Torres said. “There’s no situation in which this should be a death penalty.”
More than 30 people have died this year in ICE custody, according to federal news releases and tallies maintained by immigrant rights advocates.
Some have succumbed to tuberculosis, kidney failure, cardiac arrest, respiratory issues and other ailments. At least four detainees — in Missouri, Georgia and Pennsylvania — have died by suicide this year, according to a review of ICE death reports and news releases.
Two of the deaths stemmed from a September shooting outside an ICE facility in Dallas.
Immigration lawyers and advocacy groups have expressed alarm about crowded and unsanitary conditions at some detention centers. Multiple reports have documented cases of migrants who have been deprived of proper access to medical care. And the complaints have led some federal judges to rule that conditions in some facilities were inhumane, leading to the release of migrants who grew too sick to remain in custody.
The day after Mr. Brutus’s death, Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, toured Delaney Hall. He spoke to about 80 detainees, many of whom described receiving poor medical care and meals that sometimes included cold, raw meat.
Mr. Kim, who has called for the facility to be closed, urged ICE to release a “detailed report on how this death occurred.”
“For the millions of dollars spent on this facility,” Mr. Kim said Friday, “they must do better.”
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years.
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