A pregnant woman from the Dominican Republic suffering from severe stomach pains was denied prenatal care for a month. A Guatemalan man diagnosed with leukemia grew sicker after missing two months of treatments. A Haitian woman had a throat tumor that obstructed her breathing; it became so painful she could no longer speak.
These are some of the grave conditions detailed in 60 emergency lawsuits filed by immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Delaney Hall detention center who allege they were denied critical medical care.
Some were arrested while recovering from severe medical conditions — including a stroke, thyroid cancer and colon removal surgery — and said the facility was unable to treat their conditions. Others suffered from chronic illnesses like diabetes and epilepsy and said the facility did not provide consistent access to life-saving medications. Even immigrants who entered Delaney Hall healthy and then became ill had trouble accessing care, court documents and medical records obtained by The City Reporter show.
Together these accounts, drawn from emergency lawsuits filed between mid-October 2025 and May 2026, offer the most comprehensive view yet of the experiences of detainees attempting to get medical care inside a facility that’s become a lightning rod for the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies. Many of the accounts in the suits were corroborated with medical records and interviews. Operated by the private prison operator GEO Group under a 15-year, $1 billion contract with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, is the largest detention center in the New York area.
Detainees at the 1,000-person facility have been organizing since February in a campaign to improve conditions. Last month, nearly 300 people held inside signed a letter describing poor access to medical care and inedible food. They launched a hunger and work strike days later. One of their demands was the immediate release of medically vulnerable individuals. As the strike wore on, protestors outside scuffled with heavily-armed federal agents and later state and local police.
“The medical care is bad,” said Eric Mark, a lawyer who has represented clients detained at the facility and hopes to see an improvement in conditions rather than heed recent calls to shut it down. “Symptoms of illness are ignored. Requests for medical attention are ignored. When attention is provided, evaluation and treatment are often cursory and inadequate.”
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly denied any issues with medical care at Delaney Hall.
“It is a longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody. This includes medical, dental and mental health intake screening within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility, a full health assessment within 14 days of entering ICE custody or arrival at a facility, and access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care,” according to a statement by ICE provided to The City Reporter, reiterating the agency’s detention standards. “This is the best healthcare many aliens have received in their entire lives.”
GEO Group did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
ICE detainees are entitled to adequate medical care in accordance with due process protections in the constitution. But many attorneys have alleged those standards aren’t being met. Medical and court records reviewed by The City Reporter show that people experienced delays in seeing medical professionals and had trouble accessing essential medications, as well as critical specialists. Manageable ailments could become life-threatening in detention as their loved ones feared for their well being.
Antonio, from Venezuela, had recently undergone gastric bypass surgery when he was arrested in February by ICE in Newark while on a delivery job. While recovery required maintaining a special diet, the food at Delaney Hall led to weeks of severe stomach pains and blood in his urine and stool, he told The City Reporter in Spanish. (Like others we spoke to for this story, Antonio’s full name is being withheld as he fears retaliation in his immigration proceeding.)
As his health worsened, Antonio said, staff began to press him to sign voluntary departure paperwork. “For my health I should sign, they started to tell me,” he said.
He recalled sobbing to his wife over the phone: “These people want me to die in here.”
‘Liberty Can Be Restored Later. Brain Cells Cannot.’
By the time Marcelo, was detained by ICE while driving, the 46-year-old Newark resident had already had two heart attacks.. With daily medications and a strict diet, the Ecuadorian construction worker was able to manage his diabetes and hypertension.
Shortly after his arrest, his wife, Bertha, called the facility to report his condition to staff, she told The City Reporter in Spanish.
“He is someone who truly needs to monitor his oxygen levels. If he runs out of oxygen, he collapses completely,” she told staff. “We don’t want him to become just another statistic — another death.”
Within days his health deteriorated, and he began complaining of severe chest pain that radiated up his left arm. The pain continued until the next morning when he vomited, and the facility called an ambulance, according to medical records.
Physicians monitored Marcelo for a possible heart condition or pneumonia. He was not getting a lot of oxygen to his lungs, hospital tests showed. After two days, he stabilized and was sent back to Delaney Hall.
Six weeks later, Marcelo complained of chest pain again and reported to the infirmary, where he fainted. The facility waited 11 hours from his initial symptoms to call an ambulance, according to hospital records. When he arrived, the blood pressure and diabetes medications that he had been previously taking were not listed. Instead, he was taking ibuprofen, aspirin and gabapentin, which can be used to treat nerve pain or to induce sleep.
Marc Stern, a physician and professor at the University of Washington who reviewed Marcelo’s medical records at the request of The City Reporter, said that based on his history “he should have been sent to the emergency room immediately.”
He added it was unlikely Marcelo no longer needed those medications. “It’s more likely than not that the medications were stopped inappropriately,” he said.
As immigration arrests surged last spring, ICE’s widening dragnet took in growing numbers of medically vulnerable people, including pregnant women and people with serious conditions, like Marcelo. The Department of Homeland Security has broad authority to release those with medical needs from detention, but in the 60 cases reviewed by The City Reporter, detainees were forced to file a federal lawsuit to seek release from detention.
People with serious medical conditions detained at Delaney Hall over the last several months include a man recovering from a stroke, a man with only one functioning lung who developed flu-like symptoms and a man who had both a kidney transplant and open heart surgery and who required 23 prescription pills a day. All reported that they were not receiving necessary medications, according to court filings.
“If they have complex patients, they need to be able to appropriately manage them,” said Susan Lawrence, a physician and former medical director of an ICE facility in Atlanta, Georgia. “If they’re not able to appropriately manage them, because of staffing or because of medication issues, then they need to transfer them to a facility that can care for them appropriately.”
In some individual cases that The City Reporter inquired about, ICE said it provided care. In the case of the pregnant woman from the Dominican Republic, an ICE spokesperson said she had gotten treatment for “for abdominal pain, first trimester pregnancy, hypertension, constipation and cardiac arrhythmia.” Of the Haitian woman suffering from the tumor in her throat, ICE responded that she “received treatment for a non-cystic mass on her throat and neck, acute throat pain, neck pain and difficulty swallowing during her time in ICE custody.”
But as the protrusion made breathing more difficult, staff at Delaney Hall refused the Haitian detainee extra pillows, according to her suit. Instead, she used extra sheets from detainees who had been deported or transferred. A judge ordered her release, saying her situation met “extreme cases of special urgency,” as her condition deteriorated until she could no longer speak.
A Colombian man suffering from epilepsy went more than a week without access to daily medication after his arrest in February, according to his lawsuit. “Civil detention is not meant to be a death sentence by neglect,” said his attorney Alexandra Minogue in the suit. Every day there, she said, brought an increased risk that her client would suffer a potentially fatal seizure.
“Liberty can be restored later,” she wrote. “Brain cells cannot.” A DHS spokesperson said he “received treatment for his history of seizure disorder.”
A federal Judge Jamel Semper agreed with his attorney, ordering the man’s immediate release, finding the denial of his medication likely violated his constitutional right to due process.
The agency confirmed the arrest of the Guatemalan man with leukemia but did not dispute he had no access to his treatments during the two months he was at Delaney Hall.
‘Pain Like I’ve Never Had in My Life’
Haruna told ICE agents he was healthy when he was detained at Delaney Hall after he was arrested last July. But after five months there, the 39-year-old asylum seeker from Ghana started to notice blood in his stool and felt dizzy and weak.
Getting medical care at Delaney Hall required filling out a request form and then waiting for a nurse to visit your unit. But sometimes his requests were ignored, Haruna said. Only after several requests and repeated calls from his wife was he able to see a doctor, according to court records and an interview. By then, his symptoms were so severe that he was transferred to a local emergency room where he remained chained at his wrists and ankles while receiving a blood transfusion.
After a few days, Haruna was returned to Delaney Hall, but his symptoms continued. He missed a surgical appointment, court records show. In March, his condition deteriorated so significantly that he was taken to the emergency room three times for more blood infusions and surgery. Doctors noted that he was “at high risk for morbidity and mortality,” records show.
In a recent phone call from Delaney Hall, Haruna said that despite receiving treatment, he is still bleeding and has pain.
“I’m sick. I tell them the same things, but they don’t take it to be something serious,” he told The City Reporter. After nearly a year in Delaney Hall, he said, “It’s like hell to me now.”
Anjali Niyogi, an internal medicine doctor at Tulane University who reviewed Haruna’s medical records, wrote in a letter to the court that his gastrointestinal bleeding “has not been properly managed while in detention.”
“Continued detention places him at severe risk of gastrointestinal bleeding and severe clinical decline,” Niyogi said.
Haruna was among several people who alleged they experienced gastrointestinal bleeding that went ignored by medical staff. Another included B. who was born in Guinea and was detained in April after a routine ICE check-in. In court records and an interview, he said that he had blood in his stool for 39 days — the entire time of his detention. He only found relief after a judge ordered his release, and he was able to seek care on his own.
“It was like pain that I never had in my life,” he told The City Reporter.
The symptom can indicate a wide range of medical issues, from hemorrhoids to cancer, and requires an evaluation by a medical professional in a timely manner, said Homer Venters, a physician and former chief medical officer at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex.
“Bleeding — either coughing up blood, vomiting blood, having blood in your stool— those are potentially very serious signs and symptoms,” he told The City Reporter. “Those types of patients need rapid assessment.”
Lawyers representing people detained at Delaney Hall said it was common for their clients to receive medications like Tylenol, even for severe issues.
“We often see people with complex medical histories and medical issues being treated with over-the-counter pain medication that doesn’t do the job,” said Alex Mintz, a lawyer who represents several detainees at Delaney Hall.
This doesn’t meet the standards of required care, said Lawrence, the former medical director of the Georgia ICE detention center.
“It’s the responsibility of the facility that is holding them to provide constitutionally adequate medical care, so if all they need is Tylenol, then great, but if they need insulin, if they need HIV medications, if they need other specialized care, it’s the responsibility of the facility to provide that,” she said.
Waiting for ICE to Approve
For detainees seeking specialized medical treatment, the wait often stretched out for months, according to court records. Some have yet to see a specialist.
E., a gay asylum seeker from Ghana, lost most of the sight in one eye after local authorities assaulted him because of his sexuality , according to medical records and court documents.
By the time he was arrested at an asylum interview in October, the sight in his other eye was deteriorating as well, causing him sharp pains. Trapped inside Delaney Hall, he feared he would go permanently blind. Each time he visited the infirmary, medical staff told him the same thing: “They are waiting for ICE to approve,” he told The City Reporter.
Through a friend in detention, he learned of the Mami Chelo Foundation, a group that helps detainees at Delaney Hall with serious medical issues. He sent an urgent message to the group’s director Sally Pillay in February seeking help.
“Afraid to go total blindness,” he wrote. “I’m begging you in the name of God.”
The group was able to connect him with a pro bono lawyer and soon after, five months after his arrest, a federal judge ordered his release. E. has since been able to get cataract surgery, and his vision has improved dramatically, he said.
Still, other medically frail people remain locked up at Delaney Hall. Haruna, who has been held there for nearly a year, still has a pending lawsuit seeking release from detention, as does Marcelo who is reaching his sixth month at the facility.
After filing a habeas petition requesting his release, the judge ruled against Marcelo, but added that his lawyer could file a letter to contest the decision.
The lawyer, Marlon Bayas, wrote to the judge in early April, but so far there has only been silence. “There’s a blatant disregard for anyone with medical conditions,” Bayas told The City Reporter. “I don’t know why the judge is just sitting on this case.”
As Marcelo’s wife Bertha, who is a legal permanent U.S. resident, watched him growing weaker with every visit, she felt powerless, she told The City Reporter in Spanish.
“He’s not the same person he was before. His face, his expression — it’s all gone,” she said, as her husband, who has never been accused or convicted of a crime in this country, now approaches six months locked up.
The couple have three children together, ages 17 and 12 and an infant. Her two older children have been rattled by their father’s sudden decline.
“Mom, ‘Look at him. Look at how Dad looks. Look at how he’s changed,’” Bertha said one told her on a recent visit.
“‘Hush,” she urges them. “‘Don’t say things like that in front of him. Just hug him. Tell him you love him.’”
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