108 Days Apart: A Wife’s Fight to Free Her Husband From Delaney Hall

Latif Hafraoui rarely talks about the 108 days he spent in immigration detention, most of it at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. He and his wife, Sandra, say they want to forget the fear and anxiety she felt, and the horrors he experienced. “These guys don’t go by the book of law. They treat immigrants like animals, like we have no rights,” Latif told The Marshall Project. “It was like torture.” “We’re trying to not remember it and to heal from it,” Sandra said. The New Jersey couple — she is American, he is Moroccan — had been married 15 years and were headed to Florida when immigration agents detained him at the airport in August 2025. He was locked up at Delaney Hall, the immigrant detention facility currently at the center of opposition against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation program. Protests erupted outside the facility in May after detained immigrants began a hunger and labor strike over poor conditions inside, including rotten food and inadequate medical care. In an email, the Department of Homeland Security told The Marshall Project the detainees’ claims are false and the hunger strike has ended. The problems there have been longstanding. A year ago, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested while trying to inspect the facility. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Latif on an old deportation order he didn’t know existed, he said. An immigration notice went to the wrong address. He missed a court date, and a judge ordered him deported in absentia 16 years ago. The same judge reversed the deportation order while Hafraoui was in detention, Sandra said. Held for nearly four months, at Delaney Hall and at facilities in Louisiana and Arizona, Latif says he witnessed guards physically abuse detainees. He spent 10 harrowing days in solitary confinement after he refused to be deported, according to his account and an ICE document. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations. Sandra remembers one of their last visits, this time at an ICE facility in nearby Elizabeth, New Jersey, before he was moved again to Delaney Hall: “He was so traumatized, so terrorized. I thought, ‘My god, what did they do to him?’” Photographer Corrie Aune documented the Hafraouis’ time apart, and their reunion, for The Marshall Project.