By admin 
By the time I arrived, the scene outside Delaney Hall, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Newark, had become quiet. During the week, it had exploded in violence. There were only a handful of protesters standing on Doremus Avenue, a big tent offering refreshments and a place to sit for organizers and visitors, and about a dozen armed ICE agents guarding a driveway entrance. Most of the agents had on tactical gear and had their faces covered and stood with the bored posture of men waiting out a shift of watching over protesters with bullhorns.
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The few protesters taunted the agents, who mostly amused themselves. When chants of “No ICE, no KKK, no fascist USA” broke out, one agent started beating his hands to the rhythm and bopping his head. Another protester turned to one ICE agent who appeared to be of East Asian descent and told him he should know better, referencing the U.S. government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. A few other agents chuckled and called back, “That’s racist!”
At another entrance, reporters clustered around New York Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the first formerly undocumented immigrant to serve in Congress. He had just exited Delaney Hall and declared that the facility needed to be shut down. “The women there are under attack,” he said, referring to reports of a woman who is said to have experienced a miscarriage while detained inside.
Faint chants of “Libertad” were audible from inside the facility. Protesters answered with chants of “Si, se puede.”
Late last week, roughly 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike inside Delaney Hall over deteriorating conditions, including inedible meals, insufficient medical care for detainees with cancer or diabetes, poor ventilation, delayed hearings, and pressure to sign papers to self-deport. For months, lawmakers inspecting the facility have corroborated reports of inhumane conditions and called for immediate intervention. (GEO Group and the Department of Homeland Security have both denied the central assertion about poor conditions.) By Sunday and Monday, some of the most violent scenes since the Minneapolis ICE bombardment and protests followed, including an incident in which New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim said he was pepper-sprayed.
The official response from Washington was ridicule. Asked about New Jersey leaders pushing back against ICE operations at Delaney Hall, Trump joked about renaming it “the NICE facility,” and dismissed the demonstrations as staged. “These aren’t protesters,” he said. “These people are fake. They’re all paid for.” Then he defended the facility itself: “We run the finest facilities anywhere in the world of their type,” he said, before claiming the people inside included “horrible killers” and “guys that have murdered numerous people.” (The majority of detainees at Delaney Hall have no criminal record.)
A Trump administration official weighed in and declared, “There is no hunger strike.” Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin went further, disputing the hunger strike as being only “a handful” of people refusing to eat because they wanted “ethnic food.” “They can go back to their country and get whatever food they want,” he said. “This isn’t Holiday Inn.” He blamed Democrats for the unrest, and said Sen. Kim “probably shouldn’t have been there” if he did not want to be hit by pepper spray.
Organizers who have maintained a presence outside the facility since it opened say federal agents are the ones escalating. Sally Pillay and Megan Anandarangam, of Eyes on ICE NJ, a grassroots anti-detention coalition, showed up long before the cameras arrived. They have been stationed outside the facility since April of last year, Pillay told me, trying first to stop Delaney Hall from reopening and then to support the families who began arriving there.
Eventually, that work culminated in the “radical hospitality” tent outside the facility: a place with water, snacks, chairs, and shade for families, organizers, and visitors. Anandarangam said the tent exists partly because visiting families are left waiting outside. “It’s the only detention center in the country that doesn’t have an indoor waiting area,” she said. “Some of these people are coming from New York. They’re coming from hours away. They show up early. The schedule is very unreliable. It changes all the time. And they’re out here in all of these conditions. They have young children. They’re pregnant.”
Last Friday, Pillay said, advocates held a rally outside the hospitality tent. It was led in part by Gabriela Soto, who is four months pregnant and whose husband was detained inside. That morning, calls started coming from inside Delaney Hall. According to Pillay, the detainees learned what was happening outside and responded in kind. “The men and the women decided, in solidarity with what was happening outside, to engage in a hunger and a labor strike,” she said. Advocates then began a 24-hour vigil.
Then, Pillay said, came retaliation. The flashpoint was Soto’s husband, Martin Alonso Soto Hernandez. Pillay said ICE told Soto that he would be released. “When the van came out, advocates on the ground—somebody saw him in the van because he was banging,” Pillay said. Then they realized ICE was trying to move him out of the facility and into another one. She believes Soto was targeted to get to his wife for organizing the demonstration outside. “He was not the leader in the hunger and the labor strike. He was merely a participant in it in support of what was going on. They lied,” she said.
“That’s when we put the barricade to stop him from being moved,” Pillay recalled. Roughly 125 protesters formed a human chain and blocked entrances and exits to try to stop the transfer. Masked federal agents pulled protesters from the crowd, dragging at least one across the ground, and agents threw a gas canister and used pepper balls and batons while telling protesters to move back. Sen. Kim, who had visited the facility after hearing about the hunger strike, was among those caught in the chemical irritant.
Though protests began to swell recently, Delaney Hall has been a flashpoint since February of last year, when GEO Group announced that ICE had awarded it a $1 billion, 15-year contract for a 1,000-bed facility in Newark that dramatically expanded immigration detention capacity in New Jersey. Newark officials and immigrant rights advocates fought the reopening, suing GEO over permitting and inspection disputes, which led to a spectacle when Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside Delaney Hall while accompanying members of Congress who were denied access for an oversight visit. (The trespassing charge against Baraka was later dropped, but Rep. LaMonica McIver was separately charged after the confrontation.)
Pillay said that since this latest round of protests, the retaliation has continued. “Visitation for families has been cut. Communication has been cut, too,” she said. “Water has been intermittently turned off. The guards with the rubber bullets are patrolling. There’s a lot of intimidation tactics. There’s a lot of retaliation inside. And folks outside, they need to know this.”
By nightfall Wednesday, the scene outside Delaney Hall was turning violent again. Protesters—many wearing keffiyehs or other face coverings—crowded the entrance forming a human chain blocking the facility driveway while ICE agents pushed forward, shouted “get back” and swung batons low at protesters’ legs, fired pepper balls, and used Mace.
One local known as Trivv, who was posting video of the protesters, said he expected the coming days to be worse. He received messages from people around New Jersey who had not realized how bad things were at Delaney Hall and now planned to come. “I got a lot of DMs after the videos from last night,” he told me. “People saying, ‘I’m coming in. I live in Jersey. I’m a Jersey resident. I didn’t know it was this bad. I haven’t heard anything on the news about this. You’re the only reason why I knew.’ ” (On Thursday, Trivv was detained and then released.)
That is what Pillay and Anandarangam worried about. They had hoped to keep in focus before the latest violence broke out. The story, they kept saying, was not supposed to be about Andy Kim, or pepper balls, or the spectacle outside the gates. It was supposed to be about the people inside.
To Anandarangam, the skirmishes risk swallowing the story and drawing attention away from the conditions for detainees in the facility. “The headline shouldn’t be that Andy Kim has been pepper sprayed,” she told me. “Full credit to him. He put his body between those pepper-ball guns pointed at us and the agents. I haven’t seen a lot of other elected officials do that. He has been inside multiple times. When we’ve asked, he has come in person,” she said. “But that shouldn’t be the headline. It should be what’s happening in here. And what’s happening with the families.”
“There’s people who are here legally. They’ve done things the right way. They’re not criminals,” Pillay said. “They’re following the law. They’re following the process,” Anandarangam added.
It was difficult to hear Anandarangam as she told me about what drives her to continue showing up. Loud trucks kept passing and honking their horns, leaving a smell of burning diesel fuel in their wake. If you know Newark, you know there are unique layers of environmental hell to this particular area: Doremus Avenue is part of the landscape that local environmental-justice organizers have long described as the Ironbound’s “sacrifice zone.” Delaney Hall is nestled in a 1-mile stretch of Doremus Avenue with a natural gas plant, an open-air sewage treatment plant, an animal-fat rendering plant that spews putrid smells, chemical storage containers, constant airplane traffic, and one of the most contaminated waterways in America. It’s also in close proximity to several condemned Superfund sites deemed too toxic to recover.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that as I stood outside the facility. Doremus Avenue has long been treated as a place for things that, with enough long-term exposure, can kill you. People being held here—especially here—made me recoil. The people who were outside voluntarily were doing it for them.
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