At Delaney Hall, an ICE detention camp for captured immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, operated privately by the for-profit contractor Geo Group, the food is spoiled, and sometimes has maggots. Those who are imprisoned there, who have not been convicted of any crime, are forced to work for about $1 per day.
Conditions are overcrowded and unsanitary; there is only limited and inadequate medical care. Those inside say that they are being beaten and pepper sprayed; the DHS has denied allegations of mistreatment, but the Geo group issued a statement last week admitting to at least one instance of “physical altercation” that included “limited use of chemical agents”.
Like at other ICE camps, members of Congress have been denied access to the facility, in violation of the law. This week, DHS also “denied full access” to New Jersey state health inspectors.
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Immigrants inside Delaney Hall have organized a labor strike and a hunger strike, trying to call attention to the inhumane conditions they are being held in. Outside, immigration force members, local police, and a group of pro-Maga locals who have gathered to show their support for the concentration camp have clashed with anti-Ice protesters, including New Jersey senator Andy Kim, who have gathered there for more than a week to show their support for the striking prisoners. Those protesters say they have been pepper sprayed, too (which DHS has denied).
Reports from inside ICE detention centers are uncommon, partly because ICE and their allies in the Trump administration have successfully restricted investigations into conditions there. The agency has long made it difficult for those detained to contact attorneys or their families, charging hefty fees for telecommunications services and moving their prisoners repeatedly between different camps, to make it harder for those on the outside to track them down.
At Delaney Hall, families of the captured were temporarily blocked from visiting; when a small congressional delegation was finally allowed inside, they reported seeing inadequate food and medical care and imprisoned teenage girls, and what House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called “a depraved indifference to human life”.
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They were not allowed to meet with hunger strike leaders. DHS claims that reports of poor conditions inside the camps are “a hoax”. But all this effort on the part of DHS to keep people from seeing into the facilities, and to keep those trapped inside from describing what is happening there, suggests that ICE feels that they have something to hide.
Nevertheless, none of this has stopped those imprisoned inside from trying to get the word out about their suffering. In San Diego, incarcerated immigrants wrote notes detailing their horrific conditions and taped them to lotion bottles, the better to throw them to protesters on the other side of the camp fence. At other detention centers, those imprisoned have formed their bodies into the letters “SOS” when allowed into outdoor recreation yards, hoping to be photographed by overhead drones.
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At Delaney Hall, the immigrants leading the hunger and labor strikes have been able to smuggle accounts of their conditions and activities to journalists and activists, including through letters, which have been signed by nearly 300 detainees – including 50 women – inside the camp.
The protests outside Delaney Hall in New Jersey evoke the street clashes in Minneapolis earlier this year, in which residents, many of them citizens, rose up in resistance against the ICE forces occupying the city and kidnapping their neighbors, and federal forces responded with violence that killed at least two US citizens. But the Delaney Hall uprising is different in kind, because it represents an escalation of organizing and resistance by imprisoned immigrants themselves.
Those who have now been on hunger and labor strike inside the New Jersey prison are not in hiding, as many immigrants in Minneapolis were; they are no longer looking to evade capture by ICE. Maybe this means that they no longer have anything to lose. They are not relying on risks taken by citizens and permanent residents who have more freedom because they are less easy to deport.
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They are instead taking their cause upon themselves, taking their fate in their own hands, and successfully creating blocks of solidarity and resistance from within the heart of Trump’s archipelago of concentration camps.
In this sense, they represent a maturation of the movement to resist the federal government’s mass deportation machine: the activation and radicalization of the most vulnerable.
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Will it work? That might be up to those of us on the outside. Violence is already allegedly ongoing inside Delaney Hall, where the organized strikers, after all, have nowhere to run. Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called “border czar”, has said that if the hunger strike continues, ICE guards may result to the violent and violating procedure of force-feeding.
Meanwhile, ICE has tried to break the strikes by secretly moving one of the leaders to a different detention center, in violation of a court order. The immigrants’ courage is matched only by the severity of their limited options. Ultimately, the pressure for change will have to come from the outside.
