‘We won’t stop until they’re free’: protesters outside a New Jersey ICE facility in their own words

Wednesday marked the sixth day that more than 300 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were on a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. Meanwhile, the mood amid the dozens of organizers and community members rallying outside the facility was tense but energized with support.

Masked protesters circulated, handing out water bottles, personal protective equipment and oranges. A few attenders who travel across the country to ICE protests wherever they occur – such as a man with a karaoke machine in a giraffe costume – trolled the ICE agents, successfully getting a giggle out of one of the few agents with his face exposed. Passing tractor-trailers on the busy industrial road punctuated protest chants with long, extended honking in solidarity.

Around 9.40pm, detainees sent out a message of recognition, a reminder that they were separated by about 40ft and walls: a light flashed on and off from inside the top-floor window of Delaney Hall closest to the protesters, who responded with a celebratory roar.

Shortly after, things turned violent.

Late on Wednesday, supporters attempted to form a human chain to block vans coming in and out of the facility. Livestreamed footage from the outlet Status Coup showed ICE agents hitting protesters with batons – and steadily, as they had all day, pushing protesters further into oncoming traffic, including one protester into a tractor-trailer, getting their foot run over.

Durga Sreenivasan, a protester who organizes with Hands Off NYC, says she was hit with a baton, and that ICE agents sprayed chemicals. According to the DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, six protesters were arrested.

Protesters lock arms outside Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center, where detainees are engaged in a hunger and labor strike in Newark, New Jersey, on Tuesday. Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian

“There were some elderly ladies there, and a lot of young people,” said Sreenivasan. “Some of these chemicals can affect us for the rest of our lives.”

While people have been organizing outside Delaney Hall for months, this week’s demonstrations sprang up in response to ICE transferring a key leader of the strike, Martín Soto, to another facility. Since then, ICE agents have sprayed protesters with chemicals and shot pepper balls. The Democratic senator Andy Kim was reportedly pepper-sprayed after visiting the facility on Monday with Mikie Sherrill, the New Jersey governor, who was denied entry.

On Thursday afternoon, allegations also emerged of ICE beating and using pepper spray on detainees. Kim condemned ICE and Geo Group, stating that his office had received multiple calls regarding the allegations, and called for the immediate closure of “this broken facility”. Sherrill also joined demands that the facility close, after the state’s department of health was denied full access.

With their hunger strike, detainees have made four demands: an in-person meeting with Sherrill, the “immediate release of all prisoners”, the quick adjudication of their immigration cases and an end to alleged internal pressure from ICE agents to self-deport. Detainees in at least five ICE facilities are undertaking active hunger strikes, according to the independent outlet LA Taco.

In a letter earlier this week, detainees say that Geo Group – which, as ICE’s biggest contractor, runs Delaney and at least 18 other facilities – “fails to meet the basic conditions necessary to protect our health and our lives”. Following a visit inside the facility, members of Congress described poor conditions: cancer patients being given Tylenol and food that “very often” contained maggots. Detainees in Geo Group-run facilities are forced to work in the facility for $1 a day or sometimes no pay. According to attorneys, detainees have been denied visitation rights and access to commissary and video calls to the outside.

Mullin, the DHS secretary, has consistently denied the conditions and the hunger strike, saying on Fox News on Thursday: “Not only are we providing them a safe place to stay, and food, and a place to sleep, but we’re also giving them a convenience store to buy products out of. So we’re going above and beyond. The fact is this is political theater.”

At another Geo Group facility in Washington state, detainee Rogelio Enrique Bolufé Izquierdo, the founder of Unión de Secuestrados por ICE (or Union of those Kidnapped by ICE) who helped organize a hunger strike at the facility, has been moved to an unknown location, according to the Stranger. Advocates say detainees like Izquierdo and Soto are being moved in retaliation for organizing the strikes.

On Thursday, organizers were still calling for people to join the protests at Delaney Hall to support the detainees.

“We need to keep remembering that the fight is about those on the inside,” said Cristian Moreno-Rodriguez, the executive director of El Pueblo Unido of Atlantic City. “So as long as we keep doing that, we encourage everyone to keep coming, to make sure we’re highlighting the atrocities, the abuses that these ICE agents are committing.”

The Guardian talked to organizers and advocates outside Delaney Hall on Wednesday about why the protest was important.

Cristian Moreno-Rodriguez, executive director of El Pueblo Unido of Atlantic City

First and foremost, we want to center the demands of those on strike.

We are here fighting for Nicolás and his family. Nicolás was one of our team members who was detained unlawfully in a Kavanaugh stop in Hammonton, New Jersey, a couple weeks back. He’s been in Delaney Hall for the last several weeks. He is in the same unit where the overwhelming majority of folks are on hunger and labor strike. Nicolás hasn’t eaten since Friday.

Cristian Moreno-Rodriguez: ‘There’s so much solidarity.’ Photograph: Lex McMenamin/The Guardian

We’re here to show statewide solidarity. We drove from two and a half hours away. This is our fourth night here, back to back to back. And we’re here to hold the line to make sure that those inside are not forgotten, to make sure that we’re fighting for the dignity and justice of them all. We won’t stop until they’re free.

There are moments of intense trauma, brutalization, from the abuses that these ICE agents are committing. They’re recklessly pepper-spraying protesters, they’re batoning us. But even through all the pain, something that they can never take away from us is the love and courage that we have for each other. There’s so much solidarity, whether we’re locking arms, whether we’re receiving a community member who’s been recently released. One thing they can’t deny is that we’re unified and that the whole state is coming together to organize at Delaney Hall in support of those on strike.

El Pueblo Unido comes about once a week to do accompaniment [where a volunteer accompanies an immigrant to court or other places where they may come in contact with the authorities] from Atlantic City all the way up to Delaney Hall. We were here for an accompaniment trip on Sunday when things escalated with all the attacks, when we tried to stop the van so that Soto wasn’t transferred.

At this moment in time, it’s those on the inside who are carrying the fight, and we’re just supporting their fight on the inside, outside.

Jasmine Johnson, executive director of Fight Against Fascism Organization, part of March 4 Democracy

Jasmine Johnson: ‘It’s time for us to come together.’ Photograph: Lex McMenamin/The Guardian

I was up here on a humanitarian mission, to drop off some much-needed medical supplies.

I’m about two hours south of Delaney Hall, so it’s not a huge trip, but my husband and I felt it was urgent to come up here and contribute.

Honestly, seeing this [crowd] is actually making me feel great, in the sense that we know that there’s so many of us who are on the right side. It just begs the question, what holds the rest of them? What is gonna be enough for you? What does it take for the rest of you to realize that this is eventually going to come for you too?

I don’t think that we’re ever going to get what we need from this current administration or the government as it’s currently structured. So it’s time for us to come together. I would just like to get back to where neighbors can actually knock on your fucking door and not worry about getting shot.

Maral Sahebjame, board member with Resistencia en Acción New Jersey, an immigrant and workers’ rights advocacy organization

The detainees’ demands are not better conditions for the inside – they want their freedom.

I teach a course on human rights law. In my unit on disaster capitalism, we spoke about the privatization of prisons by states handing giant contracts to private companies like Geo Group and CoreCivic, which own a significant portion of the detention facilities throughout the country. The detention center in Adelanto, California, is owned by Geo Group, and there, detainees have been on hunger strike for over 10 days.

[These companies] run on a lot of the labor of the detainees, which makes it a highly profitable industry – private prison investment. And I think that’s something that we have to recognize when we think about, does our law enforcement serve us? Absolutely not, because it’s actually being driven by investors and shareholders of these companies.

The privatization has, I think, escalated the barbarity and the indecent and inhumane treatment of detainees.

Kylie No Heart Noir, protester from the Muskogee and Yuchi Nations of Oklahoma

I came to witness, stay silent and to watch what’s going on, to see what kind of support is really being given, and what’s really needed.

Coming from a reservation in Oklahoma, we know what the federal government can do. We have been at war with them for a very long time. This is our land. I don’t think any Indigenous people have a problem with the immigrants that are coming and wanting to stay, because as long as you respect the Earth and the people, you shouldn’t be a problem.

The value of coming here is you get a perspective on something that people are gonna talk about for 30, 40 years. History repeats itself in various ways.