Detainees rebel against horrific conditions in Newark, New Jersey

Detention centers, just like jails and prisons, are concentration camps for the workers, the poor and oppressed peoples, on a global scale from occupied Palestine to El Salvador to the United States. Our incarcerated siblings face some of the most horrific, inhumane treatment imaginable — usually isolated and invisible from the rest of society.

But every once in a while these detainees rise up to say “enough is enough” to remind the world that they are human beings and want to be treated as such despite their extremely oppressive conditions under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whatever charges they face.

Such was the case that happened at the ICE Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey, when four migrant inmates escaped during an uprising on June 12. Those inmates are Joel Enrique Sandoval-Lopez and Franklin Norberto Bautista-Reyes from Honduras and Joan Sebastian Castaneda-Lozada and Andres Pineda-Mogollon from Colombia. As of June 16, both Lopez and Lozada were recaptured.

The detention center, like many others, is notorious for being so overcrowded that people have to sleep on a cold floor, are served bread as a meal, forced to drink contaminated water and face constant guard brutality. These kinds of conditions and more led to the uprising when inmates covered security cameras in order to hide their identities to smash windows and walls, according to immigration lawyers who interviewed the detainees.

This detention center, like many others inside the U.S., is financed and managed by the GEO Group, a Wall Street firm that makes profits from this repression. This private firm won a 15-year, $1 billion contract from the Trump administration to transform an old building into a detention center especially for undocumented migrants. This contract is part of Trump’s overall plan to detain without due process and deport as many migrants as possible as quickly as possible. There are an estimated 51,000 migrant detainees throughout the U.S.

These detainees deserve our solidarity.