Delaney Hall: Lawsuits or mass protests?

Over 300 immigrant detainees inside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) concentration camp known as Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, started a labor and hunger strike on May 22, galvanizing broad public support and condemnation of GEO Group, the private prison company which runs the center.

Strike supporters outside the hall engaged in multiple militant clashes with ICE police who responded with pepper spray and rubber bullets. Charging ICE police with violence, on May 30 New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill (D) sent New Jersey State troopers to the front lines who were just as brutal if not more so than ICE. Many demonstrators were injured, and on May 31 state police kettled and arrested 63 activists. Sherrill blamed what she called “outside agitators.”

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D) was next to respond with a curfew and a ban on traffic within a half mile of the hall, which is located in an isolated, heavily industrialized area. Even though he’d been arrested a year earlier for protesting about conditions at Delaney Hall, Baraka deployed Newark city police, despite having claimed the city would not spend taxpayer money to safeguard Delaney Hall.

It is not GEO group employees who need safeguarding — it is the 850 immigrants who have been detained inside, some for over a year, in what Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road New Jersey, described as “a modern-day concentration camp.” (whyy.org, May 25)

Horrific conditions fueled the strike

The detainees’ labor and hunger strike is a response to intolerable conditions like the denial of medical care, including for cancer and diabetes, food that is swarming with maggots or is otherwise inedible and overcrowded conditions that force people to sleep on floors. Detainees are being refused bail bond and access to lawyers and are being forced to work for as little as $1 an hour, if they are paid at all. 

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, claims that the multi-billion-dollar private prison company can pay immigrants so little because of the exception in the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery — “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Yet the vast majority of ICE detainees have not been convicted of any crimes.

Many of those detained at the prison were snatched from their jobs or taken while reporting to courthouses for green-card appointments. Most are Latine and jailed without due process. One striking worker, during a video call stated: “We are also doing this to demand freedom. We’re not treated like people. We’re treated like animals.” (In These Times, June 5)

A major complaint is that the horrific conditions are intentional as a way to pressure detainees to leave the U.S. Federal DHS officials are insisting that no hunger strike occurred, but “if detainees are not satisfied with their dining experience, they are welcome to leave” — in other words, to self-deport.

Broad support

Workers World spoke with Jersey City activist Donna Ristorucci, who joined hundreds of others for a 24-hour vigil outside Delaney Hall on May 29 when she heard about the hunger strike. “The detainees are not criminals,” Ristorucci said, “yet they have been denied their rights and are being treated like criminals. We need to abolish ICE and end the whole anti-immigrant culture. It’s enraging.”

Ristorucci was glad to see that many people were wearing keffiyehs, showing solidarity with the strikers and their families at Delaney and with Palestinians in Gaza who have been killed and imprisoned. “AI surveillance technology provided by Palantir, which has major contracts with ICE and Israel, has been used to target Palestinians in Gaza and immigrants here,” she noted.

The protests have resulted in the release of a small number of the most seriously ill detainees.

Lawsuits vs. mass public protests

The hunger strike and the public demonstrations in support of detainees, now going into their third week, have highlighted a key division between movement activists and the strategy of Democratic Party officials to counter insurgence with limitless lawsuits. Two new lawsuits over health and safety issues at Delaney Hall were filed in recent days by State Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and another by Ras Baraka.

But few detention centers have been closed as a result of lawsuits. So far in 2026, detainees at Delaney Hall have filed over 531 lawsuits challenging their detention — a rate of more than three per day. Their claims account for a third of the habeas corpus lawsuits filed in New Jersey. (Not Us, June 6)

Bina, one of the protesters involved with the demonstrations outside the hall, told Workers World: “The city of Newark has filed new lawsuits, but it took people both inside and outside to bring attention to this struggle. When there were mass protests outside, people on the inside responded by banging on the windows.”

Bina noted that the same politicians who filed the lawsuits unleashed state troopers and local police on the protesters. She described how Delaney Hall was purposely located in a heavy industrial area surrounded by noxious smelling sewage plants. “It’s easy for the government to hide this uprising, because it’s not near an urban area, and Newark police shut off access to the center.

“Rather than lawsuits, what’s needed is mass outreach with flyers, talking to people in the surrounding communities and cities.” She noted that a hunger strike by nine detainees at Bergen County detention center in 2020 was successful because of this type of mass engagement. “That jail no longer detains people for ICE.”