Prisoner Hunger Strike in Newark Sparks Clash With ICE Thugs
Solidarity riot at Delaney Hall teaches us many lessons necessary for these increasingly revolutionary times.
Over the past nine days, immigrant prisoners in the Newark New Jersey detention center Delaney Hall went on hunger and labor strike after being faced with appealing conditions. The prisoners cited terrible food quality with worms, absent medical treatment, beatings, abysmally low pay, no due process, and being “treated like animals.” Outside of the prison, activists have escalated protests in solidarity, demanding their freedom, especially for those who are elderly, pregnant, and sick. The strike has now grown to over 300 people, some of whom have been pictured waving to supporters from the prison windows.
In response, ICE agents have been reported to have beaten and tortured prisoners partaking in the strike, in many cases throwing them in solitary confinement. Prisoners seeking freedom are hit with an over $50,000 bail even if they have a clean criminal record, and have been denied access to their lawyer. In many cases, these immigrants were arbitrarily arrested from job sites, or have been taken away right after court hearings or green card appointments.
Protestors and strikers also demanded that the Democratic governor Mikie Sherrill do something to resolve their demands and meet with them. Since the beginning of the strike, Sherrill has entirely ignored the people on the fround and has only offered empty promises. Like any capitalist-beholden politician, her public image was more important and thus is seeking to deescalate rather than escalate in order to end the abuse. In a news conference she said that “I have never thought Delaney Hall should open,” meanwhile she . Sherill still claims to want the entire facility to be closed. However, one report she was said to have reached “common ground” with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the modern-day-nazi behind this barbaric scene. So that implies she is completely lying, and that the “common ground,” is just some marginally better version of the status quo at best.
One of Sherill’s solutions was creating designated protest zones to cage-in those on the ground who were actually trying to disrupt the prison activities. In conjunction with that, local New Jersey police were sent out to support the ICE agents defending the concentration camp. It’s curious how a governor can place herself on both sides of the protest line and claim to be “keeping the community safe.” But in reality, the police have whole-heartedly participated in brutalizing the community. Tear gas, riot shields, and rubber bullets have left people bruised, bloody, and burned.
Sherill also used her platform to denounce the fictitious “masked individuals,” different from the “peaceful protestors,” for their “aggressive and dangerous actions against Newark and New Jersey State Police.” She went on to say “The police were not in protective gear; they had been on location since early in the morning ensuring protestors and counter protestors had areas to exercise their rights safely.” Whining about the rabid cops who were just chomping at the bit to crack protestors skulls the night before. These are the same cops that stand side-by-side with the ICE gestapo and joke about murdering leftists behind closed doors. Playing dumb she writes, “I do not know why these individuals attacked or what they wanted to accomplish,” implying that their anger is completely unwarranted. This is precisely the controlled liberal thought which the Democratic establishment wants to instill; that ‘peaceful protest,’ which has solved nothing on its own, is fine, but as soon as a person is angry enough at the state to start throwing rocks, they must be condemned for the sake of the innocent optics of this side of the protest. We saw this happen countless times when the masses get seriously angry with their current conditions and start to riot. Liberals are always the first ones to hand wave, deny, or denounce radical protest. They want to support the cause but not the means to actually force it to happen. Last summer when Los Angeles residents rose up against the city police and the ICE thugs, establishing barricades, and starting fires in the streets, the liberal media was angry at them, finding their justified rage to be a nuisance. During the Black Lives Matter riots, we saw the racist side of the liberal media come out in full force, policing how angry the black community of Minneapolis was allowed to be about the murder of their neighbor.
Profiting from this concentration camp is GEO Group, a private-prison contractor that allows the federal government to institute what is effectively slavery. Out of the range of federal oversight, this private corporation is legally allowed to charge as little as $1 an hour for so-called ‘voluntary labor,’ which is generally just forced by punishing those who don’t ‘volunteer.’ Being an agency that arbitrarily detains immigrants based on race, throws people into this prison regardless of conviction, and forces them to perform labor, ICE has overridden multiple Constitutional rights that have meant effectively nothing to the Trump administration. It is reported that this corporation earns a contract of $1 billion from the federal government on top of the profit from the forced labor output by the prisoners. Civil rights groups like the ACLU already sounded the alarm during the opening of this facility back in February of 2025, demanding that the state lawmakers pass preventative measures to stop local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. Now here we are, 18 months later, and state officials can only offer crocodile tears while the cops under their jurisdiction brutalize people taking action into their own hands.
to be continued…