Inside the Protests at Delaney Hall, the New Front in Trump's Immigration War

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/delaney-hall-protests-new-jersey-detention-center-1235570458/

For hours, the masked protesters and masked ICE agents have stood staring at each other, separated by a thin strip of asphalt. At the edges of the crowd, New Jersey state troopers stand around, arms crossed, looking bored. Daylight hours at Newark’s Delaney Hall immigration detention center are quieter, the crowds thinner, the officers behind the gates more relaxed. It’s when, until recently, families could still go in and out, visiting their relatives inside. But when night falls, things change.

“When sunset happens, they’re going to push us into that cage and mace the fuck out of us,” says a street medic we’ll call Egg. “When they come, they’ll come hard and fast.”

The cage Egg is referring to is a small square of orange fencing set up on the street outside of Delaney Hall. It’s there because New Jersey’s new Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill, has for days tried to quell the protests outside of the detention center, and has determined that what demonstrators need is a designated “protected speech zone.” Temporary fencing isn’t going to cut it, though — not for the protesters and certainly not for the detainees suffering inside of Delaney Hall.

On May 22, a group of detainees in DHS custody began a hunger and labor strike over what they claimed were inhumane conditions inside the facility. In a series of letters, detainees described a horrific list of ailments and injustices, including the persistent spread of disease, long response times by guards in the case of accident and injury, worm-riddled food, insufficient medical care, and dilapidated bathrooms that were in “inhumane condition.”