Washington, DC — In a new Substack post from America’s Voice, Gabe Ortiz highlights the ongoing hunger strike by hundreds of detained immigrants happening at the privately owned Delaney Hall immigration detention center in New Jersey – and the larger implications of what the Delaney Hall protests signify.
Rather than advance accountability and reforms, the administration is intent to escalate the situation – just this morning, in an interview on Fox News, DHS Secretary Mullin threatened that the agency “could soon stop processing international travelers at Newark Airport over the immigration dispute,” exacerbating an already tense situation. Read “Detained Immigrants Are Hunger Striking To Protest ‘Brutal’ Private Prison Conditions” in full on AV’s Substack and find key excerpts below:
Hundreds of immigrants detained at a privately-operated detention facility in New Jersey have been waging a hunger strike to protest dehumanizing and unsafe conditions funded by our tax dollars, including worm-infested food, inadequate medical care, forced labor for $1 a day, and due process violations that have kept them separated from their families and communities with no freedom in sight.
“The conditions are brutal,” attorney Selenia Destefani told CNN about life inside the GEO Group-operated Delaney Hall, where an estimated 300 immigrants have launched strikes to protest inhumane detention conditions that have even seen individuals with life-threatening conditions like cancer unable to access adequate medical care. “People just sleep on the floor – overcrowded rooms, cold showers, no food, extremely cold in the cells with no blankets,” Destefani continued. “Not sound conditions to live in.”
“Frustration then boiled over at plans to move Martin Alonso Soto Hernandez, a detainee whose wife is pregnant and who has sought release on bond, his attorney said,” CNN reported. But his sudden transfer Monday morning to a second privately-operated detention facility was retaliatory, outraged advocates and lawmakers said. Soto Hernandez had been a leader in the hunger strike movement at Delaney.
Before his abrupt transfer, Soto Hernandez’s wife, Gabriela Soto, launched her own protest outside the Delaney facility to help call attention to her husband’s plight. She’s been supported by local community organizations like Cosecha New Jersey, Resistencia en Accion New Jersey, Pax Christi NJ, El Pueblo Unido of Atlantic City, Faith in NJ, and Sussex Visibility Brigade, to name a few.
“When I started this protest for Friday, I wanted press to come, so that they can see what they’re doing to destroying families and separating them,” she told Democracy Now! She said that when she tried to visit him Saturday, the detention facility also retaliated against her by refusing to bring her husband to the visiting area and instead harangued her about speaking to the press. “Why are you telling people that we’re feeding them worms? Why are you telling people that we don’t give them medical care?” a guard demanded to know. “Because it’s true,” she responded. Her husband was transferred just hours later.
It’s not hard to deduce that there’s brutality inside Delaney because the brutality outside the GEO Group-operated detention facility has been impossible to miss. Gothamist reported that “multiple protesters and bystanders posted on social media that ICE deployed pepper spray,” including against U.S. Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), who was assaulted with the chemical agent while trying to keep community members safe. “And I just thought that was an incredibly dangerous action for them to do, and that continued problems, that continued threat of violence and escalation continues today, tomorrow,” he later said. “I mean, it just, we’re seeing just a heightened level of danger right now in New Jersey.”
Just as Sen. Kim predicted, violence continued on through the week, after federal agents reportedly targeted and abducted a volunteer working as a street medic, Kathy O’Leary, the New Jersey coordinator for Pax Christi, told Gothamist. The volunteer is a U.S. citizen and U.S. military veteran, she said.
“According to O’Leary and social media videos, the volunteer was across Doremus Avenue, separated from the facility by four lanes of traffic, when ICE agents moved from the facility and rushed toward him, shouting ‘eyes on the target.’ They ‘shoved the volunteer’s face into the pavement, handcuffed him and dragged him into the facility,’ O’Leary said,” Gothamist reported. “After his arrest, the man was left on the side of Rutherford Street in Newark, O’Leary added in a text message.”
People of good conscience must ask themselves what these detention facilities must be hiding, because why else would they block federal lawmakers – and even the state’s governor – from conducting oversight visits? U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ) said that he arrived at Delaney on Sunday night to conduct an unannounced visit after hearing Soto Hernandez was at risk of being transferred but was wrongfully denied entry into the site.
Federal law and the courts have been clear: members of Congress are explicitly authorized to conduct these visits as part of their oversight responsibilities. Then the following morning, the site blocked Gov. Mikie Sherrill as well.
“The inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall shock the conscience,” responded House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “The majority of detainees at the facility have no criminal record and are being served rotten food, denied medical care and forcibly confined in unsafe conditions. Donald Trump and his violent mass deportation machine have repeatedly and unlawfully attempted to block Members of Congress from carrying out our oversight responsibilities. At least 48 people have died in immigration custody since the start of this administration. That is unacceptable.”
On Wednesday, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) arrived at Delaney with what he said was a court order in hand. “And as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, I am entitled to go in, so we’re gonna do that just now,” he said.
As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer so effectively summarized in his 2018 piece, the cruelty is the point. In California, immigrants at two GEO Group-operated facilities are also hunger striking over inhumane conditions.
“More than 40 detainees inside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center started a hunger strike on Friday, May 15 to demand quicker medical attention and to protest meager food portions and mold in the showers,” the Los Angeles Daily News reported. “As of Tuesday morning, an additional 20 people detained inside the Desert View Annex, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility next door, joined the hunger strike, activists said, to demand adequate medical and mental healthcare, nutritious food, bond reform, accountability for deaths in ICE custody, and to shut down the Adelanto ICE facilities.”
The strike comes as the state’s Justice Department released a report finding that detention conditions there “worsened as the current administration’s mass deportation campaign led to overcrowding and strained resources at new and existing facilities.” The Adelanto ICE Processing Center also ranks in the top ten when it comes to the use of solitary confinement, which human rights experts have compared to torture.
In their third open letter to the public, Delaney Hall hunger strikers thanked community members for their support and asked them to keep fighting for justice for everyone unjustly detained at the GEO Group facility. It’s critical that they remain on the nation’s mind as so-called border czar Thomas Homan has threatened to violently force-feed the hunger strikers who are demanding basic human dignity.
“We, the detainees at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility, wish to express our objection to the violation of our rights as immigrant human beings,” detained individuals wrote on May 26. “We, the detainees, are demanding our progressive release, based on the fact that our arrests were illegal; immigrants to this country have the right to await our pending immigration proceedings outside of prison; therefore, we demand to be released on bond or parole so that we may complete our proceedings.”
“We appreciate the support of everyone who is protesting outside the facility,” the letter continues. “We want you to know that you give us the strength and determination to keep going. Please, DON’T GIVE UP!”
