The Battle for Delaney Hall

The immigration detention facility is notorious for mistreatment. Inside and outside, people fought back.

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Magazine

In February, thirty-year-old Martín Soto was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while on his way to buy diapers for his eleven-month-old son. He was sent to northern New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, the largest immigration detention facility on the East Coast, which has become known for its inhumane conditions. In May, Martín was one of roughly 300 people inside the facility who launched a hunger strike and signed an open letter broadly addressed to federal officials, elected representatives, and the general public. It described being “tortured physically and psychologically” due to the rotten food, inadequate medical care, and civil rights abuses inside the facility.

Gabriela Soto, Martín’s wife, has helped lead what are now regular protests outside the facility, which is operated by the private, for-profit prison company GEO Group. Family members, advocates, and other activists gather to try to block ICE vehicles entering through the gates and employees arriving for work. The company’s contract with ICE to run Delaney Hall is worth $1 billion—providing 1,000 beds for fifteen years, thereby quadrupling New Jersey’s immigration detention capacity.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived outside Delaney Hall in May was how far away ICE wants people to be kept from the detention facility. Local police towed cars parked in nearby lots. Protesters would sprint back to move their vehicles and then end up having to park more than half a mile away. By the third day of the hunger strike, the barricades had become as much a part of the story as the people refusing food inside.

There is a place for the cameras. A place for the families. A place for the clergy. A place for the protesters. Everyone is assigned a patch of pavement from which they can watch without interrupting anything. The detention center continues its business just beyond reach, behind the barbed wire and gates that surround the facility. Beyond the fence, silhouettes of detainees pressed against the frosted windows of the building can be seen, pumping their fists toward the protesters who are cursing GEO employees as they drive through the gates.

In June, during the second and third weeks of the escalating confrontations outside Delaney Hall, Newark police forced all attendees through checkpoints nearly half a mile from the facility in either direction. They also prohibited journalists and protesters from bringing personal protective equipment like safety glasses and respirators.

By the third week of the standoff outside Delaney Hall, New Jersey State Police officers were firing flash-bang grenades and tear gas into the crowds. Protesters were often struck with less-lethal munitions, echoing scenes of the resistance outside the detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, that took place last fall and which I also reported on for The Progressive.

In an apparent effort to break up the hunger strike, which concluded in late June, the Department of Homeland Security transferred its organizers to other detention facilities across the country. Just days after people inside Delaney Hall launched their protest, Martín was transferred about nine miles south to the Elizabeth Detention Center, where his family worries he awaits deportation. Gabriela says he was moved in retaliation for his activism inside the facility and her protests outside of it.

“This is kidnapping,” Gabriela tells me. “DHS are kidnappers. They’re abusers. The people running Delaney Hall are helping them.”