For more than two weeks, around 300 immigrants locked up at Delaney Hall, an immigrant detention camp in Newark, New Jersey, have been on a hunger and labor strike, refusing to eat and refusing to work maintaining the prison for its operators, the GEO Group. They are not alone: Outside the camp’s chain-link fence, in an industrial area, their family members, loved ones, and a broader community of supporters have gathered and remained despite violence from ICE and the New Jersey State Police. As Gabriela Soto, whose husband was detained at Delaney Hall, told reporters a few days into the hunger and labor strike, their demands are to “close Delaney Hall and free every person in there.”
Since the strike began, immigrants inside have shared four letters, published by Cosecha, an immigrants’ rights organization. “We feel vulnerable, in a way, kidnapped or detained without justification,” the prisoners wrote in one letter. They have reported being denied medications (one woman said staff told her that pain medication was “cosmetic”), being fed spoiled food, and being forced to endure outbreaks of illness across the facility, which has poor ventilation and does not have adequate medical treatment or emergency responders.
Another letter, released on Wednesday, describes the opening days of the strike, when Delaney Hall administrators demanded to speak to its leader. “They were upset when we told them there was no leader and that the strike was a collective effort,” the letter recounts. In response, the letter continues, administrators retaliated against one person who had helped with translation, trying “to take him away in handcuffs, which all of us, seeing the injustice, wanted to prevent by peacefully blocking their path with our hands raised so that they wouldn’t take him away.” Next came “beatings, pepper spray, and from ‘ICE,’ a riot squad came up spraying pepper spray throughout the facility, causing many people to be rushed to the hospital.” That was on May 25. “To this day, we haven’t heard anything about those people.” Despite the violence, the strike has continued, as have similar strikes in GEO Group–run detention facilities in California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The conditions inside Delaney Hall, which are appalling, dangerous, and a violation of the rights of those detained, are entirely in keeping with how other such “detention centers” are run across the country; a recent AP investigation found hundreds of immigrant detainees reporting medical neglect in lawsuits across 33 states. The solidarity shared by people trapped in these camps, as evidenced by the multiple simultaneous strikes, makes sense; it has extended outside the camps, as well, with local groups working to shut down ICE facilities offering their support. The resulting crackdown on both striking detainees and their supporters tracks with all the other times Immigration and Customs Enforcement has harmed witnesses and protesters in the course of the agency’s carrying out Trump’s signature campaign of mass deportations. People coming together is treated as a threat by those running the camps because it is precisely the thing the camps are meant to break.
“The opposite of a camp is community,” journalist and translator John Washington writes. He uses “immigration camp” to more clearly describe the dangers posed by the “hundreds of ‘detention centers,’ ‘processing centers,’ ‘holding facilities,’ as well as leased local jail and prison cells in every state of America.” He argues in his forthcoming book, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches From the Fight Against Immigrant Detention (out in July), that the camp shapes our politics and our ways of making community. “A camp warps and degrades reality,” he writes, “both for those in fear of ending up in one and for those living alongside them.” But for as long as there have been such camps, there has been resistance to them, including by those caged within. Camps are, after all, not abstract systems but the products of people’s decisions. “A camp is a long series of choices that need frequent reaffirmation,” Washington observes, and each choice is an opportunity to end, or at least slow, the camp’s operations.
For one thing, camps need approval from myriad city, county, and state authorities; all stages of approval can be contested. As an example, Washington offers a site in Adelanto, California, where immigrants began a hunger strike earlier this month. The camp’s opening required sign-off from agencies such as the state’s Environmental Health Department, CAL FIRE, and the Native American Heritage Commission, among many, many others. That camp also needed permits for everything from native vegetation removal to signage to pollution discharge. As Washington added at the end of this list, each of the people who signed off “could have said no.”
That work—researching, locating, and challenging each of these decision-makers—has been undertaken over decades by groups such as Detention Watch Network, which has identified points of intervention at each stage of immigration camp operation and expansion. Its tool kit on how to challenge ICE’s warehouse expansion details specific permits and ordinances required; venues in which those can be fought; and tools available to the public, such as zoning codes, environmental review, and litigation. As Trump’s mass deportations campaign took off, some national progressive groups have also taken up the fight against immigrant detention, such as Indivisible. Newer efforts have also joined, such as Project Salt Box, which uses public records to map out possible new camps and the money behind them. Detention Watch Network maintains a map detailing Trump’s camp expansion plan; few states are untouched. If you want to put a stop to immigrant detention, it is likely happening near you, whether in a private-run facility like Delaney Hall, a purpose-built camp like the one in the Florida Everglades, or more quietly, in a county or town jail leasing space to ICE.
Among the many tragedies of Delaney Hall is the fact that it had already been shut down once before. GEO Group ran it as an ICE detention center from 2011 to 2017. It then sat dormant until GEO Group got a billion-dollar contract (over 15 years) to reopen in 2025. Not long after the camp took its first prisoners in May 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka challenged it in court, in part on the grounds that it was operating unlawfullywithout required permits or safeguards; after one attempted inspection, the city left a court summons on the camp’s chain-link gate. In response, GEO Group accused the mayor of engaging in “a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey,” that was meant to “interfere with the federal government’s efforts to arrest, detain, and deport dangerous criminal illegal aliens in accordance with established federal law.” At the time Baraka tried to inspect Delaney Hall, alongside three Democratic members of Congress, an event DHS characterized as the elected officials having “stormed the gate” of the camp, when video evidence shows clearly that ICE had let them inside before forcing them out. Baraka was charged with federal trespassing charges, which were ultimately dismissed.
Now, in this second round of working to close Delaney Hall, organizers are using some similar strategies as before. People have tried to stand in the way of ICE vehicles. Lawmakers have demanded site visits. Lawsuits have been filed, most recently by the state attorney general against GEO Group. If that company has “nothing to hide,” New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said in a statement, “and the conditions inside Delaney Hall are as safe and as sanitary as this private corporation and the Trump Administration claim, then there is no legitimate reason why my health inspectors are being kept from full access throughout the building.” She added, “I will continue using all the power of this office to advocate for the detainees and their families.” Mayor Baraka said this week that he would “expand” his existing lawsuit against GEO Group; he wants a judge to order the camp closed. But of all these efforts, the strike and the public support it has garnered seem the most disruptive to the operations of the facility. Last week, DHS issued a statement claiming that detainees’ reports of abuse and dangerous conditions are a “hoax,” and on X the agency denied that there even is a strike underway.
But this is not a simple story of local officials defending their community against violent ICE agents and the private prison camp. Governor Sherrill—who, despite her statements to use “all the power” of her office, has not returned to Delaney Hall—last week declared the area a “peaceful protected protest zone.” This pushed people away from the facility, effectively negating their efforts to block ICE traffic, as independent journalist Talia Ben-Ora noted. Press access was likewise restricted, and had been challenged even before the zone was declared, with photojournalists seemingly singled out by officers; the U.S. Press Freedom tracker recorded 30 assaults on journalists by law enforcement in one week outside Delaney Hall. The governor has yet to meaningfully respond to these threats to both press and protest freedoms, which, arguably, she amplified. The governor also put New Jersey state police in charge of policing the protests. “I will not give ICE the pretext to expand operations in our state,” Governor Sherrill said when announcing these plans. “The state police were just ushers for ICE,” said one organizer at a rally in the New Jersey State House this week that was intended to push Sherrill to do more in defense of immigrants. After the launch of her “protest zone,” dozens of people were arrested. Press on the scene documented flash-bangs and tear gas used against protesters and themselves.
These last two weeks of concentrated attention aside, people have been outside Delaney Hall for months now, offering support for those inside. They have welcomed and comforted family members who stood outside the facility in long lines in the frigid cold and in punishing heat for the chance to visit those inside. As people inside met repression when protesting conditions, mutual aid groups outside have too. Community media, such as Radio Jornalera NJ, have been reporting what’s happening nearly live in some cases, capturing in Instagram Reels people trying to make family visits, the aftermath of police violence, and moments when people are released. Their reporters have been there throughout the strike, witnessing, giving people outside a chance to share what they hear about people inside. The chain-link fences remain, but they have not severed the community gathered on both sides.
