On Thursday afternoon, the wives of detainees on a work strike at the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark started to receive frantic calls. Guards were beating men with batons and deploying pepper spray in one of the units, they said.
“They were all screaming, but I could hear him say, ‘They’re hitting me. They’re hitting us. Could you please call someone?’ And everyone was just screaming, ‘help,’” recalled Gabriela Fuentes, 35, whose husband called her Thursday afternoon.
Another woman, Tatiana, who asked that her full name be withheld so as to not cause further retaliation against her husband, said she’d gotten a similar call.
“They started hitting them and pepper spraying them. One of the guys was bleeding from his mouth,” she said her husband told her.
It was the latest in the chaotic, week-long standoff happening inside and outside Delaney Hall, the New York metro area’s largest ICE detention facility, located on a gritty stretch of Newark’s industrial park.
Christopher Ferreira, a spokesperson for the GEO Group, which runs Delaney. confirmed guards had deployed “the limited use of chemical agents” while responding to “a physical altercation involving detainees.”
But advocates and family members of detainees said the confrontation began after guards tried to remove a detainee who’d been acting as a translator with staff during the ongoing strike. When others on the unit surrounded the man to prevent him from being taken, guards attacked with pepper spray and batons.
John Leschak, an immigration attorney in New Jersey, said he spoke to one frightened client who was detained in one of the units where the fighting broke out. ICE officers entered the unit and started beating people up, he was told.
“There was blood everywhere, there was pepper spray everywhere and it was hard to breathe,” Leschak said.
U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-New Jersey) spoke to GEO Group officials at the facility on Thursday evening and was told four detainees had been hospitalized.
One person was treated for a head injury, one for a fractured hand, one for shortness of breath and another for a heart problem, Melendez told reporters. Others were treated inside the facility for breathing issues and exposure to chemical irritants. Menendez said that the unit was still on lockdown on Thursday night during his visit. GEO Group didn’t let him speak to anyone inside.
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said “staff used the minimum amount of force to safely deescalate the situation. Following the incident, all affected detainees were promptly evaluated by on-site medical personnel and were cleared with no serious injuries.”
The unrest of the past week has rattled family members who have loved ones inside the facility. One woman who has two sons in their early 20s detained inside of Delaney called their Pennsylvania-based lawyer Keith Sklar on Thursday begging for help with their release.
“They’re going to get hurt, they’re going to get killed,” she told her lawyer.
Erica, the mother of an 18-year-old detainee who had yet to graduate high school, said her daughter’s anxiety had skyrocketed in recent days, and she hadn’t been able to visit her as all visits to the facility are suspended indefinitely.
“Today it was these two units. Tomorrow we don’t know what will happen,” she said in Spanish. “It’s the fourth day that this is happening and I can’t go there. I just see it’s getting worse every day.”
Detainees first announced a work and hunger strike inside the facility on May 22, calling for the immediate release of medically vulnerable detainees, followed by the release of everyone else on bond. It kicked off as a labor and hunger strike refusing to work in the kitchens or as cleaners.
The protest inside the facility drew crowds of supporters to its entrance over the weekend, as guards initiated the transfer of Martin Soto, one of the participants in the protest. While he was not leading the efforts inside, his wife Gabriela Soto stood vigil at the gates for several days rallying protesters outside.
Protesters spent several hours late Sunday night into Monday morning trying to block the van transporting Soto, but early on Monday morning ICE agents arrived to clear the way. Since then, immigration officers have been stationed along the facility’s perimeter around the clock.
In the days since, advocates have said most detainees are no longer participating in a full hunger strike, though many are refusing meals and instead relying on snacks from the commissary.
They are, however, still refusing to work for GEO Group, which pays them a few dollars a day to do janitorial or kitchen work. Advocates said the private prison group stopped paying the detainees in recent days, which was one of the issues that sparked the strike last Friday.
“We just demand due process,” one of the participants in the protest told The City Reporter shortly after his release from custody earlier this week. He declined to provide his name fearing retaliation in his pending immigration case.
In his account, the protest started organically the week earlier after a guard violently shoved an elderly man and detainees stepped in to catch the man. They announced the hunger and work strike several days later.
“If we do a hunger strike they’ll listen to us finally,” he said.
In a series of letters sent to advocates outside, participating detainees are demanding the immediate release of medically frail detainees as well as young and elderly ones. They are also demanding the release of all other detainees on bond while their immigration cases wind through court.
A letter from the strikers sent through advocates on Tuesday thanked those who’d rallied on their behalf outside the facility’s gates.
“We want you to know that you give us the strength and determination to keep going. Please, DON’T GIVE UP!” it said.
Clashes at the gates have grown more violent over the week. On Wednesday night, AMNewYork reported an agent shoved one protester into the path of a semi-truck that rolled over his foot, while others described injuries including massive bruises from nightsticks and broken bones.
One protester who watched the man’s foot getting rolled over told The City Reporter he went to try to protect him and an ICE officer struck him on the shoulder, breaking his clavicle.
“It’s scary to be facing off with people who are so heavily armed and so willing to be violent,” said the 30-year-old, who asked to be referred to only as S. fearing retaliation from the Trump administration. The City Reporter reviewed medical records confirming the injury. “The sort of violence that we’re experiencing on the outside is just a fraction of the violence they’re experiencing on the inside,” he said.
By Thursday evening, the protest had grown into a standoff that devolved into clockwork skirmishes as vehicles entered or exited the heavily-guarded facility gates.
Around a hundred protesters locked arms against a row of masked ICE agents in tactical gear guarding the gates. Wearing shields fashioned out of plastic garbage can lids, respirators and rain slickers, they chanted “free them all” and “fuck ICE” while ICE agents taunted the demonstrators, fingering cans of pepper spray and whipping open their night sticks, waiting for a signal.
Each time a vehicle approached the facility’s gates, the row of agents rushed into the crowd, firing streams of pepper spray indiscriminately, shoving protesters to the ground and swinging night sticks. After a vehicle passed through the gates, both the ICE agents and protesters reformed their original battle lines.
“If a car comes out of this hell hole, we will stop them!” one protester shouted to cheers. The crowd of protesters steadily grew as the night wore on.
Each confrontation drew new injuries. Protesters choking and red from the pepper spray or bleeding from the batons retreated to the back. Nearby, a tent of volunteer medics doused people in water and treated wounds as a new line formed at the front, ready for the next surge.
The hand of a freelance photographer, who asked not to be named, was gushing blood after an agent whacked it with a metal baton. He needed stitches, he later told The City Reporter.
At the edge of the protest crowd, one woman playing the guitar strummed along to the 90’s hit song by Chumbawumba. “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down,” she sang.
Between Wednesday and Thursday nights, federal agents arrested 15 people, a spokesperson for DHS confirmed. The City Reporter witnessed several ICE agents dragging one protester past the facility gates after one conflict. It’s not clear if anyone faced charges and a spokesperson for New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Unlike in New York City, where the NYPD have often intervened when demonstrations break out on the streets involving ICE agents, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on X that local Newark and State Police were refusing to provide ICE back up on crowd control, though though on Thursday evening local sheriffs had stationed several cars at the end of the block to direct truck traffic.
Spokespeople for the New Jersey State Police and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
“Rioters bit, kicked, and punched law enforcement officers,” Secretary Mullin said in a subsequent statement Friday.
“Anyone who assaults law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” he said, adding, “Law and order will prevail.”
Maria, a 38-year-old mother from Ecuador whose husband has been detained for several months at Delaney Hall, said she was shocked at how the situation had spiraled in the days since she joined a small group of families at the gates seeking justice for their loved ones.
“We didn’t start a war,” she told The City Reporter in Spanish.
“A march, and raising our voices peacefully, doesn’t mean that we started a war,” she said. “We’ve always been peaceful. Here, who started the war? It was ICE.”
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