Bearing Witness to ICE Abuses at Delaney Hall

The warehouses of human suffering are all around us. Filthy, inhumane prisons where immigrants are hidden away and brutalized. It's up to us to keep pushing to end these modern-day concentration camps. To expose them, empty them, and tear them down.

For months we New Jerseyans have mobilized to defend our brothers and sisters locked away in Delaney Hall in Newark. Many there are on a hunger and labor strike to protest the inhumane conditions inside—the rotted food, untreated illness, physical abuse and mental anguish—and the injustice of their detention in the first place. They are demanding their freedom.

Delaney Hall is just one part of a national network of immigrant abuse. It’s not about enforcing immigration laws—it’s about a paramilitary operation to attack and imprison immigrants and people of color, and keep them in inhumane conditions without the possibility of freedom until they give up their rights and accept deportation. In prisons all over the country—Adelanto, Dilley, Krome, Otay Mesa, Hutto, and others—corporate contractors like GEO Group are profiting from human isolation, sickness, and death. The Trump administration is supplying the bodies. And Congress is pumping billions of dollars more to feed this obscene, corrupt system.

Right now there is so much we can and must do to support the people suffering and protesting inside those walls. Some courageous fighters have already been released. But the struggle continues. We must work together to keep the pressure on the administration to meet their demands for human rights, due process, and for their freedom, starting first with the release of the most vulnerable, the elderly, young, pregnant, and sick.

We who are outside need to keep fighting and organizing to defend imprisoned immigrants and to support their families.

At a bare minimum, we must bear witness. The ICE Out of New Jersey collective has brought together several state and local community and grassroots organizations to be in the front lines to defend immigrants and expose and resist the administration's abuses. The groups are the New Jersey Immigrant Rights Program of the American Friends Service Committee, CATA - The Farmworkers Support Committee, Cosecha NJ, DIRE (Deportation and Immigration Response Equipo), El Pueblo Unido, Estamos Unidos NJ, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Resistencia en Acción NJ, and Semilla Roja NJ.

Also, Eyes on ICE is building a network of watchful vigilance and mutual aid. Community members, elected officials, faith leaders, students, unions—it's going to take all of us, all across the country. To show that we could be different. We must not look away. And we must not stop.

President Donald Trump and those enforcing his white-supremacist campaign of mass imprisonment and mass deportations want us to feel afraid and powerless. The police—like the New Jersey state troopers who attacked peaceful protesters at Delaney Hall—want to intimidate us. We need to work together to shift this narrative, at all levels, from the governor and state and federal representatives to mayors and grassroots leaders.

When we say, “No justice, no peace,” we mean it. We are neither afraid nor powerless. And we are not strangers. We are human, like those just inside those walls.

Our freedom out here is linked to their freedom inside. We must fight for the liberation of all. The attack on one is an attack on all of us.

We must be witnesses when we are ordered to leave and told there's nothing to see. Even when Immigration Custom Enforcement agents and state police officers beat, trample, and pepper spray us in the name of "keeping the peace."

We must keep saying no—not now, not ever, never again. We must not allow the Trump administration and its state and local partners to keep abusing their power and using our money to commit moral atrocities in secrecy.

We the people must hold firm to our humanity and reject their barbarism.

The administration's top goal is to dehumanize immigrants. But despite all their violence, they have failed. The men and women behind the bars of immigrant prisons like Delaney Hall refuse to be dehumanized. Those who are on a hunger and labor strike are asserting their human dignity, which can never be erased.

We who are outside need to keep fighting and organizing to defend imprisoned immigrants and to support their families. We must keep up the pressure, for as long as it takes and with all the power we have.

We must not let their inhumanity dehumanize us.