Let’s be clear: the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation agenda must be stopped.
Immigration detention threatens the democratic principles our country was founded upon and tears families apart. The Trump administration’s dangerous immigration policies and xenophobic rhetoric are actively harming our communities – violating their constitutional rights, spurring fear, and creating fewer safe environments for everyone.
The people being detained at Delaney Hall, a detention facility in Newark, are facing inhumane conditions and are denied basic human needs they have rights to, such as being subjected to rancid and inedible food, systematic and egregious medical neglect, and coercion into giving up their rights – including pressuring detained people into signing voluntary departure orders and deportation documents they do not understand. Many resorted to starving themselves to shed light on the abuses inside.
New Jersey isn’t the only state where this injustice is happening: hunger strikes have taken place in facilities in California, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, too, to protest the cruelty the people are facing. In response to these calls for change, federal agents have violently retaliated against protesters and people in detention, even transferring those who are participating in hunger strikes, thousands of miles away from their families and communities.
The inhumane treatment of people being detained is endemic to immigration detention. These are not isolated incidents – they reveal the calculated cruelty of the immigration detention system and the Trump administration’s entrenched interested in profit over people. In fact, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) just received another $70 billion in funding that will further protect the interests of the private corporations running immigration detention facilities over the health and safety of communities.
In the face of these horrific injustices, community members and families have continued to unite in fierce opposition to the abuses of immigration detention.
Community members have rallied together outside Delaney Hall in overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations to call attention to the deplorable conditions on behalf of everyone detained inside, many of whom began a hunger and labor strike to advocate for basic human needs.
In response, federal agents fired pepper balls and tear gas at people gathered outside the Delaney Hall, including Sen. Andy Kim, and reportedly retaliated against hunger strikers inside.
The real harm New Jersey is facing is not from peaceful protests, but from the rampant ICE raids tearing apart our communities, the brutality of the immigration detention system, and the excessive force being used against detainees, observers, journalists, and protesters.
This reality underscores that for the Trump administration, cruelty is the point.
People detained at Delaney Hall are facing deplorable conditions. The families and community members who are protesting their treatment, and the elected officials who are asking to inspect the facility, should not face pepper spray and rubber bullets for doing so. New Jersey’s response must prioritize the safety and well-being of people, leverage every tool at its disposal to carry out meaningful oversight of the facility, and ultimately work toward it being shut down.
Immigration detention is inhumane and un-American. It is dangerous for those being detained, their loved ones, and all who care about the preservation of our democracy. We cannot sit idly by as our neighbors are killed, injured, and terrorized.
The ACLU of New Jersey is calling for the end of the Trump administration’s detention and deportation machine, including the closure of Delaney Hall, a facility that has subjected those inside to abusive conditions since the day it opened.
Join us by adding your name to our petition to shut down Delaney Hall and all facilities like it. Together, we can stop the Trump administration's detention and deportation agenda – because we cannot let these threats to human rights continue.
Have you witnessed unlawful conduct by ICE? We want to know about it. Share your story and use our form to report unlawful conduct by federal immigration agents in New Jersey.