Inside New Jersey's Infamous ICE Facility

This is Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. It's been a jail, a halfway house, a rehabilitation facility, but for the last year it's been an ICE detention center and the site of ongoing clashes between federal law enforcement and the protesters outside. Much of what we know about the inner workings of Delaney Hall come to us from letters that detainees have smuggled out. And in those letters are accusations of wormy food, denied medical care, unsafe working conditions. I sat down with journalist Amanda Moore and my colleague at Mother Jones, Sophie Hurwitz, both of whom have been on the ground outside Delaney Hall. I asked them how this place became a flashpoint, what protesters and detainees are demanding and who ultimately is to blame. This is our conversation about Delaney Hall. Let's dig in. What is happening at Delaney Hall? Nothing good. There's a hunger strike. So in solidarity with that hunger strike, there have been protests outside of Delaney Hall for over a year. Somewhat famously, right? They made the news last year as well. And the response from both the federal government and from the local police has been to meet everybody with absolutely brutal violence. Imagine someone has never heard of Delaney Hall. How would you describe the facility and the purpose it serves? Delaney Hall has been a lot of things. And last year it was reopened as a detention center housing about a thousand people. I have not been in. Media is, as a general rule, not allowed inside Delaney Hall. They also aren't allowing health inspectors to perform a full inspection of the place to see whether the allegations of wormy food, of unsafe conditions, of dirty sleeping areas are true. There's a whole lot going on. I think Delaney Hall is also a symbol. It has become, like the Whipple building, like Broadview, a symbol of ICE brutality contained in a building. Yeah. There was a person who passed away there not too long ago, 41-year-old John Wilson Brutus. And so it's kind of gotten this real reputation, in a way, for being kind of one of the worst places to go. At least that's the way it seems from the outside looking in. But have you spoken to anyone who's been inside? I have not. I have, though, read these letters that have been coming out from inside, which I really want to highlight. Starting, I think, about a month ago, a group of detainees in Delaney Hall started sending out these handwritten letters detailing their conditions, talking about the bad food, about being forced to work there for wages ranging from a dollar to four dollars per day as janitors and cooks and maintenance people. They want government officials like Governor Mikey Sherrill to meet with them to see for themselves what the conditions are like inside. They're saying that they want their habeas petitions and their immigration cases to actually get properly reviewed. And they're saying they want their freedom. What precipitated this very specific clash that we've seen over the last week or two? It was this hunger strike. It was the solidarity with the hunger strike that created these conditions for this protest to happen. But really, I don't think at the beginning was very many people that were there. And still, it was an extreme response from ICE. Can you describe that extreme response? I had a conversation with Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, and she described ICE as creating chaos. I mean, a lot of chaos, right? A lot of chaos that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE created. Could you describe perhaps some of the, as you say, response, the kind of vicious, violent response that you've seen from ICE today? Yeah. So, you know, they used to tear gas people, shoot pepper balls at people. But I guess those are bad objects. So now instead of doing that, they were spraying pepper spray, the most potent kind of pepper spray that's meant to spray into the air for crowd dispersal. You're taking it and spraying it directly onto your face. It's extraordinarily painful. Extraordinarily for days. Painful anywhere it touches on you. They're also, or they were, understaffed for what they were trying to do. They couldn't hold their line when they would come out and push against the protesters as they tried to block cars. There just weren't enough of them. It's a cycle. They just started clubbing everybody with their batons. I think it just made them more violent because they felt like they had to make up for being understaffed. Sophie, there are detainment facilities across the country. And we've heard through reporting across outlets that conditions aren't always the best in those facilities. So what makes this one unique? I think that Delaney Hall has also become a flashpoint because of the brutality the ICE agents are exhibiting. But I don't want to say that's unique because we know it isn't. I mean, Amanda can speak to the other places that she's been. But I do think that the community that has built up around the people detained there is something that I found really striking. Amanda, yeah, I'd like to hear from you about some of that. What are some of the tactics that we've seen? You've already mentioned the pepper spray. But have you seen ICE use other tactics in their clashes with the protesters? Well, the tasers were new. I hadn't seen that. I mean, there was a guy, he would come out waving his taser around, holding a cup of coffee, telling people, you're going to get tased, you're going to take it. I mean, it was just bonkers. And now in Albany Park in Chicago, just the other day, they tased someone there too. And I literally never saw a single DHS agent hold a taser for the entire time I was following Bovino around. I'm wondering what local officials are doing about this. How are they responding to the demands of the protesters? And how are they kind of responding to the increased attention that's kind of come to this facility? So that's been messy. Both Governor Mikey Sherrill and Ross Baraka, the mayor of Newark, have called for Delaney Hall to be shut down. However, they are also the ones making the calls for the state police and the Newark local police to come in and control the protests. So while on the one hand, they're holding these press conferences where they're like, yeah, things at Delaney Hall are horrible. We don't want this in Newark. We never wanted this in Newark. They are also the ones that are sending in people who then tear gas the protesters. Amanda, you witnessed the local state police coming in. And I'm curious how that played out. They kettled everybody, journalists and protesters alike. At some point, I counted 40 protesters, and there had to be, I could probably name off the top of my head, 20 photographers who were there. We were a significant portion of the people that were in this kettle. They let most of the media out. They kept a few people and arrested them as well. Held them for 24 hours before processing them. I know for the journalists, people were contacting the governor's office, the press freedom group, ACLU, everybody was involved and nothing. They towed everybody's cars also, by the way. $175 a day, only open eight to three. They let everybody out after like 24, 25 hours. At least one of the journalists who was arrested still does not have his phone or his camera. It's all still taken. He has no idea where it is. I think that their intention was, well, first, we don't have to deal with tomorrow's protests if they're all still detained, which is true. But I think they wanted to scare people off. Because in reality, tear-gassing people, flashing grenades, you might get hurt. Someone might die. But realistically, it's fine. You're going to be fine. But you can only get detained for 24 to 48 hours so many times. That's a huge turn. What the police did is an escalation compared to ICE. As they were pushing people up that first night, they started on the other side of the street, pushed people towards the facility, and then passed it. ICE is just standing there, hanging out, cracking jokes, occasionally firing off like a pepper ball or something just to be part of the activity. But they're really just watching the show. And so this is another state that is saying, we have citizens, people living here, neighbors who are being brutalized by immigration officials. And they don't want to be. They don't want to be detained. They don't want to be deported. And the only people who are willing to be brutalized by immigration officials are now instead being forced to take that cause up with the state police. It's like, you can't hit my little sister, but I can, kind of thing. Those are my constituents. Only we can beat the ---- out of them. Well, obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty here. But both of your work for Mother Jones has been really, really clarifying, really helpful and revelatory. So thank you so much for what you're doing and the reporting that you've guys been leading.