Everyone Has a Role to Play in Supporting the Strike at Delaney Hall ICE Jail

Immigrants taking part in the massive hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall — the privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail in Newark, New Jersey, where they are imprisoned — say they are continuing to face harsh retaliation in response to their resistance.

Catalina Adorno, a volunteer with the grassroots immigration rights group Movimiento Cosecha NJ, says people inside have been denied visits, phone and video calls, tablets, toilet paper, and access to common spaces. Strikers have reportedly also been pepper-sprayed, beaten, isolated, forced to go to the cafeteria, and transferred out of state.

“This is not the complete list of retaliatory acts we have seen,” Adorno told me, “but I just want to make clear that the retaliation is very real.”

The immigrants at Delaney Hall launched the initial hunger and labor strike on May 22. The strikers issued demands that included the immediate release of all detained people, with urgent priority for elderly people, pregnant people, young people, and people with serious medical conditions; meaningful and fair review of immigration cases and habeas petitions; an end to coercive pressure to sign deportation or voluntary departure documents; and an in-person meeting with New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill so she can observe conditions and hear directly from people inside.

“We deserve to be free and to complete the process at home with our families,” detained people wrote in a May 31 letter. “We demand freedom, a fair trial, and for our rights to be respected.”

The letter was written by a detainee named Leonardo, who has since been transferred, and signed by 24 detained people.

More than 300 people initially participated in the strike action, according to reporting by Kevin Ortega-Rojas and Democracy Now! The Guardian has reported that all pregnant women and two 18-year-old women were released from Delaney amid the strike and protests — releases that advocates have celebrated as victories.

In the weeks since the strike began, ICE has transferred hundreds of people out of Delaney Hall. Ortega-Rojas reported on June 11 that nearly 300 detained people had been transferred over the previous weekend, followed by reports that another 80 people had been removed from their units. Some people were released, but hundreds were dispersed to other facilities. Advocates told Ortega-Rojas that they believed the transfers were intended to break up the organizing effort and isolate detained people from their support systems.

The full number of transferred people who participated in the strike remains unclear. Democracy Now! reported that activists believe most of the original hunger strikers were transferred to other ICE jails.

These punitive transfers can separate immigrants from their attorneys, loved ones, and supportive organizers; interrupt medical care; conceal the whereabouts of detained people; and disrupt relationships that facilitate collective resistance.

Amid conflicting reports that the strike action had been crushed, women still imprisoned at Delaney Hall announced on June 10 that they were continuing the effort with a hunger and labor strike of their own.

“We are mothers, daughters, sisters,” the women declared in an open letter. “We do not deserve the punishment that has been inflicted upon us.”

A Leaderless Strike Against Forced Labor and Imprisonment

Adorno from Movimiento Cosecha NJ told me that Delaney Hall should be understood as “a symbol of resistance.” Movimiento Cosecha NJ fights for permanent protection, dignity, and respect for all immigrants, regardless of legal status. Since Delaney Hall opened, the group has worked alongside the Eyes on ICE coalition to provide mutual aid, orient families, connect them with resources, and organize people directly affected by the facility.

“We are not just a service provider, but an organizing vehicle,” Adorno explained. Movimiento Cosecha works to ensure that family members can advocate for themselves and their loved ones in immigration jails. “No one else knows the pain they’re experiencing but themselves, so it’s important that these families are centered.”

Delaney Hall is operated by the GEO Group, a private prison behemoth whose profits surged during the first year of Donald Trump’s second term. In February 2025, ICE awarded the GEO Group a 15-year contract, valued by the company at approximately $1 billion, to operate its company-owned, 1,000-bed Delaney Hall facility. The GEO Group has said the contract could generate more than $60 million in annual revenue at full occupancy.

That deal is emblematic of a rapidly expanding apparatus. A recent WIRED investigation identified more than 150 ICE leases and office expansions underway or planned across the country as part of what the publication described as a secret, monthslong campaign to enlarge the agency’s physical presence. The GEO Group, meanwhile, reported increasing its contracted ICE detention capacity by approximately 6,000 beds during 2025.

In May, former GEO Group executive David Venturella became acting director of ICE. As I recently wrote, Venturella’s appointment signals “an unabashed merger between GEO Group and the US deportation machine” — an arrangement that positions the company to extract ever-mounting profits as people are funneled into its immigration jails, shackled with its electronic monitors, and warehoused in facilities it owns or operates.

The strike at Delaney is a profoundly human response to the dehumanization of imprisonment, coerced labor, the targeting of immigrants, and a deportation regime whose violence creates opportunities for corporate extraction.

In a letter written on May 31, detainees described the strike as both a refusal of food and a refusal to keep their own prison running. They wrote that people inside had “voluntarily stopped working and assisting with facility operations,” including cleaning, cooking, maintenance, laundry, and floor polishing.

Adorno emphasized that the facility depends on this labor.

“There is no cleaning crew or service or kitchen staff,” she said. “All of that work is done by people being detained.”

The GEO Group and ICE, she argued, are not only depriving people of their freedom but exploiting their labor, even as GEO profits from multimillion- and billion-dollar government contracts.

Women detained at Delaney report that staff have forced them to clean under threat of losing access to their tablets, which they describe as their primary means of communicating with their families.

The strikers say GEO Group staff have tried to break the strike action through threats and punishment. “They constantly threaten to deport us, transfer us to punishment units, and move us from one detention center to another,” they wrote. Staff members, they said, take photographs of people in their dormitories without consent and tell them that “we have no rights here.”

The letter states that staff attempted to force the strikers to resume work throughout the facility. As part of that effort, the strikers say staff required people entering the cafeteria to sign a list, allowing officials to track who was refusing food and single them out for punishment.

On May 25, strikers say facility administrators gathered detained people in a common room and attempted to identify the strike’s leaders. The strikers told them there was no leader and that “the strike was a collective effort.”

When GEO Group staff attempted to handcuff and remove a detained person who had assisted with translation, others blocked the officers’ path with their hands raised in an effort to protect that person.

“In return, we received from them: beatings, pepper spray,” the strikers wrote.

The letter says an ICE riot squad then entered and discharged pepper spray throughout the facility, causing several people to be taken to the hospital.

“To this day, we haven’t heard anything about those people,” the strikers wrote. “As a result of all this, we feel psychologically impacted and are plagued by the fear that they might carry out their threats for no reason at all.”

Protesters Outside Delaney Hall Face Police Repression

The violence has not been confined to people imprisoned inside Delaney Hall. Adorno says GEO Group guards, ICE agents, Newark police, and New Jersey State Police have used force against protesters and organizers.

“We have been pepper-sprayed, gassed, beaten, and thrown against traffic,” she said, “all because we are in solidarity with the strikers.”

Jonathan Alcantara, a member of the executive committee of the North New Jersey chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), spent several days at Delaney Hall helping to marshal demonstrations and de-escalate confrontations. The chapter’s members, working through a statewide immigrant justice group with Central and South Jersey DSA, have supported rapid-response networks, “know your rights” trainings, and families affected by detention. When the strike began, Alcantara said, members mobilized to publicize the strikers’ demands and support protests outside the facility.

Alcantara emphasized the sensory experience of gathering at Delaney Hall. The detention center stands on Doremus Avenue, in the heavily industrialized section of Newark commonly known as the “Chemical Corridor.” The surrounding area contains waste-processing facilities, energy infrastructure, a sewage-treatment complex, and an animal fat-rendering plant, amid heavy truck traffic.

“I think part of the common experience at Delaney Hall is also about the smells when you’re there,” Alcantara told me. He described powerful industrial odors and trucks constantly passing the facility — a landscape of environmental harm surrounding people who have no ability to leave it.

Alcantara described GEO Group employees monitoring demonstrators from behind the gates, ICE agents forming a perimeter, and state and local police rotating through to keep protesters away from the facility. Inside, detained people repeatedly turned their lights on and off and gestured from the windows. Alcantara could not tell whether they could clearly see the protesters, but he was certain they could hear them.

“They knew that we were outside,” he said.

The demonstrations are also sites of collective care. Alcantara recalled people arriving not only to protest in solidarity with the strike, but to donate supplies to a radical hospitality tent supporting families and demonstrators.

“It was heartening to see so many people coming,” he said.

The strikers had asked for an in-person meeting with Gov. Mikie Sherrill. Alcantara condemned the governor’s failure to publicly acknowledge the strike while New Jersey State Police were deployed against people supporting it.

“It was incredibly disappointing and saddening,” he said, adding that the state police crackdown resembled the violence protesters had previously experienced from ICE agents.

The Demands of the Ongoing Women’s Strike

Dozens of women still imprisoned at Delaney Hall are carrying the hunger and labor strike forward in the wake of the mass transfers that threatened to dismantle the collective action. They are demanding restored access to communication and visitation, independent investigations into allegations of abuse, adequate medical care, safe drinking water, and improved living conditions. They are also demanding the release of detained women, with particular urgency for mothers, young people, and those with medical conditions.

Their demands remain rooted in freedom but also draw attention to sexual violence and abuse inside Delaney Hall.

Among their demands is the firing of a female guard accused of sexually assaulting detained women. According to Democracy Now!, the guard has been accused of sexually assaulting at least 10 immigrant women.

Another letter written by women inside Delaney describes family separation, medical neglect, coerced labor, racism, sexual abuse, and terrorization.

“We were taken at the entrances of our immigration court check-ins, at our jobs, taking our kids to school,” the women wrote. They described being shackled, denied bond, and swept into detention, often despite having work permits, tax records, pending immigration cases, children who are U.S. citizens, and long histories of attending court dates.

The women’s letter gives a devastating account of the trauma and grief that confinement and family separation are causing for detained people and their families. One detained woman, they wrote, has a 17-month-old baby who “cries every night because she misses her mom.” Another woman was detained shortly after giving birth. “Her baby was two months old when she was arrested, and she has been detained for three months,” the letter states. “Her family brings her the baby, but he doesn’t recognize her.” The women also described a mother whose 10-year-old child has heart disease and is going without treatment because her detained mother cannot renew the child’s health insurance.

In one case, the women say a detained person lost a pregnancy due to “medical malpractice.” Following the pregnancy loss, they allege, the woman’s medical record was erased and officials claimed the pregnancy had been psychological.

The women further allege that a person diagnosed with tuberculosis has been left untreated while living in a unit with 63 other detained people.

In a separate account, they described a detained person with post-traumatic stress who they say suffered a breakdown after being sexually assaulted by a worker at the immigration jail. The women wrote that the survivor was subsequently removed. As of May 22, they said, her family had gone eight days without being told where she was.

It is not clear whether this account concerns the same employee whom women are now accusing of assaulting at least 10 people.

“The pain and fear are taking a physical toll on us,” the women wrote. “We are losing our hair, some of us are suffering from anxiety attacks, we cannot sleep, and we have no energy for anything. We are depressed from being separated from the people we love.”

The women claim that the water they drink “is not potable” and say the food in the facility is nutritionally inadequate. Their complaints echo accounts from immigration jails across the country, where inadequate food and water, medical neglect, unsafe conditions, and retaliation against detained people have been repeatedly documented.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied that a hunger strike is taking place. In a statement reported by The Guardian, a DHS spokesperson called accounts of the strike a “hoax” and denied that detained people were being beaten or abused. The GEO Group did not respond to The Guardian’s request for comment.

How to Support the Hunger Strikers at Delaney From Afar

DHS officials cannot make the resistance at Delaney disappear simply by denying that it exists. People inside have described their actions in signed letters, communicated with relatives and organizers, endured retaliation, and continued organizing after hundreds of people were removed.

“The confinement is hurting us because it has inflicted wounds upon the heart of every detainee,” the women wrote, “wounds of hopelessness and fear.”

While the women repeatedly state in their letter that they “are not criminals,” there is nothing any of these women could have done — and nothing any criminalized person could do — that would justify such conditions. Every human being who organizes against abuse and exploitation amid the dehumanizing conditions of the carceral system deserves our support.

At Delaney Hall, multiple struggles are converging as detained people resist the extraction of their labor, sexual abuse, medical neglect, terror, coercion, family separation, and confinement itself.

The immigrants imprisoned at Delaney Hall have described months, and sometimes more than a year, of incarceration; cursory hearings; denied bonds and habeas petitions; rushed deportation orders; coercion; family separation; medical neglect; unsafe conditions; and retaliation for speaking out. They are demanding release and the opportunity to pursue their cases from home, with their families and communities.

Adorno says elected officials should be advocating for the release of those imprisoned at Delaney Hall and the facility’s closure. For everyone else, she says the first responsibility is to listen.

“Everyone should read the letters of the strikers,” she said. “Don’t just take our word for it; hear directly from them through these letters.”

Listening, however, is only a first step. Adorno encourages people who are moved by the strikers’ words to take action. She emphasized that supporters do not have to travel to Newark to participate. Organizers have posted calls to action that people can take up from anywhere in the country or around the world.

ICE may have scattered hundreds of people in an effort to break the relationships and collective power they built inside Delaney Hall. But the women who are carrying the strike forward have made clear that dispersal has not extinguished the resistance.

The people imprisoned at Delaney Hall are speaking under conditions designed to isolate and silence them. Their words should be read, circulated, and answered with action.