We get an update on protests at Newark, New Jersey's Delaney Hall, an ICE facility owned and operated by the private prison company GEO Group, where hundreds of immigrant detainees have been on a hunger and labor strike for the past week demanding their immediate release. New Jersey Congressmember Analilia Mejía recently toured the facility and spoke to people who described being arrested and detained after attending routine ICE check-ins, being held for months in appalling conditions even after signing voluntary deportation orders, and being hospitalized after they were beaten and pepper-sprayed by armed ICE agents. "What we need to understand is that this is a for-profit model, and they are failing human beings," she says. "The reality is that this is a rogue administration that has handed undue power to agencies, to ICE agents and to entities like GEO Group [that] are now acting with impunity."
Meanwhile, says Li Adorno, a community organizer with the immigrant rights group Movimiento Cosecha, protests outside the facility in solidarity with the strike have grown increasingly contentious. Local investigative journalist Bob Hennelly explains that the Trump administration's targeting of Newark for immigration enforcement has escalated since federal agents arrested and charged Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and New Jersey Congressmember LaMonica McIver with trespassing after inviting them into Delaney Hall last May. Hennelly says "there's a much broader implosion of the administration of law in New Jersey … [and] a collapse of federal law enforcement in Newark."
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