Written by Marco Castillo
June 16, 2026
Freedom’s name is mighty sweet
And soon we’re gonna meet
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Inside Delaney Hall right now, people are surviving on spoiled food, broken bathrooms, and $1-a-day wages. A few weeks ago, I stood outside its razor wire and watched MAGA counter-protesters scream at the people trying to say so.
The contrast could not have been starker: their rage and our grief. Their certainty, and the anguish of the families waiting at the gate.
Delaney Hall is a detention hub for the entire NY-NJ-CT tristate area. A thousand-bed ICE prison in Newark’s industrial lowlands, owned and operated by GEO Group of Boca Raton, Florida, under a 15-year, $1 billion contract with ICE, one of the largest private prison companies in the US and one of President Trump’s closest allies in the business of suffering and pain. Last year, thousands of immigrants detained across these states passed through its doors or remain there now, a major stop in ICE’s operation to deport mostly innocent people to countries they were forced to flee due to violence, poverty, or devastation caused, in many cases, by US corporations or our nation’s insatiable markets.
What I also witnessed that day was solidarity. People from churches and synagogues across the metro area. Volunteers distributing clothes to visitors turned away at the gate for wearing the wrong shoes. Truck drivers on Doremus Avenue laying on their horns, long, defiant blasts rising up over the chants and the razor wire and the planes overhead, as if the road itself was bearing witness. That is the side of this country worth fighting for.
Advocates like Kathy O’Leary of Pax Christi have been demonstrating here for years, standing with families on the outside and bearing witness to the horrors within. That movement has grown sharply in recent months since detainees launched a hunger strike and a 100% labor strike to protest their conditions. It has sparked a growing statewide movement against this place.
The retaliation: ICE agents clashing with demonstrators, trying to intimidate, terrorize, and criminalize them. The NJ Governor offered to mediate, but instead of taking steps to close this inhumane facility, she sent hundreds of state troopers to separate protesters from the center. Anti-immigrant, pro-authoritarian counter-protesters followed, sending flowers to ICE agents and hurling hate at human rights advocates.
This scenario, where everyone but the powerful loses, became the story for weeks. A crime in plain sight, protesters silenced and criminalized, institutions turning a blind eye, people left to the mercy of the racist and hateful, emboldened and protected by the highest office in the land.
But we have to keep our focus on what matters most: the detainees and the families who have been fighting for years to end the unjust, illegal suffering of innocent people.
Call Governor Mikie Sherrill and demand the immediate release of vulnerable detainees — including elderly people, pregnant women, young people, and individuals with serious medical conditions; meaningful and fair review of every immigration case and habeas petition; an end to the coercive pressure on detainees to sign deportation or voluntary departure documents without prior legal counsel; and the closure of Delaney Hall.
A few days ago, a group of women detained at Delaney joined the hunger strike, growing the pressure on the state to act — and calling on all of us to hold on and keep fighting.
Let’s continue resisting hate with love and compassion. Always — as Pete Seeger would say — keeping our eyes and ears on the human beings bearing the brutal consequences of this terror regime