Following last winter’s showdown between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the population of the Twin Cities, momentum is picking up on another front: resistance from within detention facilities. At least 51 people have lost their lives in the custody of ICE since Donald Trump took office, twice as many as died between 2021 and 2024. In response to this tragedy, as well as to unbearable conditions and the looming threat of deportation, detainees and their supporters are staging strikes and protests around the country.

One of these fights is playing out at Delaney Hall, a federal detention facility located in Newark, New Jersey. The facility closed in 2017, but the private prison profiteering company GEO Group reopened it in February 2025 in return for a billion dollars of taxpayer money.

Delaney Hall has been a site of conflict for over a year. On May 9, 2025, a confrontation took place between ICE agents and Democratic politicians attempting to inspect the facility. On June 12, 2025, after detainees reported unacceptable conditions and lack of food, raucous solidarity demonstrations took place outside it. During an uprising inside the facility, four prisoners escaped after breaking through a sheet-rock exterior wall.

This month, on May 22, 2026, more than 300 detainees at Delaney Hall launched a hunger and labor strike, citing rotten food and lack of medical care and legal resources. In response, hundreds of protesters mobilized outside the federal detention center, building barricades and blockading the exits in order to stop ICE from removing strike organizers from the facility. Federal officers responded by firing pepper balls and other projectiles at demonstrators, tear-gassing protesters, and once again attacking a politician who visited the facility in an effort to report on the conditions within.

The strike in New Jersey is part of a growing wave of actions across the US. In Southern California, at least 20 detainees are participating in a hunger strike at the Desert View Annex, where previous hunger strikes have occurred. Four people have died at that facility since it, too, reopened in 2025.

In New Mexico, Rogelio Bolufé launched a hunger strike to protest employees of CoreCivic, the company operating the private prison, seizing his legal documents. In retaliation for launching the strike, authorities transferred Bolufé to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. The Northwest Detention Center, which is also owned by GEO Group, has itself been the scene of ongoing protests, acts of resistance, and hunger strikes for many years.

On May 19, the Tacoma-based group La Resistencia released a statement from detainees, announcing the formation of “La Union de Secuestrados por ICE (USI),” the Union of People Kidnapped by ICE. Over 140 members of the USI from both Torrence County and NWDC signed the letter, declaring that they “firmly denounce that the current operations against immigrants are not driven by security concerns… but rather by a system that has turned human suffering into a business.”

Meanwhile, private prison contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic are reporting record profits. Following the ignominious departures of the officials previously leading ICE, Trump tapped David Venturella—a former GEO Group executive who previously oversaw contracts for detention centers. Venturella is best known for helping to imprison and then deport the ex-girlfriend of Paolo Zampolli, a Trump associate linked to Jeffrey Epstein. It could not be clearer that what Trump calls “the largest deportation program in the history of America” is above all a means to enrich his allies in the private prison industry.

At Delaney Hall, hundreds of protesters have been mobilizing alongside family members of those locked inside to support those on strike. They have rallied in support of detainees every day for several days now. According to one report,

On Friday morning, at a small rally organized by Gabriela Soto—a rising immigrants’ rights advocate who’s married to Martin Soto, a Peruvian man detained at Delaney since February—several men held at the center spoke to the crowd via video chat.

One man said he and the nearly 300 others in his unit at the facility had decided to “stop eating and stop working” indefinitely until the inhumane conditions inside the facility improve. “But that’s not all we demand,” he said. “We are also doing this to demand freedom.”

With pressure building, protests grew over the weekend, pushing a Democratic politician to tour the facility. The senator reported on the horrific conditions inside which include rotten food, lack of access to medical care, and echoed calls for the facility to be shut down.

Martin Soto is one of the organizers at the center of the strike. He was scheduled to be released on Sunday night. However, it soon became clear that ICE was attempting to move him to another facility in an effort to break the strike. According to another report,

Word of Martin’s supposed release reached [Soto’s wife] Gabriela, who immediately went to Delaney Hall… While she waited to greet Martin and bring him home, Gabriela instead saw guards put him in the van. Sally Pillay, an advocate with Eyes on ICE NJ, was with Gabriela at the time and previously described the scene to Gothamist.

“ We ran out [to] the van. [Martin] was banging onto the van. I clearly saw him in the van. He was the only one in the vehicle that they were trying to take out,” Pillay said. “He was still wearing his uniform. He was shackled, but he was banging furiously. He could see [Gabriela]. She was running frantically in and around the van.”

Protesters outside the fence quickly realized ICE was attempting to move Martin, and they formed a human chain in front of the gate to prevent the van from leaving. Word of the transfer attempt spread rapidly online, and the crowd of protestors grew throughout the evening.

The effort forced the van to retreat, thwarting Martin’s transfer temporarily. Minogue declares in the filing that when Martin was brought back inside Delaney Hall, he was thrown to the ground, accused of damaging the transfer van, and placed in solitary confinement.

Further protests took place on Monday, May 25, as demonstrators looking for Soto attempted to block and inspect every vehicle leaving the facility. Then it came out that Soto had been transferred to the Elizabeth Detention Center, also located in New Jersey. According to a filing from his attorney, “[Martin] remains housed in solitary confinement conditions and wildly restricted to access to counsel as well as terminated visitation for his family.” Clashes with federal law enforcement nonetheless continued.

Officials in the Trump administration have held to their longstanding policy of blatantly lying about resistance to ICE, with acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis declaring that “There is NO hunger strike at Delaney Hall. There are NO subprime conditions or abuse at the facility.” Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement maintaining that “No individuals were directly struck by pepper ball projectiles.” 

In another letter from strikers inside Delaney Hall, prisoners addressed those demonstrating outside the prison walls: “We appreciate the support of everyone who is protesting outside the facility. We want you to know that you give us strength and determination to keep going. Please, DON’T GIVE UP!”

On Tuesday night, clashes between federal officers and demonstrators intensified as federal agents attempted to move detainees out of the facility, repeatedly pepper-spraying and beating protesters. Nonetheless, protesters held their ground, linking arms and pushing the agents back again and again.

The clashes taking place in New Jersey represent the first large-scale public resistance to mass deportation since Donald Trump fired Greg Bovino and Kristie Noem in response to outrage over the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The new secretary of DHS, Markwayne Mullin, has sought to remove the agency from the spotlight, hoping that keeping a lower profile will diminish popular resistance. Even Stephen Miller, the white nationalist and former college buddy of neo-Nazi activist Richard Spencer, has begun avoiding media coverage in order to dodge pushback against his efforts to build a white ethno-state.

Yet people may not forget ICE so easily. Across the US, people have been mobilizing against proposed ICE warehouse prisons. The fight against Delaney Hall could return ICE to the headlines.

As social media pundits and corporate media outlets turn their attention to the upcoming midterm elections, it is crucial to mobilize against ICE detention facilities in solidarity with those locked within them. This is an opportunity to keep the atrocities ICE is perpetrating in the thoughts of the general public—both to ensure that the plight of detainees and other immigrants are not forgotten under this or any future administration, and also because ICE agents will likely form the shock troops of any effort to use force to preserve Donald Trump’s control over the government. We should gather outside Delaney Hall and other detention centers around the country and aid the families of those who are imprisoned within them.

Last summer, Texan authorities sought to make an example of demonstrators who held a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland Detention Center. Supporting the resistance from within Delaney Hall and other detention centers is a way to show that we cannot be intimidated, that solidarity is ultimately a more powerful force than greed or fear. We must stand together against this autocratic regime, from both sides of the detention centers’ walls, or be defeated and disappear behind them one by one.

---

Further Reading

• Our Cry: A Letter from inside Delaney Hall

• SOS: A Second Letter from Delaney Hall

• On Willem Van Spronsen’s Action against the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma—Including the Full Text of His Final Statement
• The Road to Prairieland—The Crackdown on Anti-ICE Activists in Texas Reflects a Pattern of Intensifying Repression

• They Escalate, We Escalate: A Short History of the Fight against ICE in the Twin Cities