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On Sunday night, New Jersey police arrested dozens of protesters for defying a curfew outside of Delaney Hall, the immigration jail in Newark, New Jersey, where hundreds of detainees are on day 11 of a hunger strike.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka instituted the curfew on Saturday night, after both state and local police charged at the protesters. The day before, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill dispatched the state police to take over control from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers outside of Delaney Hall. While she said that she was doing this to avoid giving ICE “the pretext to expand operations” in New Jersey, she effectively enabled greater collaboration between the two agencies that deployed violence against protesters.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin called Sherrill’s decision a “win for law and order” and thanked the governor for “allowing New Jersey State Police to cooperate with us.”
Shortly after Sherrill’s dispatch on Friday, state police blocked off road access to the jail and set up checkpoints. But ICE agents did not immediately withdraw from outside of Delaney Hall, either.
Paulo Almiron, media coordinator for Resistencia en Accion New Jersey, an organization that has been on the ground supporting the hunger striking detainees, described the situation on Friday night to Truthout.
“When the police were pushing the protestors on one side, ICE agents started shooting teargas pellets on the ground behind the crowd so that the wind would push the teargas towards the entire crowd, which was between them and the state police,” he said. “So there has been collaboration in the tactics they’ve used to attack the protesters.”
On Sunday night, the first night with the 9 pm to 6 am curfew in effect, protesters stayed put outside of Delaney. Fifteen minutes after state officers issued a dispersal order, they surrounded the remaining protestors and arrested dozens; activists say 46 protestors were arrested. Some of the police were in riot gear, while others were on horseback.
Almiron said that more attention should be on the hunger strikers, rather than on the violence against the protesters outside.
“Governor Sherrill, in the past press conferences, has failed to acknowledge or mention the hunger strike directly,” he said. “It is a shame that the governor has failed to address them, besides just coming to Delaney for 40 minutes to have a photoshoot with a few families. There’s more that we expect from her.”
In a Saturday press conference, Sherrill blamed outsiders for the tension and violence.
“To the people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations, you should not be here,” she said. “You’re not helping the people detained at Delaney Hall, you’re not helping detainee families, and you’re certainly not keeping New Jersey safe.”
But Resistencia en Accion, like many organizations that are showing up, is a local New Jersey group. “Our focus as an organization is to keep supporting the families that come here to visit their loved ones, to support the strikers and uplift their demands, which are to have the governor speak to them, to release people in vulnerable conditions — the young, the elderly, those with medical conditions and who are disabled — and to let doctors into units 2A and 2B, where people have been in need of urgent medical attention that’s been denied,” Almiron said.
“A hunger strike is a very, very delicate thing to do,” he added. “This took many months to organize. This is something that the detainees have been planning and executing for their own sake and for the sake of their families.”
When asked what might be motivating Sherrill’s actions, Almiron said: “The World Cup is coming, and the threat that the DHS secretary has made about shutting down international flights coming into Newark could play a role in that…. It looks like it is an issue with her priorities, of her putting tourism and the economy over the well-being of the families and over the concerns of grassroots organizations.”
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