ICE Protests Growing
Major protests have happened for months at the ICE Detention Center in Delaney Hall, NJ. After a detainee Jean Wilson Brutus’ death on Dec. 19, protests and ice reinforcement have only begun to ramp up. And as suspected, the cause of death calls for concern.
While you can check the ICE report to find that the death was from “natural causes,” Brutus’s family has called for independent autopsies and even started a GoFundMe.
But now the issues relating to the protest have not entirely changed – but they have shifted. As of now there are two different hunger strikes by detainees – one Adelanto, CA, and the other in Delaney Hall.
Last month, there were hunger strikes at the North Lake Processing Center in Michigan and the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania. An interesting point to make is that all the centers listed here are owned by the GEO Group, an independent corporation.
The hunger strikes are all protesting one thing: food security.
Reports have surfaced of molded food, unsafe drinking water, and food riddled and infested with bugs and maggots. This is not surprising. This is more of the same of everything we have already heard for as long as Trump has been in office.
Protestors outside Delaney Hall have clashed multiple times with ICE and local police. Mayor Ras Baraka has now imposed curfews around the detention center. While protestors often stay past the curfew, some have been taken into custody.
Delaney Hall Police have refused to comment on how many have been taken into custody, but I suppose it’s a start that they’re admitting it.
While it is worth mentioning Ras Baraka is a Democratic mayor, it still seems that he is swinging in favor of ICE here. Sure, he is just a mayor and likely doesn’t have enough power to make enough changes to calm the situation. But imposing a curfew and limiting First Amendment rights feels like a step backwards.
Border Czar Tom Homan sat down recently and had a meal that was apparently out of the Delaney Hall Detention Center. Of course this is a political move, to make it seem that the food detainees are being served is at least somewhat edible.
But we have too much evidence from too many different sources to fall for this, so maybe now is the time to take the information we do have and expand it.
Establishing a curfew and punishing protestors is exactly what expect a pro-Trump Republican to do; sad to say, but maybe that’s what we ought to start expecting from Democrats. Too many of them are kowtowing to extreme forces. I suppose you can’t entirely blame them, but if this happens enough times, Trump ends up as president [spoiler, he did].
So, our prison-industrial complex rages on through ICE, protesting gets harder and more violent, and propaganda regarding the well-being of humans is churned through the media mill.
Truthfully, I’m not surprised in the slightest, and you shouldn’t be, either.
 | A guest post by
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Mason Hauptman’s piece in the Observer names what too many outlets won’t: people are being held in cages and fed maggots. That’s not a policy dispute. That’s a human rights violation happening on American soil, run through a private corporation — the GEO Group — that profits from every additional body it warehouses.
Delaney Hall. Adelanto. Moshannon Valley. North Lake. The hunger strikes aren’t isolated incidents. They’re a coordinated response to the same conditions at facilities owned by the same company. When detainees at four different GEO Group facilities in four different states all stop eating in protest of the food, the food is the problem. Tom Homan sitting down for a photo-op meal doesn’t change what detainees have documented. It just tells you how much the administration respects your intelligence.
The Ras Baraka curfew is worth saying plainly: a Democratic mayor using executive authority to restrict First Amendment activity around a federal detention facility is not a profile in courage. Hauptman is right to name it. The people outside those walls are doing the work that elected officials won’t. Criminalizing their presence doesn’t make the maggots disappear.
Jean Wilson Brutus died in December. His family is still waiting for answers. The GEO Group is still collecting its contract. The protests are still growing. That’s the through-line. Not the curfew. Not the photo-op. The fact that a man died, the government called it natural causes, and the people who would hold them accountable are the ones getting arrested.
This is the prison-industrial complex operating exactly as designed. The only thing that changes that math is people who refuse to look away.