Crimes of ICE

On Friday, a coalition of over a dozen press freedom groups condemned the May 31 arrests of at least three journalists covering the protests at Delaney Hall immigration jail in Newark, New Jersey, calling for their charges to be dropped.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260605173515/https://www.404media.co/ices-plan-to-let-cops-around-the-country-scan-faces-to-verify-immigration-status/

There’s a lot of profit in paying immigrants a dollar a day to run their own jail—until they refuse.

Hundreds of detainees across at least 33 states allege in federal lawsuits that immigration detention facilities are failing to provide adequate medical care, an investigation by KFF Health News and The Associated Press found. Detainees say they didn’t get medications on time — or at all — for conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, epilepsy, Parkinson’s and HIV. Requests for help went unanswered for weeks. Blood sugars rose. Infections festered. Cancers remained untreated. Detainees collapsed and had seizures.

The agency is facing pressure to improve medical care in its facilities after reporting the deaths of 18 detainees in the first five months of this year.

Quick and repeated transfers have become more common in President Donald Trump’s second term, a Marshall Project investigation has found. From the final year of the Biden administration to the first year of Trump’s latest term, the number of people transferred five or more times more than tripled. The number of people transferred out of state within 24 hours more than doubled, according to a Marshall Project analysis of ICE detention data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.

They constantly threaten to deport us, transfer us to punishment units, and move us from one detention center to another; they take photos of us in the dormitories without our consent and tell us that we have no rights here.

GEO Group’s stock has risen 25% in one month, after their first quarter results. Let me translate this corporate speech:

A few dozen people were stuck inside their formation, known as a kettle. Some were protesters defying a curfew order, which was intended to quell demonstrations at a nearby ICE detention facility. But most appeared to be journalists who were just there to do their job.

New Jersey’s lawsuit comes after GEO Group officials denied state health inspectors entry to Delaney Hall last Wednesday “because GEO already had too many visits scheduled with congressional delegations for the day,” according to court filings.

Image Source

At Delaney Hall, an ICE detention camp for captured immigrants in Newark, New Jersey, operated privately by the for-profit contractor Geo Group, the food is spoiled, and sometimes has maggots. Those who are imprisoned there, who have not been convicted of any crime, are forced to work for about $1 per day.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill is facing backlash over her management of protests outside Delaney Hall federal detention center in Newark.

We, the detainees at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility, wish to express our objection to the violation of our rights as immigrant human beings. We, the detainees, are demanding our progressive release, based on the fact that our arrests were illegal; immigrants to this country have the right to await our pending immigration proceedings outside of prison; therefore, we demand to be released on bond or parole so that we may complete our proceedings.

Image Source

On Friday and again on Saturday night, state police attacked protesters and press where hundreds of immigrants have been engaged in a hunger and labor strike against filthy conditions, medical neglect, lack of access to counsel and pressure to sign deportation documents. By Sunday, at least nine people had been arrested over two nights.

At least 20 people were reportedly arrested outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, New Jersey on Sunday as anti-ICE protesters clashed with riot police.

Image Source

Four detainees at the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in the U.S. filed a federal lawsuit on Saturday alleging human rights abuses, “horrific” conditions and “severe medical neglect” at the facility.

Wisconsin would adopt a state law effectively ending unlimited corporate spending in elections and make it a state felony for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to be stationed near polling places under an election security proposal from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong.

Three Washington state protesters have been found guilty of federal conspiracy charges for sitting in front of a bus taking people to an immigration detention center in Tacoma.

Protesters have flocked to the detention center since last Friday as detainees are said to be holding a hunger strike over the facility’s allegedly poor, unsanitary living conditions.

Christian Castro, who had been charged with assault in the shooting of a Venezuelan man during the immigration crackdown in Minnesota, was taken into custody Friday morning.

Delaney Hall has been the site of sustained resistance since late May 2026. Detainees launched a hunger and labor strike after months of documented medical neglect, lack of air conditioning, contaminated food and water, and abusive guard treatment. Their demands are straightforward: the immediate release of the elderly, the young, and those with serious medical conditions.

The “Mega-Master” executive shift increases the docket from the traditional of 36 people to 100 or more per judge. Reports from immigration practitioners suggest that the government is specifically targeting respondents whose hearings were originally scheduled for 2027, 2028, or 2029, moving them up to current dates. The strategic theory behind this is that many individuals may not receive notice in time or may be unable to rearrange their lives on short notice. If a respondent fails to appear among the crowd of 100 during roll call, the judge can issue an in absentia removal order, effectively closing the case with a deportation order without the person ever being heard.

https://www.adamgrayphotography.com/

The Newark-based ICE facility is operated by the Geo Group, one of the biggest private prison companies in the US. According to activists and detainees, between 300 and 400 detainees are participating in the strike, demanding improved food, ventilation and medical care – and for their immigration cases to proceed.

The immigration camp, it really depends on a lot of local infrastructure. It is not this untouchable federal abstraction. It is up to us, neighbors, community members, and we have the actual power to shut them down,” says journalist John Washington. In this episode of Movement Memos, Washington joins host Kelly Hayes to discuss his book How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, the rapid expansion of ICE detention, and how communities can fight camps before and after they open.

More than 170 U.S. citizens had been caught up in the Trump administration’s maximalist immigration crackdown, ProPublica reported last October. That was before the brutal killings of queer mother Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minnesota earlier this year.

On Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a U.S.-born woman at a checkpoint in a residential area of Lafayette. 

[The unnamed Mexican immigrant] said nights have haunted him since Jan. 20, 2025. That was when a group of assailants entered a house he shared with other immigrants in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a hooded man shouting “ICE! ICE!” kicked down his bedroom door.

Senator Andy Kim was filmed having his eyes washed out with a bottle of water in a video shared by a reporter on X [replaced X link with nitter.net]. The senator has subsequently said that his eyes and throat were “burning” and that his hand hurts following the incident.

The move deals an embarrassing blow to the Trump administration, which made the Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the face of its deportation campaign.