BREAKING NEWS: Migrant Uprising Inside NJ ICE Facility Delaney Hall

A hunger-fueled revolt inside a private ICE facility has exposed the chaos, corruption, and cruelty behind Trump’s mass detention regime.

They were starving. Not metaphorically. They were literally hungry. Dinners didn’t come until 11 p.m. Breakfast was expired milk. Diabetics were left without food during critical hours. The men locked inside Delaney Hall weren’t just being neglected. They were being broken.

No explanations. No updates. No idea when or if they’d see their families. Visits were denied without reason. Conditions worsened by the hour. Overcrowding. Filth. People sleeping on floors. Hunger that bordered on cruelty. And then silence. They waited. They waited until the waiting became unbearable. Then, on June 12, 2025, it broke. Approximately 50 detainees, men locked in a third-floor dorm, rose together and tore down part of a dormitory wall with their hands. Bedsheets were tied in a makeshift escape plan. The smell of gas filled the air. The guards were gone. Doors locked behind them. Four men are currently unaccounted for and a manhunt has been called. As of the time this was posted, they’re still looking for them.

This wasn’t just an outburst. It was a reckoning. A message etched into drywall and panic. In that moment, Delaney Hall became more than a detention center. It became proof that when people are pushed to the edge and ignored long enough, they will write their stories in the architecture of collapse.

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They Showed Up With Candles. The State Brought Tear Gas.

Every Thursday evening, a quiet ritual takes place outside Delaney Hall. Family members, local advocates, and neighbors gather in the fading light to hold vigil. They bring signs, candles, and each other. They show up for the people inside who have no voice, no platform, and no choice.

But this Thursday, the air felt different. Heavier. Charged.

Heavily armed forces reportedly began to show up and rush in to Delaney Hall around 6 PM.

Around 6 p.m., something shifted. Dozens of heavily armed agents began arriving in waves. They wore tactical gear, carried riot shields, and entered the building with intent. They quickly made their way into the facility. This wasn’t a response to protest. There was no crowd of agitators. Just a line of visitors and a community doing what it had done countless Thursdays before. Something had changed.

Then came the shutdown. People waiting to see their loved ones were suddenly told that visiting hours were over. No explanation. No clarity. Just a silent wall of denial.

One woman managed to get in touch with her husband inside. He told her he was terrified. The guards had left. No one was coming. He said the doors were locked. He was trapped.

Then it happened. The popping sound cut through the noise. Within seconds, people outside the gates were choking. Their eyes stung. Their lungs burned. They staggered back, holding onto each other. They had been tear gassed.

These weren’t looters or vandals. They were sons and daughters, mothers and husbands, standing in line, waiting for answers. The system told them to be calm, to follow the rules, to wait their turn. And when they did, it punished them.

In the aftermath, plastic barricades were dragged to the gates. People linked arms. Others stood in front of vehicles trying to exit. Not out of rage, but out of grief. Out of terror. No one would tell them what was happening to the people they love.

So they did the only thing they could. They stood in the way.

This is what American detention looks like. A place where even asking questions is treated as an act of war. A place where silence is the policy and gas is the answer. A place where abandonment is routine and cruelty is protocol. The state watched them cry. Then it told them to leave. Then it made them choke.

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What Do You Do When the Jailers Run?’

Roughly an hour before it all erupted, one man inside the facility placed a call to an emergency immigration hotline. The person on the other end was Ellen Whitt, a volunteer with the advocacy group DIRE. He told her that tensions were rising, that people were hungry and fed up, and that a group had begun to rebel over the dismal food conditions. She could hear screaming in the background as he spoke.

Inside, windows were being struck. Bedsheets were tied into makeshift ropes. The guards and ICE agents, overwhelmed or unwilling to respond, reportedly fled the unit and locked the detainees inside.

Chopper footage shows the crowd starting to grow outside of Delaney Hall 6/12/2025.

No one was left to ensure safety. No one remained to deescalate or protect. They sealed the doors and walked away, leaving dozens of men trapped in a room filling with chaos, panic, and possibly gas

There was no grand plan. No script. Just fear and fury and the overwhelming knowledge that no help was coming.

ICE said nothing. GEO Group referred all questions elsewhere. The Department of Homeland Security said it was "in contact." Newark officials offered no comment.

This is what happens when people in cages resist. The system doesn’t respond. It evacuates. Then it hides.

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Footage from outside of Delaney Hall 6/13/25:

¡Viva la revolución!

They Tried to Keep the Doors Shut for a Reason

This wasn’t the first time Delaney Hall was at the center of national scrutiny. Just last month, in May, three sitting members of Congress, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez, and LaMonica McIver, arrived at the Newark facility for a routine, lawful oversight visit. Mayor Baraka arrived shortly later. It’s a legal right. But at Delaney Hall, law means whatever the armed men at the gate decide it means.

They didn’t barge in. There was no breaking and entering. They identified themselves at the fence, waited, and walked in when the gate opened for a vehicle. They spoke with guards. They were escorted inside. Mayor Ras Baraka showed up soon after and was explicitly invited onto the premises by staff who hoped his presence might calm a growing crowd of peaceful demonstrators outside.

There was no breach. No threat.

But what followed looked more like a scene from an authoritarian state than a democratic one. Baraka was arrested outside the gate.. after already leaving the premises. Officers streamed out, opened the gate themselves, crossed onto public property, and dragged the sitting mayor of New Jersey’s largest city away in handcuffs.

And then the story changed.

The Department of Homeland Security released a statement on its official government website claiming that “a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility.”

Not just a lie, a state-crafted hallucination. In their version of events, federal agents are the victims and elected leaders are the violent offenders. Reality be damned.

This is where we are now. The government website reads like state TV in Pyongyang. Truth is not even twisted … it’s incinerated. The public record replaced by a fantasy in service of power. Our elected leaders weren’t even safe. And now, weeks later, the very place they tried to inspect has erupted in tear gas, hunger, and open rebellion.

Now we understand why they didn’t want anyone looking inside.

Delaney Hall was never about due process. It was a powder keg built on silence. And when people tried to enter with cameras, with questions, with titles like “Congresswoman” or “Mayor,” the response was violence. The DHS wasn’t trying to preserve order.. they were trying to bury the truth.

And what they buried is now clawing its way through the walls.

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