Inside Delaney Hall, They Stopped Eating. They Stopped Working.
A dollar a day, worms in the food, and a billion-dollar contract you're funding
On May 22nd, 2026, 300 detainees inside the concrete walls of Delaney Hall declared a hunger strike. Self-starvation had become their only method of self-preservation. Sit with that. How bad does it have to get before starving yourself becomes the only way left to fight for the people coming after you? What does it say about us, about you and me, when the people we as Americans have locked in cages show more humanity than we do, willing to die so the next person might suffer a little less?
And yes, I know we — me and you — we did not literally do this. But it’s on us to stop it. Every person reading this. Hear me out.
This didn’t start in May. Delaney Hall has been in and out of the news since it reopened in 2025. That May, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested for trespassing and Rep. LaMonica McIver was charged with assaulting federal officers. Baraka’s charges were dropped. McIver’s weren’t. She’s pled not guilty and her appeal is now pending before the Third Circuit.
The facility held detainees from 2011 to 2017, then closed. ICE reopened it in early 2025 as the first federal detention center of Trump’s second term, handed to the GEO Group on a 15-year contract worth $1 billion. Your money. And that billion is just the floor. It’s a guaranteed base, about $60 million a year, a fixed-price deal, so GEO gets paid for a minimum number of beds whether anyone’s in them or not, plus more per detainee per day when they pack the place fuller.
Then they squeeze the people inside for even more. GEO runs detainees through a Voluntary Work Program that pays as little as $1 a day to cook, clean, and do laundry, free labor a Washington jury already ruled broke state minimum wage law, ordering GEO to pay $23.2 million, a ruling they’re now fighting all the way to the Supreme Court. They hand you a dollar, then upcharge the hell out of commissary and phone and tablet calls, where a whole day of your labor buys about one 14-minute call to your kids or a single meal without worms.
Sure, it’s only a pack of ramen, zero nutrition but better than the alternatives of starving or eating worms.
How the Protests Started in 2026
This information is coming directly from the detainees themselves, who had letters smuggled out in February and May of this year.
In May members of congress sent a letter to the newest leader of DHS
So picture what your tax dollars are actually buying. Slave wages of a dollar a day. Basic supplies marked up to the sky. Food with worms in it. Covid and the flu tearing through pregnant women, the elderly, the blind, the disabled, and no doctor in sight.
We are paying for this. Every cage, every marked-up phone call, every untreated illness, billed to you and cashed by them.
And that $1/day slave wage? I’ve written about this before, and that entire concept is how this strike started.
Which is why it’s important to talk about what a lot of the media seems to be missing: It’s not just a hunger strike. It is a labor strike, too.
The same people GEO pays a dollar a day to cook the meals, scrub the toilets, shovel the snow, and keep the lights on simply stopped. Delaney Hall runs on immigrant labor, detainees cooking, cleaning, and repairing the place for as little as $1 a day and sometimes for nothing at all, so when 300 of them walked off the job, they were aiming straight at GEO Group’s bottom line. That’s the part that should sink in. The machine only runs because the people trapped inside it are forced to run it. Take their hands away and the whole profitable nightmare grinds to a halt. The American Prospect
And that is exactly the leverage they reached for. They refused food and they refused the work together. The hunger and labor strikes began when detainees stopped eating and stopped showing up for their jobs to protest the conditions inside.
When you have nothing left, when they’ve taken your freedom, your health, your due process, your dignity, your body and your labor are the only things still yours to withhold. So they withheld them.
And no, they weren’t even asking for more “ethnic foods” that they like, despite what DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin says.
“The individuals inside Delaney Hall are not asking for more comfortable conditions,” advocates say, “They are demanding their fundamental human rights: dignity, safety, medical care and freedom.”
The release of the elderly, the pregnant, the sick, the kids. The bare minimum of being treated like a human being.
That’s how this started. A dollar a day, extremely up-charged phone calls, worms and mold in the food, and people who decided they were willing to starve themselves today for a better tomorrow for those around them. Real humanity. One could argue there is more humanity inside chains at Delaney Hall than there is inside of the entire United States government.
Delaney Hall: Where It Stands and Why It Matters
Delaney hall was originally built in the year 2000, sitting at 451 Doremus Avenue, Newark, NJ 07105. It’s original function was a private, for-profit facility built by Community Education Centers to house inmates more cheaply than the state could, all for profit. GEO Group bought that company in 2017, which is how the same private prison giant ended up running it as an ICE detention center today.
The Essex County Correctional Facility is right next door at 354 Doremus Avenue.
Doremus Avenue is a heavily industrialized, and reportedly, toxic stretch in Newark's Ironbound neighborhood, sometimes called the "Chemical Corridor."
It’s a street with a natural gas plant, a sewage treatment facility, and an animal fat rendering plant, the state's biggest trash incinerator, the contaminated remains of an old Agent Orange factory, along with a series of chemical storage containers behind acres of fencing. There are industrial trucks coming day and night, and planes always flying overhead.
The toxins and the humans are stored in the same place, because somewhere, somebody decided they were all disposable.
When the Cameras Showed Up
Once the strike pulled press and protesters to Doremus Avenue, the state showed up swinging. Not at GEO, but at the people standing outside.
Inside, guards pepper-sprayed detainees, beat them with batons, shipped the strike leaders off to other facilities, and shut down family visits. Detainees told a visiting congressman it was punishment for the strike.
Outside was the same. ICE agents and then state police pushed past the barricades, sprayed chemicals at protesters and reporters, and blocked the exits. An AP photographer broke her leg covering it and still had to argue her way out, because police had sealed the street. Footage shows agents shoving a protester into the path of a semi and smashing his leg.
Another video shows a man standing peacefully on the street, then getting thrown and dragged back by “state police.”
This is The United States of America. It’s New Jersey. And this is unacceptable.
A first person perspective of the chaos outside of Delaney Hall (Source: @hudson.images)
“An AP reporter broke her leg covering the Newark protest and still had to negotiate her way out because police blocked every exit” (Source: @amay.a100)
ICE and DHS held the facility. Sherrill sent in state police, who threw up a half-mile barricade and went at protesters in riot gear. Then Newark PD took over the perimeter, and Mayor Baraka, who’s fought this place from the start, put the neighborhood under a 9 p.m. curfew, which the activists say is now being used to shut their protest down too.
The one person moving freely through all of it was Nick Sortor, a pro-Trump content creator who went “undercover” into the “ANTIFA” protest camp, fed the “rioters” footage to Fox, and cheered the arrest buses with “this is the way.”
The state’s own Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill, got turned away at the door. Then she announced “protest zones,” fenced-off pens where the public was told to go to protest — dubbed ‘First Amendment Zones’ as if the First Amendment stops at the gate.
Health inspectors who tried to actually inspect the place were let in halfway and sent home.
In a move that raised more than a few eyebrows, she took to Threads — where she either knowingly misrepresented the events to shield the aggressors, or simply repeated whatever narrative was handed to her. Suddenly, her much-touted “first amendment zones” and carefully cultivated ally persona begin to look far less like genuine principle and far more like a calculated effort to protect something else entirely: her campaign.
She posted that masked people attacked the barrier in the protest area, threw projectiles, used the barriers as weapons, and lit tires on fire, putting protesters and police in danger.
Instead, footage shows that it was police knocked the barrier down. Police escalated against people peacefully protesting in the “first amendment zones” she set up. When the Democratic governor of New Jersey is doing PR for The Deparmtent of Homeland Security, tells you how deep this goes.
New Jersey State Police push past barricades outside the Delaney Hall Detention Facility 5-30-26 (Source: @bgonthescene)
Now, as of June 2nd, the city of Newark, where the facility is located, has announced they’re suing the facility for a full health inspection access.
White Nationalists at Delaney Hall and Inside DHS
In one video outside of the facility, you can clearly see Trump flags and the original 13-state Betsy Ross flag of 1777, hanging on the fencing at Delaney Hall, behind the officers who are only there because people are protesting the conditions inside. They are about as subtle as a foghorn in a library.
See, DHS and ICE are (evidentially) full of white nationalists.
To them, the Betsy Ross flag showcases the idea of returning to how things used to be. These are well-known white nationalist dog whistles, and the thing about dog whistles is they give plausible deniability, so someone can claim they’re innocent while signaling something else entirely to the people who know the code. And what’s even more disturbing is what looks like a deliberate humiliation ritual, where POC officers are made to stand in front of the Betsy Ross and Trump flags.
This same week, Trump’s former border patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who got pushed out in January, turned up at a “remigration” summit in Porto, Portugal, sharing a stage with neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. The man who organized it, Afonso Gonçalves, founded the far-right, anti-Muslim group Reconquista, named for the historical expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula.
Afonso Gonçalves once said, “Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions,” a grotesque reference to the rise of Nazi Germany.
“Remigration” is just a ‘nice’ word for the mass expulsion of non-white people.
So, one could argue that it’s intentional that Bovino posted the tweet with the ‘Roman salute’ before attending. DHS flies the flags at the fence while the men who used to run its operations fly to Europe to network with fascists.
The walls of Delaney Hall were built to keep people in. Last June, four men punched through one and ran. This May, 300 people had to starve themselves just to be heard through them. This alone shows why they will not let anyone past the doors.
The people inside already did the hard part. They stopped eating. They stopped working. They aimed the only thing they had left, their bodies and their labor, straight at the people cashing the checks. Delaney Hall doesn’t run without immigrant labor. Neither does this country. Ours.
So I’ll say what I said before. America needs to think seriously about a general strike. The people in the cages already started one.
I’m with you on a general strike. Delaney Hall is a nightmare scene.
I am a handful of miles away from this. The only thing stopping me from being there every day is because I am on federal supervised release, and an arrest, wrongful or otherwise, could jeopardize that. I am wondering if anyone knows if I can provide material support to the protesters without physically being there. I am days away from simply deciding to go there myself, and I may end up doing that. Unfortunately I am very much at risk. But if anyone knows any organizations who are helping with the protests, please let me know so I can support them. I know the area well. It is not a safe area to protest, and I wear a target on my back. So if anyone has any advice, let me know. Otherwise, I may see you there.