ICE Protests in Delaney Hall Failed—But They Lent Themselves to the Strange Afterlife of Resistance

By Kelly Kimball

As a journalist reporting from the frontlines of U.S. politics, I saw how the long arc of resistance against Trump’s immigration crackdown, despite inflicting severe repression, may not end in authoritarian victory.

On May 22, Gabriela Soto stood across the cracked sliver of Doremus Avenue from Delaney Hall, a towering, utilitarian ICE detention facility on the industrial outskirts of Newark, New Jersey, her phone set to speaker as she stood among a group of demonstrators.

On the other end was her husband, Martín Soto, a 30-year-old father who had been arrested by ICE agents and detained inside since February after going out to buy diapers for their infant son. Gabriela was translating his calls and those of other fellow detainees for advocates gathered outside the facility by a makeshift triage tent. The tent, created by volunteers since the detention facility reopened under a Trump-brokered multibillion dollar ICE contract in May 2025, was lovingly retrofitted with medical supplies, snacks, toys, and a seating area for families of detainees to wait with volunteer caseworkers.

That day, Martín announced the launch of a hunger and labor strike. It would be the first of its kind from within an immigration detention facility, involving roughly 300 detainees who were protesting what they described as brutal and unsafe conditions at Delaney Hall.

Later, detainees sent out a cascade of hand-written letters in Spanish laying out their demands, which included a meeting with New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a thorough review of detainee immigration cases and habeas filings; and an end to coercive measures intended for detainees to sign deportation or voluntary departure documents.

“We are not striking to demand better treatment and conditions,” they wrote in lead pencil on crinkled binder paper. “We are doing this to demand freedom.”

The strike was both an act of defiance and an act of desperate communication.

Since the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s unprecedented immigration crackdown last year, the black box of ICE custody has grown ever darker. In all, 152 detention facilities have cropped up around the nation, with many housing more detainees than the country’s most notorious prisons.

But detainees are not criminals. Since last year, there has been a 2450% increase in the number of people with no criminal record being held in ICE detention on any given day. Once inside, few, if any, are ever released.

Last summer, Trump called for the maximum use of detention and a “no release” system, making it nearly impossible for detainees to be released on bond. By the end of November 2025, discretionary releases from detention fell nearly 90 percent.

The detainees at Delaney saw the writing on the wall. And they knew they had to act.

What they could do was refuse to eat, refuse to work for a meager $1 to $4 dollars per day, and speak through the walls, finding ways to make the outside world finally hear them.

“We don’t know the consequences exactly, maybe solitary confinement, we won’t know,” Martín said over the phone with Gabriela on the day the strike began. “But they are taking our freedom of speech, and our physical health is in danger.”

In a matter of hours, their protest ballooned into a national story — and a battle over what was truly happening within the facility.

The Trump administration and federal officials denied both the existence and characterization of the strike, even as detainees, their families, clergy, and advocates continued to describe conditions in detail. Their food was infested with worms; there was no privacy in the units, with detainees forced to shower in a concrete bullpen with other people; those who were ill wouldn’t be seen by medical staff for weeks to months, and even then, they were placated with ibuprofen for the most severe ailments or chronic needs.

Detention staff were reportedly verbally and physically abusive, and several reports warned of a guard sexually assaulting the female detainees.

Outside Delaney’s gates, an entirely separate story was mounting.

Dozens of protesters began gathering day and night, growing increasingly confrontational as ICE agents and GEO Group employees patrolled the grounds. Demonstrators were arrested. Some were kettled, pursued, run over, or doused with pepper spray.

Eventually, the protest outside formed a single heartbeat with the strike inside. Those behind the walls and those pushing against the metal barricades, each refusing to let up, each demanding that the world confront the reality of life inside America’s brutal experiment with the ostracized “other.”

Then came the seventh day of the strike.

That afternoon, I watched as nearly six ambulances raced toward the back of the facility while protesters looked on with a mixture of worry and rage. Officials initially would not say why — or for whom — the vehicles were being summoned.

Over the course of the evening, witness accounts emerged alleging that strikers had been beaten by ICE agents and GEO Group employees, while others were becoming seriously ill after days without food. Many of the strikers, including Martin, were eventually scattered to other ICE facilities across the country and placed in a form of solitary confinement.

The government’s strategy, protesters believed, was to divide and conquer: first inside Delaney, then outside its gates.

By the eighth day, Gov. Mikie Sherrill directed the New Jersey State Police to take over street operations from federal immigration agents.

A new order took shape outside the facility: a designated area for broadcast media; another for detainees’ families; another for clergy members who had been leading demonstrations since the facility reopened in May 2024; and another for protesters.

By June, the strike had ended.

Functionally, nothing has changed in Delaney Hall. The demands, although noble and exacting, did not produce sweeping institutional change. No ICE agent, law enforcement officer, or GEO Group employee has yet been brought to justice for alleged or documented crimes against detainees, the press, or protesters.

But this is not an essay about a failed mission.

As the Star Wars adage goes, “Rebellions are built in hope.”

I have spent much of my career thinking about what happens when citizens document institutions at the moment they are most determined to control the story.

As a professor of media law, ethics, and journalist safety, and as a two-time newsroom leader who routinely worked with correspondents based in the world’s most volatile frontlines, I have come to believe that documentation has a crucial function beyond the news cycle.

It preserves the contested moment so that justice may one day finally come.

A photograph. A video. A handwritten letter. A phone recording. A medical record. A court filing. A witness testimony shared while events are still ugly and confusing and incomplete.

Each of these will outlive its expired moment and become un-erasable evidence. Such documents have the power to alchemize a contested claim into a judicable fact whose duration can outlast whatever denial any current administration is imposing in the here and now.

Indeed, justice is long suffering.

Since 2020, only two dozen ICE employees and contractors have been charged with crimes, including physical and sexual abuse, corruption and other misuses of authority. And these sentences were handed down before Congress voted in April to give the agency an eye-watering $75 billion to hire more agents and detain more people than the entire population of Atlanta.

Experts warn that such crimes are likely to continue, given the volume of new hires and President Trump’s own assertion that agents have “absolute immunity” for their actions.

Far-right and Trump-aligned commentators continue to work overtime to dismiss this summer at Delaney Hall as a foul-mouthed, far-left paroxysm, even as Trump and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continue to deny a strike even occurred.

But Delaney strikers and protesters created American realities, both on the ground and in memory, whose lasting meanings and implications will register far beyond authoritarians’ bullying violence, blustering lies, and bought media spin.

As has often happened in the past, defeated protests will later be shown to have held the line against intolerable injustices. Defeat creates a play book that, one way or another, no matter how long it takes, constitutes a record that can be revisited when the political circumstances change.

That record’s preservation of the truth of events can be used—by lawyers, investigators, oversight bodies, journalists, historians, and families—to advance the justice demanded by a true account of what actually happened.

On October 7, Martín Soto was freed from an ICE detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where immigration officials had transferred him shortly after he initiated the strike. Upon his release, he was immediately met by his wife and two young children outside the facility gates. There and then, as a father of both his children and a resistance that took the nation by storm, Martín finally embraced his family for the first time since his captivity.

This is the strange afterlife of resistance.