On Memorial Day, federal agents outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility in Newark pepper-sprayed U.S. Senator Andy Kim. He’d been trying to ensure that detainees engaged in a hunger strike weren’t being mistreated. ICE also fired rubber bullets into the crowd.
Let that register: a sitting United States Senator, exercising congressional oversight, got pepper-sprayed by federal agents.
Inside Delaney Hall — a privately run, 1,000-bed facility currently holding around 300 detainees — people have been on a hunger strike for days. Their complaints: medical care they can’t access, food that’s inedible, water problems. Detainees were seen flickering lights and waving from windows in response to protesters chanting outside. ICE’s official position is that there is no hunger strike.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill showed up Monday morning and formally requested entry. Denied. DHS called her visit “a political stunt.” When Senator Kim personally called DHS Secretary Mullin, he was let in. The governor of the state where the facility sits was not — because unlike members of Congress, she has no federal oversight authority. Which is exactly the kind of technicality that’s useful when you don’t want people looking too closely.
After Kim went inside and reported back what detainees told him — medical treatment denied, food inedible, water problems — ICE’s response was to threaten to transfer the hunger-striking detainees to Louisiana and Texas. Not to address the conditions. To move the people complaining about them somewhere farther away.
Then came the rubber bullets and pepper spray.
The administration says the crackdown was about “agitators” blocking facility entrances. Maybe. But you don’t get to pepper-spray a senator doing oversight and call it crowd control. And you don’t get to hide what’s happening inside a detention facility by suspending visitation and punishing the people demanding to see it.
“My request for access to Delaney Hall was formally denied this morning,” Sherrill said, “raising serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view.”
What are they hiding? That’s the right question.
Sources: NJ Globe | CBS New York | The Jersey Vindicator