More than 300 detainees at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, have been refusing food and labor for over two weeks, protesting what they describe as horrific conditions: spoiled food, inadequate medical care, and allegations of physical abuse by guards including pepper spray and beatings. Some detainees were hospitalized. They are demanding the release of all inmates from the privately operated 1,000-bed facility and a meeting with New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill.
Outside the detention center, police have escalated their response. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wielded batons, pepper spray, and stun guns against protesters, journalists, and a U.S. senator. State police arrested more than 60 demonstrators in a single night. ICE also transferred Martin Soto, a detainee held in solitary confinement and suspected strike leader, abruptly removing him from the facility.
The standoff at Delaney Hall is not new. Similar strikes have erupted at detention centers across the country, from New Mexico to California, where detainees protest water quality, mold, and lack of medical care. But according to Jessica Ordaz, a historian of migrant incarceration at the University of Colorado Boulder, what's happening today echoes patterns that stretch back more than a century.
"The conditions we are seeing today have been present for generations," Ordaz said. "And there have always been protests from inside, but it's the same narrative and the system of immigration control hasn't been curtailed."
Ordaz has spent years researching El Centro, a detention facility that opened in the 1940s as a processing center for the Bracero program, the U.S. government's labor agreement with Mexico that brought millions of Mexican workers on temporary contracts. The federal government used undocumented Mexican labor to build the prison that would eventually confine them and future generations. That economic exploitation formed the backbone of what Ordaz describes as a forced-labor system rooted in racial capitalism.
When detainees were sent to work on cleanup and land maintenance near the U.S.-Mexico border, escape became the first form of protest. Immigration officials grew frustrated as workers fled, many successfully because they were close enough to cross back into Mexico. But as awareness of resistance tactics spread, protests evolved. By the 1960s, hunger strikes, petitions, and written testimonies became coordinated weapons of resistance.
Food itself became a focal point of grievance. Under the Bracero program, Mexican laborers at El Centro were fed burritos, a food unfamiliar to many workers from different regions of Mexico. They were charged for meals and given the cheapest, lowest-quality options to maximize profit. That pattern persists today: low-quality, insufficient, or contaminated food remains a standard tool of punishment and control in detention facilities.
When detainees do manage to win concessions, the victories are often small and temporary. At El Centro, after years of protest, authorities finally allowed detainees shade during peak summer heat and permitted them indoors during the day. But the cost was high: some were deported, others transferred or hospitalized with severe injuries. The psychological damage lasted lifetimes.
Ordaz emphasizes that change requires sustained pressure from outside the walls. Lone protest from within detention is rarely enough. Successful campaigns have relied on solidarity between imprisoned detainees and external activists working on multiple fronts: some engaging politicians, others staging public demonstrations, still others coordinating with organizations that may have had different initial goals.
"The powers that be don't bend unless they feel like they have to," Ordaz said. "Usually, what that means is they get a lot of pressure from the outside."
But broader systemic change remains elusive. Even as individual detainees are released or single facilities improve marginally, the architecture of immigration detention has only grown larger and more entrenched. Resources and enforcement power have expanded while the fundamental logic of carceral control remains unchanged.
Ordaz argues that understanding this history is essential to imagining alternatives. Calls to "abolish ICE" miss a deeper truth: ICE itself is only decades old. The problem runs far deeper, rooted in generations of border policing, imperial displacement, and economic coercion that drew migrants to the United States in the first place. Without addressing why people migrate, she argues, the cycle of detention and resistance will continue indefinitely.
Author James Rodriguez: "History shows us that detention conditions have never improved without sustained outside pressure, yet the system itself has never fundamentally changed, which suggests individual victories matter but systemic transformation requires rethinking America's entire approach to migration."
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