Mr. DHS Secretary

When something is reported locally and nationally and an Administration flunkie tells us it isn't so, the lying has gotten out of hand.

This is nothing more than a political stunt by New Jersey sanctuary politicians for fundraising clicks.

There is NO hunger strike at Delaney Hall. There are no subprime conditions.
@SenBooker, @SenatorAndyKim, @RepMenendez, @RepNellie, @FrankPallone, @GovSherrillNJ and dozens… https://t.co/Lg3c3B2Q9A

— Secretary Markwayne Mullin (@SecMullinDHS) May 25, 2026

In an article published by NJ.com on May 22 and updayed four days later

At the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, detainees are so desperate, they’re going on a hunger and labor strike.

On Friday morning, at a small rally organized by Gabriela Soto — a rising immigrants’ rights advocate who’s married to Martin Soto, a Peruvian man detained at Delaney since February — several men held at the center spoke to the crowd via video chat.

One man said he and the nearly 300 others in his unit at the facility had decided to “stop eating and stop working” indefinitely until the inhumane conditions inside the facility improve. “But that’s not all we demand,” he said. “We are also doing this to demand freedom.”

“We’re not treated like people,” he continued. “We’re treated like animals.”

One man

decried the lack of adequate medical care inside the facility.

He said in the months he’s been held there, he’s fallen ill three times and has never been seen by a doctor despite repeatedly asking to each time.

A spokesperson for ICE and the GEO Group, which operates the facility on behalf of the federal government, did not return requests for comment.

The GEO Group- privatization? Of course. Continuing

Emanuel Rodrigues, a Brazilian man who’s been in forced “medical isolation” at Delaney for more than 100 days, recently told me detention center staff “do not care” about detainees’ health or well-being.

When it was his turn to speak, detainee Jordi Alvarado reiterated the long list of complaints he and others at the facility made in a recent letter pleading elected officials for help.

Inside Delaney, Alvarado said, “conditions are substandard and human rights violations are commonplace.”

“And those who speak out [against the abuses], as we’re doing now, are harshly punished for it, berated, and placed in solitary confinement for days,” he said in Spanish.

“We have to be very careful, everything we say and do is closely monitored, at all times,” he warned us. And then, almost as if on cue, his face abruptly disappeared from the screen of the iPhone advocates had used to call him.

On the blacked out screen, a message popped up. “Call paused.” And shortly after, “Call ended.”

Hours after the rally, Sally Pillay, of Eyes on ICE NJ, a grassroots coalition of dozens of immigrants’ rights groups, informed journalists the group had “lost all contact with phones and tablets for people detained inside.” Cell service returned shortly after 5 p.m. Friday.

On Memorial Day, New Jersey senator Andy Kim visited the facility. Outside

ICE had brought out an armored vehicle, and lined in front of that was a wall of armed officers creating a barricade.

Kim said that the protesters present “kind of lined up in front of them” and that he “tried to get in between the ICE officers and the crowd to de-escalate.”

 “ICE officials told me that they were going to push through the crowd with their vehicle and they wanted to get some vehicles out of there,” he said. “I tried to arrange a situation where people would not get hurt, where there wouldn’t be a confrontation. Unfortunately, ICE just continued on.”

 He said he “immediately saw people getting tackled and brought to the ground” and that ICE “started pushing through with their vehicles.”

 Kim said he again ran up to try to put himself between the ICE agents and the crowd to prevent things from escalating when the agents “started shooting at us with pepper balls and using pepper spray.”

 “I tried to do whatever I could standing in the middle to keep people safe,” he said.

That's one heck of a political stunt, trying to create order from chaos and de-escalating a situation Immigration and Control Enforcement was escalating. Of course, this sort of thing probably could have been expected from an agency led by Kristi Noem's replacement, who only a short time ago was a United States senator.

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