Newark, New Jersey, is home to more than 30,000 Puerto Ricans who live alongside Black, Portuguese, Haitian, Brazilian, and other Latin American communities. Puerto Ricans arrived in Newark in the 1950s, and today Newark remains home to many immigrants who have been similarly displaced by colonization. In Newark, these communities have struggled together for decades, fighting against city systems that have often failed us. In the face of antiblackness and police violence, Newark has stood together and radically transformed the city. That unity is called on yet again, at a critical moment of performative governance, the growing threat of gentrification, and the police’s and ICE’s violent militarization. This unity is essential not only to determine the future of Newark, but also of our shared futures. 

In May 2025, Delaney Hall reopened as a privately run ICE detention center. GEO Group, ICE’s largest for-profit prison operator, secured a 15-year, billion-dollar contract to operate the facility. Every person detained inside Delaney Hall represents profit for GEO Group. Those held are primarily Caribbean and Latin American and were captured by ICE throughout New Jersey and the broader region the agency refers to as the “Newark Area of Responsibility.” It is also these community members who, from inside the detention center, are bravely leading a hunger and labor strike while facing brutal retaliation through beatings, pepper spray, and solitary confinement by GEO Group employees and ICE agents. 

Their demands are the following:

1) An immediate meeting with the governor Mikie Sherrill 

2) The release of medically vulnerable detainees, elderly, and the youth 

3) Meaningful review of cases and habeas filings

4) End of coercion towards self-deportation 

The Diaspora Pa’lante Collective amplifies the message of the detainees as we raise the call for their freedom and the immediate closure of this detention center. Detainees have been kept from their families, beaten, and given rotten and maggot-infested food. They describe their cases being reviewed and dismissed within minutes. People in serious need, including pregnant women, are denied medical care. While they are prohibited from working in the United States, they are subjected to forced labor, at $1 an hour, inside the detention center. Yet, as the strikers have reminded us, they are not calling to improve the conditions of their detention–they want freedom. From Adelanto in California to Prairieland in Texas, from Delaney Hall in Newark to the Aguadilla ICE facility in Puerto Rico, all of these prisons must be shut down, and our people must be liberated. 

The repression on the inside of Delaney Hall has stirred our communities to action, creating a daily and consistent presence that has been met with escalating forms of brutal state violence and kidnappings by federal agents and state police. Over the last two weeks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has mobilized ICE agents, GEO Group has mobilized its employees and guards, the NJ state government of Mikie Sherrill has activated the state police, and the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, has further undermined the protests and given the green light for the local police to get involved, further endangering the people’s right to denounce and resist. On May 30th, state police kettled and flanked the crowd, launching tear gas, flash bangs, and pepper bullets. A confrontation that went on for hours ended in numerous injuries, and another rearranging of this site of struggle. 

Demonstrators have been pinballed into various “Free Speech Zones,” in heavy-handed attempts by police to be kept away from the facility. On May 31st, the protest zone was set almost a block away, with limited visibility of the facility and access totally blocked off to the public. These imposed zones defy the very right to freedom of speech, silencing the voices that are amplifying the demands of the detainees, and silencing the families who demand to see those they have not seen or heard from in weeks, unaware if they have been badly injured or secretly moved, as has been the case for detainees like Martin Soto. GEO Group has announced that visitation would be canceled for another week, extending the terms of their abuse against those being held captive and their families. 

On the evening of May 31st, hundreds of state troopers and local police officers swarmed protestors and journalists, arresting 60. This last week has shown the political theatrics of the collaborating levels of government, with the governor of New Jersey, a former naval officer and prosecutor, turning this situation over to the mayor. The local Newark police have imposed “bans” on masks and bags, while collaborating with ICE agents and armed GEO group employees in viciously attacking demonstrators – including running one of their vehicles into a journalist. 

Against this violent struggle, the campaign to Shut Down Delaney Hall and meet the detainees’ demands has had several successes. This campaign has made national and international news, applying pressure that has led to an increase in the number of people released. Now, it is time for this revolutionary fervor to spread. And Puerto Ricans are critical in this fight.

Puerto Ricans understand what it means for the United States to put profit over people. Today, thousands of immigrants in Puerto Rico are being targeted and detained by ICE, while Puerto Ricans themselves are being displaced from their homes to enrich wealthy foreign investors and corporations.

Laws such as Act 60 grant massive tax breaks to wealthy foreign investors, including exemptions on capital gains and other taxes. These policies have accelerated gentrification, fueled a rapid increase in short-term rentals like Airbnb, and worsened Puerto Rico’s ongoing housing crisis. Recently, Law 82 was passed, which drastically facilitates the construction of luxury developments and speculative real estate projects, which are pushing working-class Puerto Ricans out of their communities. One of the clearest examples is Esencia, a proposed 2,000-acre luxury development in Cabo Rojo that includes hotels, golf courses, and high-end residences. The project threatens fragile ecosystems, biodiversity, and already-limited water resources in the region.

Similarly, the detention and prison system itself is one of private profit. Across the United States, private prison corporations profit from immigration detention and incarceration. Companies like GEO Group generate billions from the capture, torture, deportation, and even killing of people. Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian man, died shortly after being taken to Delaney Hall and not being provided medical care. In Delaney Hall, many still desperately need medical attention that is continually denied.

Whether it’s “development” or detention, working-class people are suffering and dying, while the rich line their pockets.

This is a critical moment in the struggle against fascism, militarism, and imperialism; a moment that demands that we connect our struggles across the various terrains of oppression. The Diaspora Pa’lante Collective demands that Our Americas, from Alaska to Chile, be respected and defended as a Zone of Peace against militarism in all of its various forms. Intervention in a people’s democratic and sovereign process is a key play of the imperial powers, which we see unfolding in the US’s wars of aggression in Latin America, the Caribbean, Iran, and Palestine. Here we see our own government attempting to crush our movement toward peace and freedom.  

This struggle will continue to be waged as Newark is scheduled to host the World Cup soon, just 15 minutes away from Delaney Hall. These games that celebrate internationalism and are followed by Black and Brown people worldwide must not be held in a country wreaking havoc globally. This is a major contradiction that must be confronted through a boycott of the World Cup and the immediate ban of the United States from all international sporting events. A force as colonial, genocidal, and volatile as the United States empire must be isolated by the international community. 

Across Our Americas, working-class people know that freedom cannot be granted; it can only be seized — and the time to act is now.

Calls to Action:

Donate to the families of Delaney Hall detainees: https://linktr.ee/supportourfamilies 

Donate Brigada Solidaria del Oeste: https://www.bsopr.com/ 

Boycott the Games: https://www.blackagendareport.com/black-alliance-peace-calls-international-community-boycott-2026-world-cup-games-scheduled-united