CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Immigrant Detainees are Striking Against Environmental Injustice

ABC7NY, YouTube screenshot.

On Memorial Day, shortly after the tear gas deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement dissipated, community members outside New Jersey’s Delaney Hall began to cover their faces for a different reason: the stench of sewage drifting down Doremus Avenue.

“Nobody wants to be out there. It’s stinky,” X Braithwaite, an environmental justice organizer at Ironbound Community Corporation, told me over the phone. “It’s a public health hazard.”

Delaney Hall is New Jersey’s largest immigration detention facility, reopened by the Trump administration in May 2025. One year later, detainees began a hunger and labor strike to protest the horrific conditions of the for-profit facility, located on toxic land with extensive air and water pollution.

Delaney Hall is located in Newark’s “Chemical Corridor,” an I-3 heavy industrial zone. The city permits the I-3 zone for industrial development and “uses that are incompatible with and even harmful to residents.”

And yet, over 800 detainees are forced to reside in the middle of this corridor. Even after some detainees agree to sign voluntary departure documents, they are kept at Delaney for an additional two to three months. Many are forced to work at the facility for less than $1 per day, while the facility operator, GEO Group, makes record profits.

“We feel vulnerable and, in a way, kidnapped – detained without justification – not to mention that we are being tortured physically and psychologically due to the poor food resources in these detention centers,” reads a letter signed by over 300 detainees.

Those on strike are demanding a meeting with Governor Mikie Sherrill, the immediate release of the young, elderly, and those with medical conditions, and, ultimately, freedom for all.

Many of the immigrants at Delaney were taken at immigration........

© CounterPunch