It has now been almost two weeks since the laborers keeping ICE’s Delaney Hall mega-jail open went on strike—demanding a chance to speak with New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, reviews of their cases, and ultimately, their freedom. Those workers are the detainees themselves, who serve as custodians, line cooks, hairdressers, laundry workers, and janitors at the Newark prison-turned-detention center where a thousand people are trapped in DHS custody, working for wages as low as a dollar per day.

What began as a simultaneous hunger and labor strike has become largely a labor struggle, organizers with the immigrant rights group Cosecha New Jersey told me. That strike, according to a letter signed by 46 detained people and published June 3, is near-unanimous and ongoing: “people detained have all voluntarily stopped working and assisting with facility operations,” they wrote in a May 31 letter titled “We Demand Freedom.”

The for-profit firm GEO Group, ICE’s largest private contractor and Delaney Hall’s operator, runs what it calls a “voluntary work program” that in effect keeps the center operating, described in a recent GEO Group detainee handbook reviewed by Mother Jones.

While work is supposedly voluntary, “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is a “high offense” punishable by disciplinary transfer, isolation, or criminal proceedings.

“Any resident assigned to work in the kitchen will be paid $4.00 per day,” the handbook says. That’s the highest wage anyone gets: “Laundry Work Details and Barbershop Workers will be paid $3.00 per day. Special Work Details are paid $2.00 per day. All other job assignments are $1.00 per day. Ordinarily you will not be permitted to work more than eight hours per day or 40 hours per week.”

The document also lists the cost of a pair of shoes at GEO Group’s commissary: $24.28, equivalent to several weeks’ wages. A........

© Mother Jones