Version imprimableThe latest protest has taken place at Delaney Hall, a detention center in Newark, New Jersey where protestors outside the building are supporting a hunger strike by those inside. The immigrants in detention are protesting maggot-infested food, overcrowding, lack of blankets, and inadequate medical services. The rightwing neo-Nazi Proud Boys have shown up to support ICE and to confront the immigrants’ allies. ICE has roughed up protestors, fired tear gas and arrested some anti-ICE activist. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, sent the state police to the site to keep order and reduce tensions as ICE withdrew.
The protests in New Jersey are the microcosm of the larger struggle taking place across the country. Officially over 170 people have died in ICE custody or detention facilities from a variety of causes between 2003 and 2025. ICE agents have killed at least four people and maybe more during Trump’s second term and ICE gunshots have injured at least another 17 and perhaps more.
At the same time, the Trump administration is taking measures to ensure that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are denied jobs, lose medical care, are stripped of tax credits, and are kept from enrolling their children in day care. Miller hopes in this way to persuade immigrants to leave, eighty percent of whom are people of color from Asia, Africa, or Latin America, by making their lives in the United States unbearably miserable. Tens of thousands have accepted plane tickets and stipends and self-deported.
The United States has seen an enormous increase in other so-called “voluntary departures.” Between January 2025 and March 2026, immigration judges issued approximately 80,000 self-deportation decisions. But these are mostly the result of coercion by ICE or immigration judges, or because of the terrible conditions in immigration detention centers or the threat of a “third country removal,” for example, sending someone from Latin America to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not surprisingly then, many immigrants will opt to go home. Some estimate two million immigrants have left.
In violation of both U.S. and international law, asylum seekers—people who fear violence in their homelands from the government, from criminals, or from domestic abuse—have been turned back at the U.S. border. The “turnback policy” began under President Barack Obama and continued under Trump has led to hundreds of thousands being turned back. The American Immigration Council, an NGO, reports that, “Some waited for years [in Mexico] forced to live in squalid conditions and falling victim to cartel members. Many were violently assaulted, kidnapped, raped, or murdered while waiting for their chance to exercise their right to seek asylum.” Though several lower courts have ruled that the policy is illegal, the Supreme Court has not ruled and so the Trump administration has continued it.
Meanwhile, New York State has established new rules requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to unmask, to stay out of schools, hospitals, shelters, and houses of worship, and bars police from cooperating with police. ICE says it doesn’t have to abide by state laws.
Given the situation, it’s important that resistance of all sorts, legislative, legal, and in the streets continue. We can be sure that it will.
31 May 2026
