Border Czar Tom Homan wants you to know that there is definitely not a hunger strike happening at Delaney Hall—a privately run ICE jail in Newark, N.J.—and also that he condemns this non-existent strike. On his ongoing Tour de Fox, one week Homan’s telling Laura Ingraham that he’ll force-feed hunger strikers if he has to. The next, during a “Did You Assault Enough People Today?” performance review with Sean Hannity, he’s saying “there was never a hunger strike” and listing all the food he enjoyed alongside detainees during a surprise visit to the jail. “I had beans, I had green beans, I had bread and rolls, I had drinks, I had dessert.” Get it? Got it.
The strike at Delaney Hall follows months of prisoners and their families sounding the alarm about conditions they describe as psychological and physical torture. Some people have languished in the jail for a year, with no due process or end in sight. Some have already secured court orders for their release. Some signed self-deportation papers rather than suffer through more detention. All of them are still stuck in the hell of Delaney.
On May 22, they decided they were done waiting and launched a combined hunger and labor strike. As many as 400 people began a collective refusal to eat or to work for GEO Group, the private prison corporation and major Trump donor that runs the jail. The strike will continue, they say, at least until they meet with the governor and ICE releases pregnant, young, elderly and medically vulnerable detainees. Their ultimate goal is freedom for everyone jailed inside the detention center.
Through a series of letters smuggled to the outside world, they made the full extent of their suffering clear: decaying food riddled with worms, undrinkable water, outbreaks of flu and other illnesses, forced labor for as little as a $1 a hour or no pay at all, medical neglect, indefinite detention, and the denial of even the most basic legal rights.
This may not be the first time you’ve heard about Delaney Hall. GEO Group re-opened the defunct jail in May 2025 under a 15-year, $1 billion contract with ICE, over the legal and political objections of those opposed to re-opening a private prison to service the logistical needs of mass deportation. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was famously arrested by masked ICE agents and detained while trying to gain access to the newly opened facility. Shortly after, in June, detainees pushed down a wall inside the jail and four people managed to escape. Six months later, 41-year-old Jean Wilson Brutus died after a single day in custody at the jail. Government officials at all levels have consistently and illegally been denied oversight access to Delaney, outside a few limited opportunities.
Delaney Hall is the largest ICE jail on the East Coast, and one of 21 detention centers managed by GEO Group. Business is booming. GEO has the highest revenue of any private detention contractor in the United States. They raked in $254 million in profits last year, and their CEO George Zoley made $11.2 million. In a February conference call, Zoley bragged to investors that GEO jailed a company record of 24,000 detainees in 2025. Last year, a former GEO executive was hired by the Trump administration to oversee the $45 billion Congress allocated to expanding ICE detention.
The strike inside Delaney Hall has been buoyed by the presence of family members, protestors, mutual aid organizers, members of local nurses and service worker unions, journalists, and legal advocates outside the detention center. These solidarity efforts intensified after ICE agents retaliated against detainees for striking by cancelling their visitation hours with family and violently assaulting them, leaving at least four people hospitalized. At times, protestors threw things like water bottles at ICE agents, or attempted to block vans from forcibly transferring striking detainees. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill—who supports the closure of Delaney—responded by calling in state troopers, who have since joined other law enforcement officers in violently attacking people gathered outside night after night. Governor Sherrill claimed those supporting the strike had been infiltrated by “national extremist groups.” Not quite the same as Donald Trump calling the protesters paid fakers, and yet just as useless to the people inside and outside of Delaney demanding that someone, anyone do something effectual about the 1,000 or so people left to rot inside a for-profit jail.
Sherrill, Baraka, and other elected officials seem to be pinning their hopes on an unfolding legal battle. On June 2, the state of New Jersey filed a lawsuit against GEO, asking the court to grant the state health department access to inspect the inhumane conditions. It’s not the first attempt to attack GEO in court. Last year, a Newark lawsuit against GEO went nowhere after being relegated to private mediation by a federal judge. And all of these legal battles exist in the shadow of a U.S. appeals court striking down a short-lived New Jersey law banning private prison companies from contracting with ICE to detain immigrants in the state.
The people inside Delaney Hall have learned that their humanity only extends one way. That is, they can be punished for crossing the law, but when the law crosses them, they are no one at all. So they’re done waiting, and done leaving their fates up to courts. They have taken matters into their own hands.
