Over 300 immigrants detained at ICE’s Delaney Hall facility in Newark, NJ have initiated a hunger and labor strike.

Detainees are suffering deplorable and dehumanizing conditions. Fed rotten food, denied medical care, and subject to abusive treatment by officers who address them with racist slurs, the prisoners are being forced to run the facility—cooking, cleaning, shoveling, laundering—for pennies a day or nothing at all.

Similar strikes have spread through detention facilities in Tacoma, WA, Alvarado, TX, Phillipsburg, PA, Baldwin, MI and Adelanto, CA.

A class struggle

“Most of the women detained at this center were illegally detained by ICE,” one mother told the media from within the facility. “We were taken at the entrances of our immigration court check-ins, at our jobs, and taking our kids to school.”

The people locked inside Delaney Hall clean offices, stock warehouses, drive trucks, prepare food, care for children, and build homes. These workers have been stripped of their freedom, separated from their families, and subjected to conditions designed to break their morale.

Their struggle is a class struggle. The fact that they are bravely fighting back should command the attention of every union local, labor council, and workers’ organization in the country.

Hypocrisy of the Democrats

Instead, the loudest voices concerning Delaney Hall belong to Democratic Party politicians posing and sputtering platitudes for the cameras. Hakeem Jeffries posted a stern photo of himself touring the facility on his website, vowing to “continue to aggressively conduct congressional oversight visits.”

Dozens of candidates have made the trek and posed for photos. Politico called Delaney Hall “one of the hottest stops on the campaign trail for New York Democrats ahead of the primary election.” With midterm elections on the horizon, opposition to Trump’s immigration policies has become useful branding. For the Democrats, Delaney Hall is not a site of human suffering—it is a stage.

The contrast is grotesque. Inside the facility, detainees are refusing food and risking retaliation to draw attention to the intolerable conditions. Outside, politicians arrive in pressed suits and expensive ties to pose as culture warriors, while photographers document every moment for their campaign ads.

Repression through intimidation

The abuse extends beyond the detainees themselves. Family members attempting to visit loved ones describe a system of arbitrary humiliation and psychological punishment.

Guards repeatedly denied a woman visits with her husband because of alleged dress-code violations, rejecting her infant child for wearing a onesie, and her four year old for wearing leggings that the guards deemed “too provocative.”

Another woman was denied entry because she wore a postpartum belly wrap after suffering a miscarriage. One family described guards ripping up a birthday drawing that a little girl had made for her detained father.

The purpose of detention is not simply confinement. It is repression through intimidation. Every arbitrary rule, every humiliation, every obstacle placed between workers and their families, and other workers serves to pressure detainees into abandoning legal claims, accepting deportation, and being further isolated. Trump openly embraces this repression as part of his broader campaign to scapegoat immigrants for the crisis of American capitalism.

Labor must step into the fight!

Under pressure from their membership, several groups affiliated with or representing the largest unions in the country, including the CWA and SEIU, have issued statements against the treatment of detainees.

Labor Eyes on ICE, a coalition of multiple unions such as the American Federation of Teachers, SEIU 1199, and the Teamsters, organized a Father’s Day demonstration outside of the facility. The following day, a protester was hospitalized after being run over by the vehicle of a guard who works in the facility. In response, Homeland Security officials condemned the protestors as “rioters,” and vowed that “law and order will prevail.”

The protests outside Delaney Hall reflect a genuine desire to fight back. But the fact that they remain small also reveals the political dead end created by decades of retreat by the labor leadership. Unlike the protesters in the streets, most union leaders stand on the sidelines while detainees starve themselves to expose conditions inside detention centers. This has created a vacuum of leadership, and left the field open to Democratic politicians seeking votes to swoop in and play the saviors.

Earlier this year, Minneapolis showed what’s possible through concerted mass struggle. But individual heroism alone is no substitute for class-based organization. Without harnessing our power in numbers and our collective leverage as workers, we cannot defeat a deportation apparatus backed by the federal government, police agencies, courts, prisons, and billions of dollars.

The hunger strikers at Delaney Hall have demonstrated extraordinary courage, but we need organization and a revolutionary party to take the fight to the next level.