‘Repression and resistance’: a historian uncovers the history of migrant protests in US detention
Article excerpt
More than 300 detainees at New Jersey's Delaney Hall immigration detention center have staged a hunger strike lasting over two weeks, prompting historian Jessica Ordaz to examine the long-overlooked history of migrant resistance within U.S. detention facilities. Ordaz's research reveals a pattern of organized protests stretching back decades, moments of defiance that have largely disappeared from official records and public memory. The current strike at Delaney Hall exemplifies what Ordaz calls a cycle of "repression and resistance," illuminating how immigration detention in America has persistently sparked organized dissent from those held inside. Her work challenges the narrative that detention centers are sites of passive confinement, instead documenting how migrants have repeatedly organized to demand better conditions and challenge their imprisonment.
As protests flare at New Jersey’s Delaney Hall, Jessica Ordaz examines the US’s complex relationship with migration and detention
For more than two weeks, at least 300 detainees at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center have been on a hunger and labor strike. They describe “horrible” conditions at the Newark, New Jersey, facility: spoiled food, inadequate medical care and poor living conditions. Others have alleged physical abuse by guards, including being beaten and pepper-sprayed by a riot squad, causing some detainees to be rushed to the hospital. They’re calling for a meeting with the New Jersey governor, Mikie Sherrill, to urge the immediate release of all detainees from the privately operated 1,000-bed center. As of now, the Department of Homeland Security has partly restored family visitation at the center and released pregnant detainees.
To raise the alarm, protests have persisted outside Delaney, and violent clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement officials have escalated. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have wielded batons and used pepper spray and stun guns against protesters, journalists and a US senator. Federal authorities arrested demonstrators on allegations of assaulting law enforcement officers, and Sherrill deployed the New Jersey state police to the protests, leading to the arrests of more than 60 people in a single night. Meanwhile, ICE officers abruptly transferred Martin Soto, a detainee held in solitary confinement for being a suspected strike leader.
Soto’s story, and that of the hundreds of detainees on strike, fits into a long history of immigrant incarceration, and how detainees resisted, said Jessica Ordaz, a historian and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity. Strikes have been reported at other facilities across the country, including in New Mexico and California, where detainees are protesting over water quality, mold and a lack of medical care.
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