NEWARK (USA), May 27— You can smell the official lies before you even get to the gates of Delaney Hall.
The Department of Homeland Security wants you to believe that the “immigration detention center” here is a model of efficiency—three square meals, good medical care, and “humane processing for criminals” they’ve swept off the streets of New Jersey and the region.
Don’t believe a word of it.
What is actually happening behind those walls is a slow, violent rot. Detainees, our fellow working-class brothers and sisters, have launched a hunger strike not for luxury, but for survival. They are eating food crawling with worms. They are sleeping in squalid, disease-ridden cells with no meaningful access to doctors or lawyers.
And when they protest? Reports of brutal retaliation are leaking out like blood from a wound. This is not a detention center. It is a modern-day concentration camp run by fascist ICE agents who prowl our neighborhoods rounding up people based on paperwork, not proof of danger.
Let’s call the liars by their name. The DHS claims these detainees are “the worst of the worst.” But the real criminals are the government officials in Washington and Trenton who order these attacks. They are the ones tear-gassing their own constituents and arresting demonstrators simply for forming a human chain.
Today, outside Delaney Hall, we saw the price of resistance. Senator Andy Kim caught a face full of pepper spray trying to calm a situation the state created. Meanwhile, officers in riot gear pepper-balled the crowd, and the protests remain under a state of siege.
Newark mayor Ras Baraka imposed a curfew. New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill sent state troopers to defend ICE.
But here is the truth this failing capitalist system doesn’t want you to see: We are not divided. The bosses and their political servants use racist, anti-worker lies to pit us against each other—citizen against non-citizen, suburban against urban—because they know that if we ever united, their whole rotten game would collapse.
Workers are refusing to buy it. In Minneapolis, workers banded together to physically stop the ICE vans. Here in Newark, we are doing the same. Blocking the vehicles. Refusing to look away.
This isn’t just about immigration reform. This is a symptom of a system that requires a permanent underclass to exploit. You can’t fix fascism with a better voting plan. You can’t clean the worms out of the food by asking nicely.
We need to move beyond outrage and toward a real communist solution. We need to bring this message to every worker on every loading dock, every picket line, and every break room: The only way to abolish these concentration camps, to end the racist attacks, and to guarantee that every worker eats clean food and sees a doctor is to put an end to capitalism itself. To end nations and borders.
The fight at Delaney Hall is our fight. And we will not stop until the gates are open and the system that built them is gone. And every worker is welcome everywhere.
Read the ICWP pamphlet Fight for the Day When No Worker Will Be Called Foreigner here