Solidarity with the Hunger and Labor Strike by ICE Detainees at Delaney Hall

By the illume Magazine Editorial Team

MAY 29, 2026

illume Magazine has been on an unofficial sabbatical for approximately one year, with publication having been temporarily halted due to our editorial and design team members’ graduations from university and subsequent dispersals throughout the country. We are writing for the first time since May 14, 2025, to publish a statement about the coordinated hunger and labor strike that has been ongoing for seven days and counting, led by about three hundred ICE detainees inside Delaney Hall of Newark, New Jersey. Delaney Hall is one of the largest ICE detention facilities on the east coast, privately run by the notorious prison contracting corporation GEO Group in a contract worth $1 billion.

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The strikers began their hunger and labor strike on May 22, 2026, to protest the inhumane conditions and consistent physical and psychological torture faced by detainees, but they are demanding more than the improvement of facility conditions. In a communiqué published by the organization Cosecha on May 26, the strikers assert themselves as not just immigrants caught up in the country’s ongoing immigration and deportation agenda, but as human beings whose basic human rights are being violated and silenced.

In a separate press release from the organization Eyes on ICE New Jersey, a participant of the strike inside Delaney articulates the positionality of himself and his fellow strikers as political prisoners who have long been victims of the forces of global capitalism and imperialism that forced them to migrate to this country in the first place; whose labor as cleaners, kitchen workers, and snow shovelers has long been exploited since they arrived and who are now being detained without due process for the purpose of filling another bed in a for-profit facility:

When we came into this country, we were allowed parole and a work permit to be legal in this country. We have people who are married, who have their marriage petitions approved, and are awaiting their residence card, yet are still detained and their cases are yet to be resolved—this is negligenc[e]… Who will then take care of [our] family and kids? Who will take them to school? Who will pay their rent and feed them?… We want to be free. [The] majority of us were arrested during our check-in appointments with immigration, so now even if we abide the law, pay taxes and do our due diligence, we are still detained for going to immigration appointments voluntarily. We were arrested due to the change in government, a political prosecution. They are people scared to go back to their home country due to prosecution but this country now is doing the same with their racist political prosecution. We are political prisoners… We plead that everyone hears our voices and our demands.

In the first communiqué, the strikers wrote a long list of injustices inside the facility, including decayed food or food containing worms; inhumane bathroom conditions; ventilation issues; serious medical neglect with no physicians or nurses on call, even for detainees with the flu, cancer, conjunctivitis, UTIs, and pregnant detainees. Moreover, ICE agents have been coercing detainees into signing forced deportation orders, and forcing them to work maintenance without pay or for at most $1 an hour.

For the past seven days, protesters and community advocates have been gathering outside Delaney Hall, and directly facing off with ICE agents, to stand in solidarity with the strikers and their demands, which include the immediate release of vulnerable detainees—children, the elderly, impregnated, and seriously ill—and the meaningful review of ongoing immigration cases and habeas corpus filings. Despite being beaten, tased, and pepper-sprayed by ICE agents on the ground, the protestors in front of Delaney seem more empowered than before, refusing to give in to the escalating threat of violence and fear. Perhaps because they know that what the state really wants is for us to be isolated from each other; scared, helpless, and immobilized. Videos from those on the ground show silhouettes of the detainees inside the facility, jumping and flashing lights on and off to signal to those outside that they see them and they don’t want them to leave.

Can we say anything that hasn’t been said already in the past year and half? THE CITY’s recent investigation confirmed what was already widely known. In an analysis of 430 street arrests and kidnappings by ICE in the New York region, more than 93% were found to have targeted people from Latin American countries and were disproportionately clustered in Latino-concentrated neighborhoods. We already know that ICE engages in specific racial profiling against Latinos in their operations; that the criminal records of these immigrants certainly do not matter; that they are doing this for various reasons ranging from overt white supremacy to the $50,000 bonus; that they are raping and impregnating children and women inside the facilities. We know that a significant number of the agents are of racialized identities themselves and that this is why identity-based politics and representation fails us. We know that the agency is rogue, militarized, and trigger-happy to shoot anyone who gets in their way in the face.

How can we draw parallels between the administration’s targeting of our Latino and Black neighbors, with Asian Americans and the Asian American history of immigration and resistance? We are always brought back to Lisa Lowe’s materialist critique of the U.S. institution of citizenship writ large. The concept of citizenship in this country, she writes, is predicated on the state’s legal transformation of “the [Asian] alien into the [Asian American] citizen,” in the process “institutionaliz[ing] the disavowal of the history of racialized labor exploitation and disenfranchisement through the promise of freedom in the political sphere.” Through Lowe’s analysis, we see a different historical formation of the Asian American citizen, one based on a deep contradiction that created the alien through a succession of imperialist wars and occupations in Asia and various exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, and simultaneously included the alien in the exploitative labor markets of the national terrain. The political institution of citizenship for the racialized American, is thus a site of contradiction between global capitalism and liberal democracy. It remains not a site of political emancipation, but rather a contemporary way for the liberal state to produce and justify new modes of racialized and gendered violence against immigrant identities with the shifting categories of legal–illegal, citizen–noncitizen; U.S.-born–permanent resident. Lowe’s seminal Immigrant Acts was published in 1998, but still remains vital for drawing parallels between Asian American immigrant history and Mexican and Latino immigrant history. She writes in her explanation for why the Marxist critique of citizenship fails to account for the racialized history of citizenship in the U.S.:

[I]t was on racial equality that the Civil Rights movement focused its energies and through race that a coalition of Blacks, Chicanos, and Asians could form. Yet these struggles have revealed that the granting of rights does not abolish the economic system that profits from racism… Marx described the negation of “private” individual particulars of the subject who becomes the “abstract citizen” of the political state. But for Asians within the history of the United States—as for African Americans, Native Americans, or Chicanos—”political emancipation” through citizenship is never an operation confined to the negation of individual private particulars; it requires the negation of a history of social relations that publicly racialized groups and successively constituted those groups as “nonwhites ineligible for citizenship.”

Immigrants of Asian origin are not immune to the current ICE crackdown of the second Trump administration. The UCLA Asian American Studies Center estimates that removals of Asian immigrants nearly tripled within the first six months of Trump’s second administration. Earlier this year, amid the onslaught of ICE activity in the Twin Cities that killed U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, a St. Paul resident told the The Chicago Tribune that federal agents had asked her to identify the Hmong and Asian households in her neighborhood, and days later ICE illegally entered the home of U.S. citizen ChongLy Thao and arrested him in his underwear in the dead of the Minnesota winter. Thao was one of dozens of Hmong Americans targeted by ICE for detention and deportation, all or most of whom had been in the United States for decades after fleeing Laos due to unstable conditions created by the CIA’s decade-long covert bombing campaign against the Oregon-sized country during the Cold War. The forces of imperial violence and economic precarity in Laos that drove Thao and others to emigrate to the United States are undoubtedly similar to the forces that led many of the Mexican, Central American, and Venezuelan detainees filling inhumane ICE facilities all over the country to seek a new home here.

This is the perverse double-bind faced by immigrants in the United States: U.S. intervention in the termed “Global South” makes immigration a necessity, but white supremacist fantasies of national purity and impenetrable borders make a peaceful existence in the United States an impossibility. Asian American histories of immigration are inseparable from the histories of African and Latin American immigrants suffering and fighting against the same imperial world order. This AAPI Heritage Month, resist the siloed narratives of cultural celebration and Asian American exceptionalism and turn your attention to the ways this country contradicts its claims to diversity. The battle against ICE, and imperial-driven displacement and borders everywhere, is not over.

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The following section is an account written solely by Jesica Bak, the editor-in-chief of illume Magazine, intended to be shared in contextualization with the rest of the publication’s statement on the situation at Delaney Hall.

Even before the current strike at Delaney, I was already personally familiar with the conditions inside the ICE facilities. Last winter on December 6th, 2025, my close friend R (who prefers to remain unnamed for this piece), was abducted from a street in Queens, New York, by a Home Depot parking lot where he was looking for day work. Around the time of his abduction, I hadn’t heard from him for over a month and ICE operations were already escalating rapidly across the U.S. I had had a bad feeling, which was a different kind of bad feeling from when he was MIA because of unpaid phone bills, and on December 13th, I received a call from the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in New Jersey. He said he was calling me in case I was wondering why he wasn’t responding to my messages. He said he tried to run, but one of the agents gunned him down. A robot interrupted us to warn that there were only ten minutes left on the phone call.

After arriving alone at only sixteen years old, R had been living and working in the U.S. for a total of thirteen years. Throughout the years, he had barely gotten by on construction work and other day laboring work; he was, at times, withheld wages without any legal accountability or recuperation due to his undocumented status, and as a result, he was, at one point, homeless for two years and lived in his car. When we met, he had been working another precarious job finding and bringing back shopping carts at a supermarket.

I could tell the lawyer had probably been doing this work for a very long time by how quickly he did the consultation: because R didn’t have a pending asylum application based on a fear of persecution directly from the government or a non-state agent the government is closely tied to, nor did he have a spouse or children heavily relying on his presence in the United States, there is no case to make and we should prepare ourselves for his imminent removal. I asked if, at least, he would be sent back to his actual home country, unlike some of the cases we’ve been seeing on the news where, despite nation-wide protests and judicial orders stating otherwise, detainees were being shackled to countries they were not citizens of and had never heard of before in their lives. He said yes, thankfully because R does not have a pending asylum application based on a fear of persecution in his home country, he should likely be sent back to where he came from, Honduras. Given the circumstances of extrajudicial deportations, I agreed that this was something to be thankful about.

R told me that he would be transferred to a facility in New York, closer to me, but the next time we spoke, he called me from the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana. Pine Prairie is also run by the GEO Group—whose pockets I helped line by frequently sending money to R’s commissary so that he could make phone calls and watch movies on the shared facility tablet—and had also been previously subject to human rights violations from 2021 and 2023. At Pine Prairie, R told me that the detainees were not given clean drinking water; instead, they were brought buckets of dirty ice. He told me that they were not properly fed, so everyone was hungry and sick on a daily basis. He told me that the rooms were claustrophobically crammed and unfit for basic sleeping conditions, and that hundreds of new detainees were being brought in everyday. He told me almost all of them were from Latin American countries, many from African countries, and a handful from China and some southeast Asian countries. He told me that it was difficult for detainees not to fight with each other due to the psychological torture, and that they were being coerced into signing papers they didn’t understand. He told me that he was scared to go back to Honduras, that it had been thirteen years since he left and he would no longer recognize it, much less re-assimilate into its difficult political and economic climate. He had had dreams of saving enough money in the U.S. to eventually open his own small business in Honduras, and also of traveling to Europe. Despite everything, he laughed and made jokes when we called and said that he was thankful to God; that he felt lucky compared to some of the other people in there.

I spoke with another lawyer, who attested that based on her almost ten years of working with detention cases, the Oakdale court in Louisiana where R was assigned is one of the most unlikely courts in the United States to grant relief, even on the basis of credible fear of persecution. Moreover, if we didn’t want R to remain in the custody of ICE for several more months, we should prepare to file for his voluntary departure. I thought about how before I knew he had been abducted, I had bought him shearling gloves for his birthday in November that were just sitting on my shelf and for which he would no longer have a need in Honduras.

By the end of February, he had been sent back to Honduras, where he messaged me to tell me he was free and able to reunite with his family who had been waiting for him. He sent me photos from the beach. I thought about what free meant in this context, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved. R told me that given everything that is currently ongoing at Delaney Hall, he would like me to share a small part of his own story and the injustice he has also faced.