NEWARK, N.J. — Anti-ICE protesters clashed with federal officers outside the Delaney Hall detention center for a second consecutive week, with masked demonstrators blocking facility entrances and shouting threats including “Grab your guns and kill yourself” and “Every cop, every fed, shoot yourself in the head” at law enforcement.
Agents deployed pepper spray and batons as the crowd surrounded the Newark facility late Wednesday night and into Thursday morning. Members of the crowd wore masks and keffiyehs. A garbage truck driver blocked by protesters confronted the crowd in a video captured by Freedom News. “If I hit one of y’all, I go to jail,” the driver yelled. “What’s wrong with ya’ll?”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed Democratic criticism of the facility during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. “It shows the radical left Democrats’ priorities when they decide to go out and protest a detention center where we’re housing rapists, child predators, murderers, drug dealers, and they choose Memorial Day of all the time to go protest something,” Mullin said. “Then you have one of the senators complain because he got splattered with a, you know, pepper ball. I’m sorry. You probably shouldn’t have been there.”
The senator Mullin referenced was Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., who appeared at the protest on Memorial Day and was hit with pepper spray. Kim told CNN’s Jake Tapper he experienced “irritation and burning sensation in my eyes and my throat.” Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill also joined protesters on Memorial Day and demanded access to the detention facility, but her request was denied.
President Donald Trump defended the detention operations. “We have some horrible killers. We have killers, we have guys that murdered numerous people in there. And these are the people they’re trying to protect,” Trump said, according to ABC News. Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries countered that “the majority of detainees at the facility have no criminal record.”
Attorneys for hundreds of detainees have said their clients are on a hunger strike over conditions at Delaney Hall. The Department of Homeland Security denies that a hunger strike is taking place and has said detainees have not been treated poorly. The standoff at the Newark facility shows no sign of resolution as protests continue into a second week.