Trump’s brutality is showing inside and outside Newark’s Delaney Hall

The violence against protesters and the abuse of immigrants both deserve more coverage.

Photo by ikewoood

The pavement outside the Delaney immigrant detention center in Newark, N.J., has become the front line of the resistance against the brutality and cruelty of the Trump regime.

What’s happening there deserves more coverage than it’s getting from our major news organizations.

National news outlets should be on the ground, filing daily reports, while their colleagues use the events there as an urgent and dynamic news peg to explore and expose both the maltreatment of immigration detainees – especially in privately-run facilities – and the government’s violent crackdown on protesters.

Inside the center, immigrants – who did nothing to deserve this – are on a hunger and labor strike protesting inhumane conditions and the denial of their due process rights. As I wrote in February, it’s a moral imperative for American journalists to ask questions like these:

Why does someone who overstayed their visa need to be held in shackles? Why does someone who isn’t a flight risk need to be indefinitely confined in a filthy overcrowded cell? Does any child belong in a prison camp? Does anybody at all deserve to be forced to sleep on a concrete floor, or underfed, or brutalized, or denied medical care?

Outside Delaney, enraged federal agents who hide their faces are increasingly using batons and pepper spray to assault protesters who have been holding a round-the-clock vigil for seven days, exercising their free-speech rights and committing civil disobedience by blocking ICE vehicles.

Why is ICE responding with such furious violence? Consider some of the imagery from the scene, like this shot, of a masked, baton-wielding ICE agent kicking a protester into the wheels of a moving tractor-trailer. (Here’s the video.) Why so much pepper spray? Look at the rage of these agents as they chase and beat protesters, furiously swinging their batons. This is just plain brawling.

Why has ICE turned the parking lot into a war zone? Who is telling them to do this? Who in the government will go on the record saying it’s appropriate? In a normal time, with a functioning Justice Department, wouldn’t these agents be ordered to stop – and prosecuted if they didn’t?

Why did Senator Andy Kim, approaching ICE agents with his hands raised in an attempt to de-escalate a face-off, end up in a cloud of pepper spray instead?

The parking lot also offers journalists a chance to see and share the humanity of the people being held in detention by speaking to their family members. Like this woman, who described phone calls from her husband in which he spoke of inmates being beaten and gassed. Or like this 10-year-old girl whose father is a detainee. “If they’re such big and bad,” she said, pointing at ICE agents, “why don’t they just take theirs masks off?”

Of course it matters how the conflict is covered, too.

One can report from the government’s point of view, focusing on arrests and blaming the violence on protesters. See, on Good Morning America, Aaron Katersky reporting that “protesters clashed again overnight with federal officers.”

Or one can report objectively, like Duarte Geraldino did for New York’s PIX11 News, explaining that “ICE agents pushed some of the demonstrators. The demonstrators stood up for themselves and before you knew it, things quickly went out of control.”

It’s also essential not to treat DHS as a credible source of information. As I wrote back in November:

Time after time, official statements from DHS — including ICE and the Border Patrol — have turned out to be malicious fabrications, often intended to blame the victims for their own brutality.

For a model of coverage, watch Democracy Now!, which led with the Delaney story this morning. The segment included a long clip of Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, speaking outside the hall. Here’s what he said:

DHS is retaliating against people for exercising those constitutional rights. People shouldn’t have to starve themselves to make their dignity known. And not only is DHS illegally violating due process for those who are detained, they’re also illegally obstructing elected officials from gaining access to the facility, and they’re violating the Constitution for people outside by brutalizing protesters who dare to exercise their constitutional rights.

Their response to the very real issues that people are facing inside and the very real constitutional rights that people are trying to exercise outside is not to solve the problems. It’s to suppress them. It’s to brutalize people. It’s to use more force and it’s to endanger lives.

They are the ones who are escalating the situation. This entire administration is operating with illegality. The cruelty is the point.

Amy Goodman also interviewed newly sworn-in Rep. Analilia Mejia of New Jersey, who spoke of her commitment “to ensure the decent treatment of human beings that are being detained, many of which do not have criminal records.” Mejia said:

Many of the individuals that I’ve spoken to within Delaney Hall were following the law. They were attempting to go to a court-appointed date with ICE agents. They were attempting to check in and then they were detained. I spoke to a 19-year-old girl who went to a detention center to visit a friend believing that because of her protected status that she would be all right and then she was detained at the end of that visit.

Mejia also confirmed reports that guards inside the center had assaulted detainees last night using pepper spray.

The New York Times does appear to have a free-lancer on the scene, finally. Its latest article started in the passive voice: “Violent clashes between demonstrators and federal agents erupted early on Friday,” it said. But having a reporter on the scene matters. Here’s the secong paragraph:

Just past midnight, about 50 activists convened in front of about 30 federal agents. A group of officers charged into the crowd, and several protesters were pushed to the ground as officers sprayed a chemical irritant. One officer beat a demonstrator with a baton across the torso, thighs, knee and calves as he tried to flee. Three protesters were arrested, restrained with zip ties and carried past a razor-wire fence into the detention center.

The Times also quoted Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, who said state health officials were denied access to the facility. She called for Delaney to be shut down and said the protesters have been peaceful.

“What seems to really be inciting a lot of this are really the ICE agents,” she said.