Capitalist predation and imperialism displace people from their homelands. Once in the U.S. those people are driven into privately run immigration jails like Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey where a corporation profits from their incarceration.
Presented by: Family Members of Delaney Hall Detainees, Organizers with the Black Alliance for Peace NYC/NJ and the Progressive Labor Party
We are a multiracial group of residents who live in Newark along with women who recently had family members unjustly held in Delaney Hall Detention Center. We are moved by the courage, will, and strength of detainees inside. It inspires us to further organize ourselves to shut down Delaney Hall, free those inside and take down the broader injustices happening everywhere.
Although taking place in different parts of the world, we understand the material conditions we've all faced leading up to this moment to reflect two sides of the same system. For those of us with family members held at Delaney, our stories must be contextualized within the conditions we’ve faced in our home countries – namely Peru and Ecuador.
In Peru, one of us has witnessed firsthand how organized crime has taken over Peruvian communities, extorting small businesses, construction companies, public transportation, and even the most impoverished workers selling trinkets on the street. Those who don’t comply with these criminal organizations are killed. One of us was a student in Ecuador with a small business and was threatened to pay cartels $500 a week, which is the equivalent of the average monthly income. If we don’t pay, they ransack our businesses or kill us. All of this has escalated the economic crisis in our countries, making it hard to find sustainable work and/or safety if you’re not connected to someone in power.
These conditions lock our people in a state of deep instability. Capitalists collude with the state and criminal organizations to exploit our situation by suppressing wages and sewing division among workers. In Ecuador, before the wave of immigration swelled in the last 5 years, the wage was $10 a day. But the influx of migrant workers from neighboring countries willing to accept lower wages has forced migrant and domestic workers to compete over jobs while international bosses and their local partners struggle to make more money.
This kind of destabilization taking place throughout Latin America doesn’t just naturally happen. There are internal and external forces that are responsible, just as there are forces responsible for the detention of our community members being held at Delaney Hall. U.S. sanctions on countries like Cuba and Venezuela have violently escalated economic instability throughout the entire region, resulting in a snowball effect that keeps the working class masses trapped in cycles of displacement and economic hardship. This is carried out in the interests of the international ruling class and on the backs of the international working class.
“Many of us come here because we want the freedom to make a living” and because we deserve to live dignified lives. But, contrary to what the American Dream promises, our families locked inside Delaney have been criminalized, caged, and disappeared. “The US wants us to respect its laws, but it's not respecting us.” And this is done by the same forces benefiting from the man-made conditions in our homelands.
We understand that these same cycles of violence are carried out domestically within the U.S. as well. In the city of Newark, the organized crime we face takes the form of multi-million dollar developers and banks who are buying and remodeling properties across the city. Their path to getting richer depends on a city full of migrants and citizens, mostly black and Latin, who are being priced out due to rising rent and cost of living.
The other half of the developers in Newark are capitalist giants like Amazon, Audible, Lionsgate Studios, and Prudential that say they are bringing more jobs to the residents of the city. But instead, they are displacing residents while forcing workers inside and outside the city into a racist fight over these jobs. Just like in countries like Peru and Ecuador, workers in Newark too, are forced into jobs with lower wages or underemployment. Lower wages for many of us means having to constantly choose between paying for groceries, paying rent or transportation to work. Furthermore, Our communities are criminalized by police, tasked by the developers in partnership with the politicians to clean up the streets; by disappearing the most impoverished workers to make new developments “more attractive”.
These pressures along with the anti-immigrant racism blasted to deeply alienated workers, has won many of all backgrounds to become the overseers in detention centers like Delaney Hall in exchange for stable wages.
Delaney Hall, one of many concentration camps run by ICE:
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Has provoked women to have miscarriages,
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Has forced migrant workers inside to withhold simple requests for healthcare and basic humane treatment out of the fear of being put in isolation.
Among three of us who helped create this speech, we count at least half a dozen family members who have gone through this torturous system of detention. Some of those family members have been deported, others we fought to be released with the solidarity of workers like you outside of Delaney, some are still caged or in danger of deportation.
For every elder, young person, health-compromised migrant we have collectively pressured ICE to release, ICE has equally advanced both legal and extralegal tools to amass violent unchecked power. A lot of our immigrant brothers and sisters have discovered that habeas corpus - a law that challenges wrongful detentions - could be leveraged to temporarily get family members out of detention centers.
In response, ICE is more aggressively sending detainees to places with more racist courts like Texas and Louisiana where habeas corpus is less likely to be granted. More than that, detainees inside Delaney have reported that fascist guards have casual conversations about transferring detainees despite acknowledging that they have habeas corpus. A Mexican mother told one of us that despite her 19-year-old son being granted habeas corpus, he was still transferred to a Detention Center in Georgia. These are just a few examples of the extensive measures ICE is taking to keep our communities incarcerated.
As my comrade who spoke before me mentioned, the police and ICE, Delaney Hall and Essex County Jail - these institutions serve interrelated purposes. They function as militarized arms of the state. Although the name of the forces may vary, the result is the same. Whether you're an immigrant fleeing capitalist-induced crises in countries outside the U.S. or citizens in Newark being displaced and criminalized by capitalists domestically, the state response is the same – cage the poor, advance the wars.
We are here today to say No More! We know that our most powerful weapon to defend ourselves from these fascist conditions is our multiracial unity. We can all see from the actions taking place at Delaney Hall and all throughout this country that neither citizenship nor one’s essential humanity rewards safety from these violent systems. It is only through unity and organized struggle that we can participate in the society-wide transformation needed to secure our people(s) centered human rights!
May this fight against Delaney Hall unite us so that we’re even more equipped to end injustices everywhere!
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