By Kshama Sawant

I stand in solidarity with the at least 300 detainees who are on a courageous labor and hunger strike at the notorious immigrant detention center, Delaney Hall in New Jersey! I also stand with the anti-ICE protestors in solidarity with the detainees and who are facing off against the full weight of ICE, the NJ state police, and the Democratic Party politicians who run the state. Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill sent in cops in riot gear and on horseback who teargassed the protesters.

On top of the horrendous conditions in the ICE detention centers and the ICE terror unleashed in the nation’s cities, Trump and the Republicans have now approved $70 billion in funding for ICE for the next three years. My main opponent, 29-year incumbent Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith, and other Democrats have made a great show of opposing this bill. But the Democratic Party initially supported the ICE funding last year, until they came under fire from mass anger at the ICE murders of peaceful Minneapolis activists Renée Good and Alex Pretti early this year. Democrats like Smith also want working people to forget that the creation and funding of ICE raids, detentions, and deportations have been a bipartisan project from the beginning, with Democrats like Smith strongly in support. 

With its nearly 1,200 beds, Delaney Hall is the largest detention center on the East Coast and has become a flashpoint in the national struggle against ICE and the mass deportation campaign led by Trump and facilitated by both the Democratic and Republican parties. This center, in particular, shows just how much the bipartisan deportation machine has ratcheted up in recent years. In February 2025, the infamous private prison corporation GEO Group was awarded a BILLION-dollar contract to operate and massively expand the Delaney Hall facility for the next 15 years. There has been a seamless continuation of ICE funding across Republican and Democratic administrations. In 2024 alone, Democratic President Joe Biden approved $3.4 billion just for detention centers to jail an average of 41,500 immigrants per day. This exceeded all four years of Trump’s first term and also became “the third highest level in Congressional history.” Most of that money has gone as profits for the super-rich who own corporations like GEO Group.

GEO Group is one of the world’s largest private prison contractors, and operates nearly two dozen ICE facilities, including the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. GEO is widely known for its horrifying living conditions and severe exploitation of its prisoners as cheap labor. For example, detainees at Delaney Hall are paid $1 daily as part of the facility’s so-called “voluntary” work program, while a 15-minute phone call costs $5. The company’s collaboration with ICE is mutually beneficial, as ICE gains a private partner to do some of its dirty work, incentivized by profit to house as many people as possible at the lowest cost, while GEO Group makes massive profits from Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Once Delaney Hall opened in May 2025, GEO Group rapidly and massively expanded it, growing from holding fewer than 100 immigrants initially to more than 800 by the end of 2025, a shocking 700 percent increase in seven months!

Delaney Hall’s numerical growth has coincided with escalating deprivation within the facility, as well as an increased willingness on the part of the detainees to fight back. On May 22nd, hundreds of detained immigrants went on a hunger and labor strike to fight back against the rampant and inhumane conditions inside the facility. Detainees at Delaney Hall face frequent delays or denials of medical treatment, and the same is true for needed medications for chronic conditions. This is further compounded by a severe shortage of medical professionals on staff. The food served is often spoiled, rotten, or expired, and there are even reports of food containing live worms. The infrequency of mealtimes also worsens the issue. The living quarters are unsanitary and overcrowded. Detainees have described black mold on shower walls, poorly maintained toilets, and a lack of proper cleaning supplies. Individual detainees who speak up against these horrific conditions have faced retaliation through physical maltreatment or neglect, delays in their legal cases, coercion to force individuals to sign deportation papers, or the use of solitary confinement. Letters from within the detention center detail these abuses and much worse. Detainees are also reporting brutal retaliation against their strike, with reprisals from GEO staff and pepper-spraying from ICE agents.

The Delaney fightback is as much a workplace strike action against parasitic bosses who profit from exploiting workers as it is a protest against inhumane ICE detention. The detainees do all the work of maintaining the facility, such as custodial work, cooking, and laundry. The work is purportedly “voluntary,” but GEO’s dystopian “detainee handbook” states that “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or to refuse to work” is a “high offense,” with disciplinary transfer, isolation, or criminal proceedings as consequences. The profits for the executives and wealthy shareholders of corporations like GEO depend directly on how little they can get away with paying detainees for labor, and the more they charge the detainees for any necessity, from shoes to blankets to ID cards. Such brutal logic of profits for the bosses also helps drive the American prison system, with nearly 800,000 of the 1.2 million incarcerated individuals performing labor for between 13 and 52 cents an hour. This is also fundamentally how the capitalist system works. Profits for the super-rich exist because the wages they pay us are a small fraction of the value of our labor. Detention centers and prisons hold the inmates in even more draconian, even slave-like, conditions. The Delaney strike is a reminder that the vicious state apparatus of ICE, police, and the courts are in service of the capitalist class, the billionaires and multimillionaires, who control and profit from the misery of working and poor people globally.

Most of the massive corporations are owned by the same handful of so-called “asset manager” corporations on Wall Street, such as Vanguard, which has $12 trillion in assets, and BlackRock, which owns majority shares in GEO and has $13 trillion in assets. Most of the wealth in these asset accumulations are, in turn, owned by the same small elite club. Many of the same billionaires and multimillionaires also have trillions of dollars at stake in AI. They are making AI an increasingly central component of war and bloodshed. Their investments in AI are now the principal reason for mass layoffs. AI is increasingly also the backbone of ICE terror. The fight to shut down ICE and the detention centers needs to go hand in hand with the antiwar movement to end the genocide, military aid to Israel, and the forever wars, the struggle to stop the proliferation of AI data centers, and the fight to take Big Tech and Big Energy into democratic public ownership of workers.

As shameful as it is on its own, the humanitarian crisis created by both major parties at Delaney Hall is not an isolated example, but rather the standard of what ICE detention centers are like across the country. In just the past year alone, the number of people detained by ICE and its private sector collaborators on a given day ballooned by 75 percent from 40,000 people to a record 75,000 people by mid-January 2026. As working people’s living conditions under capitalism continue to deteriorate, the ruling class is increasingly driven to shift the blame onto immigrants and the working people of other countries, rather than the billionaires and their political servants who continually work to enrich themselves at the expense of all. One excuse both the Democrats and Republicans use to explain their deportation agenda is to scapegoat immigrants for crime rate increases, but this could not be further from the truth. Statistics from the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency that oversees ICE, show that at Delaney Hall, over 70 percent of the 10,300 people detained there between May 2025 and March 2026 had no criminal records.

Delaney Hall must be shut down, but we have to go further to escalate the fight against ICE repression. My campaign is demanding the complete shutdown of ICE and its array of detention centers and stopping the deportations. I am also fighting for a public-sector living-wage jobs guarantee, free healthcare for all, and a massive expansion of publicly-owned affordable housing, all funded by taxing the rich. The criminal ICE agents and private prison administrators directly responsible for the horrific conditions inside Delaney Hall and all other facilities should be prosecuted, and their detainees should be given immediate relief, including the release of vulnerable detainees (i.e., elderly, pregnant, youth, and those with serious medical conditions). Moreover, all those detained by ICE should be provided with free legal representation for deportation defense funded by taxes on the rich, in line with the “Right to Counsel” won by my Seattle City Council Office for Seattle renters facing eviction. But to win any of this, the working class and the immigrant community need to fight against both capitalist parties.

Continuing from the past month, leading Democrats in New Jersey and New York have been making visits to Delaney Hall in the name of providing “oversight” to ICE, GEO Group, and appealing to the plight of the detainees. Cory Booker and Andy Kim, NJ’s two Democratic senators, along with NYC Democratic Congressmen Jerry Nadler, Dan Goldman, and Adriano Espaillat, are among those who have routinely voted to fund ICE yet now decry the “moral stain” that Delaney Hall’s operation represents and demand it be shut down. Ras Baraka, the Democratic Mayor of Newark, where Delaney Hall is situated, has engaged in similar performative gestures, as has NJ’s Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill.

But while they engaged in their photo ops at the protests, Sherrill and Baraka quickly got to work doing what Democrats do best: constraining working-class movements and protecting the status quo. Earlier this year, Democratic Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota deployed the National Guard to contain the anti-ICE protest movement in the Twin Cities, following the murder of peaceful activist and mother Renée Good. When the movement rose up in New Jersey, Governor Sherrill deployed the NJ State Police to crack down against the protestors outside Delaney Hall, who were in direct conflict with ICE agents. With Mayor Baraka, they declared a curfew and established “protest zones” farther from the facility to take the wind out of the protests and physically isolate the labor and hunger strikers inside the facility.

In a testament to how decisively bipartisan the anti-worker, anti-immigrant deportation machine is, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin glowingly described Sherrill’s decision to send in state police as a “win for law and order,” praising her for “allowing New Jersey State Police to cooperate with us.” These scandalous maneuvers by the Democratic Party leaders are in the service of twin goals: 1) to ensure the Delaney Hall labor strike doesn’t inspire others to strike in additional ICE facilities and critical sectors of the economy, and 2) to deter the working class in Newark from mobilizing into mass protests and civil disobedience.

The palpable rage at ICE and the deportation machine that the Democratic Party helped create has forced some Democrats to adopt mildly progressive-sounding rhetoric to protect their careers and influence, but working people should not be fooled. The Democrats, even so-called “progressive Democrats,” will betray any promises they make to working people because their role has always been to oversee the interests of US capitalism and limit what is possible for working people to win. This is why what is transpiring at Delaney Hall frightens them: it forces them to expose themselves to working people.

It is very significant and inspiring that the detainees have organized a labor strike at Delaney Hall, the largest immigrant detention center on the East Coast. GEO Group cuts its operating costs significantly by paying its detainee population a sub-minimum wage to keep the detention center running. The example being set through hampering GEO Group’s profit-making should be followed by the labor movement in NJ and NY carrying out strikes in solidarity with the detainees, demanding the immediate release of the detainees and the shuttering of the facility.

Unfortunately, most of the labor leadership has been silent on using its power to win the demands of the striking detainees and to deliver a serious blow to ICE in defense of their own immigrant workers, continuing the trend of labor leadership’s unwillingness to carry out a general strike during the ICE terror campaign in Minneapolis this past January. This reflects the vast majority of labor leaders who subscribe to business unionism, relying on backroom negotiations with the bosses and alliances with the Democratic Party. The fact is: we can’t rely on the business unionist labor leadership to defend immigrant workers, much less go on the offensive for what immigrant and American workers need. We need to rebuild a militant labor movement and throw out labor leaders who are anti-strike. This task is intricately tied to building a new party for the working class. An initial step would be for the rank and file to fight for resolutions in their unions to revoke endorsements of Democratic Party politicians like Congressman Adam Smith, Governor Sherrill, and Mayor Baraka.

During my decade as the independent socialist on the Seattle City Council, I used my office to organize working people to fully shut down SeaTac Airport to fight back against Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban. I led thousands of protesters to block all the security checkpoints at SeaTac, effectively shutting down the airport and air travel and infuriating the Democratic Party. Because I used a class-struggle approach and NOT backroom negotiations, the detainees at the airport were able to receive legal action, and the movement declared victory. Ultimately, the shutdown of multiple airports, including SeaTac, forced Trump to retract his Muslim travel ban. Without the leadership from my office at SeaTac, which set an example for the rest of the country, the national movement against the ban would likely have been far less powerful.

I am running for Congress to bring that kind of class-struggle leadership to the national stage. Simultaneously, I have launched and am building a national class-struggle organization called Workers Strike Back (WSB) to spread these lessons, such as the critical lessons from SeaTac, to working people throughout the country who want to fight back. WSB members in and around New York City have been working hard to build my national campaign for Congress, as well as fighting against ICE locally, including by building pressure on the NYC Council Democrats and Mayor Mamdani at public comment in NYC City Hall. If you agree with the need for a fighting approach to win what workers and immigrants need, I urge you to join my campaign for Congress through donating and volunteering, and I also urge you to join Workers Strike Back.