Federal authorities arrested two people late Tuesday outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, as another night of confrontations between federal immigration agents and demonstrators pushed the standoff into a sixth day.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced the arrests in a post on X, saying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been “assaulted by anti-ICE rioters who sprayed law enforcement with an unknown chemical substance.”
Videos from the scene showed a chaotic situation involving more than a dozen ICE agents during Tuesday night’s confrontations. Multiple protesters and bystanders posted on social media that ICE deployed pepper spray.
The day’s events continued a pattern in which elected officials and media visit the detention facility during the day before protests heat up during the evening hours.
Mullin said two “anti-ICE rioters” were arrested on charges of assaulting, resisting and impeding federal officers, and warned that “anyone who assaults law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Organizers outside Delaney Hall offered a sharply different account of at least one arrest, though it was unclear whether it was one of those announced by Mullin.
Kathy O’Leary, the New Jersey coordinator for the Catholic social justice organization Pax Christi, said in a voicemail left for a Gothamist reporter around midnight that ICE agents had arrested a volunteer who was working as a street medic treating those hit by pepper spray. O'Leary said the volunteer, whom she identified as a Bloomfield resident, was a U.S. Army veteran and a U.S. citizen.
According to O’Leary and social media videos, the volunteer was across Doremus Avenue, separated from the facility by four lanes of traffic, when ICE agents moved from the facility and rushed toward him, shouting “eyes on the target.”
They “shoved the volunteer's face into the pavement, handcuffed him and dragged him into the facility,” O’Leary said.
After his arrest, the man was left on the side of Rutherford Street in Newark, O’Leary added in a text message.
Susan Francois, another Pax Christi member, said in a video uploaded to Instagram that the arrested volunteer had been treating protesters exposed to pepper spray before he was taken into custody.
DHS did not respond to requests for additional information about the arrests or the alleged use of pepper spray and instead directed Gothamist to the secretary’s post on X.
The arrests came on the fifth night of demonstrations outside Delaney Hall, where roughly 300 detainees have been on a hunger and labor strike since Friday to protest conditions inside the privately run facility, according to organizers and elected officials who have visited.
Detainees and their advocates have described inadequate food, limited access to medical care, poor ventilation and violations of due process. DHS has disputed those accounts.
U.S. Reps. Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver said they were able to confirm at least some of the protesters’ allegations through their visits over the weekend.
“The same issues from a year ago continue to plague the facility,” Menendez said in an interview.
Menendez, who has visited the site multiple times in the last few days and met with several detainees, told Gothamist in a prior interview that ICE phone and tablet privileges at times had been revoked from detainees.
Catalina Adorno, an organizer with the New Jersey branch of the immigrant labor group Cosecha who has been in touch with families of detainees and recently released detainees, also said no coffee has been distributed in recent days, and detainees are being more frequently transferred between units or being told they could be transferred out of the facility.
Martin Soto, who was transferred from Delaney Hall to the nearby ICE detention center in Elizabeth, has alleged in a court filing that the move was retaliation for the strike.
“They were mad about his wife outside who's among some of the protesters who have been speaking out to news stations and other advocacy groups about her husband’s condition and the condition of the facility," McIver said in an interview.
Acting Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Lauren Bis denied detainees are transferred to retaliate against them, saying the agency makes “a custody determination based on bed space, medical needs, and other factors.”
Tensions escalated at Delaney Hall throughout the long weekend. ICE agents hit Sen. Andy Kim with pepper spray on Monday after he positioned himself between agents and demonstrators, according to video and photos from the scene.
They also denied Gov. Mikie Sherrill access to the facility. She said during a press conference Tuesday that the state was “continuing to explore its options” regarding the facility which she said should never have opened. Several members of New Jersey's congressional delegation were made to wait to enter, sometimes for several hours, before they were allowed to conduct oversight visits, they said.
Arya Sundaram and Michael Sol Warren contributed reporting.
This story has been updated with new information.
