Governor Sherrill sent state police to tear-gas protesters defending starving immigrants.
Between 300 and 400 people locked in a concrete facility in Newark are refusing to eat. They are refusing to work. They have asked for four things: medical care for injuries and illness the facility will not treat, that their immigration cases actually proceed, a meeting with the governor of New Jersey, and the chance to see their families. These are not extraordinary demands. They are what any human being locked in a government-contracted facility is owed by the government that holds them and the company that profits from the holding.
The strikers at Delaney Hall know something the rest of us prefer not to know. They know they are not counted as persons but as beds. The Torah’s command on the stranger — “the alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” — was written for a people who had been held in a place not unlike this one, counted as labor, valued as bodies, stripped of the right to determine their own movement. The strikers are holding that verse in their hands and in their empty stomachs. The rest of us are not.
GEO Group, the private prison company that operates Delaney Hall, exists to profit from filled beds. Every day a detained person’s case does not proceed, a bed stays filled. Every day a bed stays filled, revenue is booked. The hunger strikers have named the mechanism they are caught in. They asked that their cases proceed. They understand that delay is not an administrative inconvenience — it is a revenue stream. Last year, GEO Group reported a record $254 million profit — a roughly 700 percent increase.
Amos saw this. “Hear this, you who trample the needy and bring ruin to the poor of the land, saying, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale, making the ephah small and the shekel great, and dealing deceitfully with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.’” The prophet named the mechanism plainly: human beings reduced to units of exchange. The shekel is larger now and the ephah smaller, and the sandals are detention beds, but the mechanism is the same. When people are worth more locked up than processed, the system will not process them. When people are worth more sick than treated, the system will not treat them.
You, Governor Sherrill, after ICE officers had already pepper‑sprayed a United States senator outside those gates, you sent your own state police, and they did worse. On horseback and in riot gear, they fired tear‑gas canisters and stun guns into crowds of unarmed people who had gathered to demand food, medicine, and due process for the men and women locked inside. Murad Awawdeh of the New York Immigrant Coalition, who was there, said Friday night was “ten times worse than what ICE was doing.” You replaced one set of armed agents with another, and you gave them horses and you gave them gas, and you told them to clear the road.
Family visitation was suspended for the duration of the strike and the protests — the one act of human connection available to people inside, removed the moment those people began to assert their own humanity. When visitation was partly restored on Sunday, it was not restored in the unit where the hunger strikers are held. Representative Hakeem Jeffries conducted an oversight visit and said the conditions inside “shock the conscience.” The conscience has been shocked before. It has not yet been moved to change the conditions that produce the shock. Newark’s mayor imposed an indefinite overnight curfew. At least nine were arrested. The Department of Homeland Security, defending the suspension, said it was all about “violent riots” — that visitation had been suspended because of those riots and could only resume once a “secure perimeter” was in place. The hunger strike answered with chemical weapons, a request for a meeting answered with a curfew, a cry for a doctor answered with a baton.
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope and the first to speak from within that formation about this system, was plain: “When people are living good lives — and many of them for 10, 15, 20 years — to treat them in a way that is extremely disrespectful, to say the least, is not acceptable.” He added that every country has the right to determine who enters, but that “we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have.” The strikers at Delaney Hall asked for exactly this. They asked for dignity. They were met with pepper spray and suspended visitation and a facility that would not treat their injuries.
Christ said that whatever you do to the least of these, you do to him. He said it plainly: I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was a stranger and you locked me up. I was sick and you sent no doctor. I was imprisoned and you kept the ones who came to visit me outside the gate while you shot gas at them. The teaching is not complicated. Pope Francis stood on Lampedusa and called our country’s treatment of migrants a “globalization of indifference,” a world that has forgotten how to weep. This week in Newark, the tear gas was the refusal to weep made visible.
We who consume the food and wear the clothes and sleep in the houses built by the labor of undocumented immigrants are the ones whose demand pays for those cages. We are not innocent. The machine runs on our ordinary American mornings. But that recognition is not an exit; it is the threshold. The door is open to the governor and to every one of us. You can refuse the profit. You can demand that people who have not been convicted of any crime be given food, medical care, and a hearing. You can stop sending horses and gas against unarmed people who only wanted to visit their loved ones.
Archbishop Óscar Romero once stood in his cathedral and ordered soldiers in the name of God to stop the repression. Today, Governor, someone must stand outside Delaney Hall and order you, in the name of the same God, to stop gassing people who are only trying to bring comfort to the hungry. The bread and water they strike for is the body of Christ. The tear gas you fire is the gesture of empire. The choice is still yours.