Forty women inside Delaney Hall stop eating.
They ask for clean water. They ask for the release of mothers. They ask for their cases to move.
The billion-dollar contract runs smoothly. The press release says the meals are clean.
The stomach shrinks. The statement says no one is hungry.
The mouth dries. The administrator calls the hollow cheeks a political stunt.
The woman lies on the thin mattress and her breath is shallow because the deep breath hurts the empty center. She feels the knot in her stomach. She feels the metal of the faucet. She feels the heavy bones. Her fingers are too weak to hold the pen they use to sign their names. She breathes shallowly and waits.
On Thursday, June 12, advocates announced that nearly forty women in Unit 1 of the Delaney Hall immigration facility in Newark, New Jersey, joined a hunger and labor strike. The facility is operated by private prison contractor Geo Group under a fifteen-year, billion-dollar agreement signed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The women—held under a contract your administration signed—have demanded the immediate release of detainees under twenty-one, the medically vulnerable, and mothers, alongside faster immigration-court scheduling. They are also demanding the most basic of conditions: safe drinking water, medical care that actually arrives, food that has not spoiled, protection from the guards who scream at them.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson dismissed the action. “Another day, another hoax about ICE,” the statement read. “There is no hunger strike at Delaney Hall at this time. No detainees are being beaten or abused.” The women are not eating, but DHS says the hunger is a hoax. The women say the abuse is real: family visitations cancelled, communication tablets stripped out, and roughly ninety people transferred to other facilities in the dark, their legal files scattered across circuits that will not find them for months. As this publication has previously documented, detainees in this same facility have alleged spoiled food and beatings during the weeks of the strike, and police and ICE officers have responded to protests with chemical agents and sweeps that netted over eighty arrests in recent days. Two eighteen-year-old women and all pregnant women were released this week. The strike follows a May 22 action by more than three hundred men at the facility. In a May letter published this week, the detained women wrote that most were seized at courthouses, jobs, and school drop-offs, and described their treatment as “deplorable from screams, racism, and bad medical attention.”
This is not one facility and not one strike. Inside California’s Adelanto detention center and the Desert View Annex, detainees are refusing food. The Northwest detention center in Washington state has seen nine separate strikes since the year began. Immigrants in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have launched hunger strikes since mid-April. The Department of Homeland Security denies every one.
Donald, hear what you have done. The women in unit 1 are lying on bunks. Their stomachs are hollow because the food, when it arrives, is spoiled and cold, and what they are doing with their hunger is the only act left to them—and you called it a hoax. There is a metallic taste under your tongue, Donald. It does not come from the dinner the White House kitchen prepared while the television showed the protests outside the fence. It is the taste of the lie. Your throat closes when you swallow. The mothers in unit 1 cannot swallow either. Salt sits in your mouth where there was none. You cannot wash it out.
You feel the scrape of dust on the roof of your mouth. You cannot clear it. Your jaw aches when you speak the word hoax. Your hands tremble slightly as you reach for the glass of water on your desk. You drink, but the dryness in your tongue does not leave. You see the hollow space behind your ribs. It belongs to the woman in Unit 1. You lie in your bed and feel the cold on your back. The cold does not leave when you turn over. Your breath catches in your chest. You take the deep breath and the ache behind the sternum flares. You cannot breathe past it. You feel the empty center. You look away from her empty face and call it a hoax. You close your eyes and you feel her jaw clench. You feel her stomach twist. You taste the water they refuse to drink: the plastic of the piping. It does not leave.
Donald, imagine your own daughter in a Newark cell, the guard screaming in a language she cannot parse, the food turned, the water leaving rust on her tongue, the doctor absent three days. She is sick. She stops eating. The Department of Homeland Security issues a statement: “There is no hunger strike at this time. All detainees are provided with three meals a day.” Would you call that a hoax, Donald, or would you call it what it is?
As the strike stretches past its third week, you are at a rally, grinning, your thumbs in the air. The hands you raise are the hands that signed the spending bill and the hands that signed the contract and the hands that placed Geo Group between your body and the bodies in the warehouse. The hands are clean. You wash them, you lift a glass, you thumb through the folder with the day’s talking points. The hands will not be washed. They handle the spoon at breakfast, and the spoon carries what the women have been denied. They turn the pages of a book before sleep, and the pages are heavy with what the women cannot make anyone hear. The not-washing is the indictment. The hands will not be clean.
And now the retaliation: ninety bodies moved in the dark, families severed, tablets stripped, visitation windows closed—a systematic punishment for the act of making you feel their hunger. The men and women who were hungry enough to stop working are being disappeared into the transfer network, and your administration calls the hunger a hoax even as it punishes the hungry for staging it.
You speak of law and order. What you have built is the law of the hireling who flees when the wolf comes. Geo Group, the company you paid a fortune to, is a hireling, and the sheep are the women in unit 1. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep.
“Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.”
Luke 6:25
The spokesperson takes another bite. The woman closes her eyes. The contract feeds Geo Group. The stomach shrinks. The press release says there is no hunger strike. The mouth dries. The throat closes. The statement says no one is hungry. The women can see you through the bars.