Communities in New York City and New Jersey are feeling an ICE surge. In New York, ICE’s shooting of Bronx community member and father, Oscar Belgal, generated national headlines and reminded many of the threat the agency poses to communities throughout the United States.
In New Jersey, violent ICE abductions of our neighbors have become a regular occurrence. This reality is encompassed in a now viral video of ICE abducting a man in Harrison as his children cling to him and scream for help.
Immigrant rights activists and community members are rightly touched by the horror of seeing this state violence play out in our specific communities, our specific neighborhoods, our specific states or cities or towns. This outrage, rooted in a sense of connection to the places we call home, is part of what fuels our sense of urgency and personal commitment to resist ICE and kick the agency out of our neighborhoods. But it can also limit how we take up that fight. The particularities of the surge in New York City and New Jersey offer an example of those limits, as well as an opportunity to rethink our approach to the fight against ICE.
It is essential that we organize our opposition to ICE based on a deep understanding of how interconnected NYC and New Jersey communities are. This requires building an opposition that does not confine our activity to our specific states, cities, and townships, but unites across state lines to oust ICE’s entire apparatus of violence.
A National Surge and Regional Realities
Even as ICE’s violence has generated fewer headlines following the national scrutiny of its operation in the Twin Cities earlier this year, the agency has continued to expand its mass deportation agenda. In fact, the lack of national attention has enabled ICE to carry out a record number of abductions over the summer.
Experiences in both New Jersey and New York have managed to cut through ICE’s more low-profile approach and bring its ongoing violence back into the national spotlight. Most recently, the shooting of Oscar Belgal has raised national scrutiny.
In fact, Belgal was not the first victim of an ICE shooting in recent months. Over the summer, ICE agents in Houston fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Then, in September, ICE agents in Austin shot a DoorDash driver. Belgal’s shooting, however, has received much more attention. The disparity reflects New York’s outsized weight in national politics. The city is a hub for national and international media and a driver of U.S. culture. For better or worse, what happens in New York City ultimately shapes what people think nationally and even internationally.
New Jersey is different. Rarely do events in our state receive a national spotlight, and when they do, they’re often covered as if they’re just an extension of affairs in New York. For example, World Cup matches hosted at Metlife Stadium in New Jersey were generally referred to as if it was taking place in New York City. Yet, against these odds, our fight to close Delaney Hall received national attention when prisoners held a hunger strike, and community members showing solidarity outside spent a week defending themselves against ICE and state police, who worked to violently suppress the strike inside and protests outside.
The shooting of Belgal and the hunger strike at Delaney Hall were two expressions of the same national surge of ICE operations. Yet they appear as separate stories because they took place months apart in two different states. Adding to the separation is a regional dynamic: New Yorkers and New Jerseyans have beef. Despite our geography and economies being deeply intertwined, our communities often feel worlds apart, a cultural rivalry that ranges from playful jabs to genuine contempt.
This cultural divide means that our organizing for immigrant rights often remains divided, even as ICE operates on a national agenda of violence against immigrants that doesn’t stop at state lines. In fact, there is no way to fully understand the ICE terror New York and New Jersey communities are experiencing without zooming out and looking at our region as a whole.
Leading intellectuals in the immigrant rights movement like Silky Shah and John Washington have written extensively on how the scale of ICE operations is largely informed by the agency’s detention capacity. This explains ICE’s efforts to massively expand its available facilities as it carries out Trump’s mass deportation agenda. At the regional level, New Jersey has served as the center of these efforts to increase detention. Delaney Hall, which was added to the national network of ICE facilities at the start of Trump’s second term, has not just been used to jail immigrants in New Jersey. It’s one of the first places many New Yorkers are sent when abducted by ICE.
In addition to Delaney Hall, there is Elizabeth Detention Center, where New York-based activist Mahmoud Khalil was held before being sent to Louisiana. Communities in New Jersey have been fighting for decades to close it. And just one day before Belgal’s killing became the main reference point for ICE’s violence and seeming impunity, an NPR investigation confirmed reports initially made by New Jersey activists that ICE has been secretly using a 500,000 square feet warehouse in rural Roxbury, New Jersey to hold immigrants. ICE has used the warehouse despite a court ruling prohibiting its use. That ruling came after widespread opposition from the local community which, notably, leans conservative.
While the high-profile actions against Delaney Hall have died down, local organizations, community members, and statewide coalitions have not stopped fighting to end ICE detention in our state. In every county and just about every town in North Jersey, there are rapid response groups, frequent know your rights trainings, and efforts to document and resist ICE abductions.
New York also has community networks organizing against ICE. These networks form the basis of the more combative protests against the agency which sometimes flare up and garner national attention, from Newark to the Bronx. They are essential to fighting ICE, but so are organizing efforts that unite communities across state lines. In New York City and New Jersey, our fights have a concrete reality we need to contend with.
Close the Detention Centers! Abolish ICE!
There is no scenario where New Yorkers end the ICE surge in their city that doesn’t run through closing the detention centers in New Jersey. And there is no scenario where we in New Jersey build a movement powerful enough to make our state close these detention centers without leveraging the political weight of New York City.
In 2021, New Jersey actually succeeded at closing three detention centers in our state. But a huge part of how we accomplished that was by forming a coalition with New York activists, which closely linked our states’ efforts to abolish ICE. Politicians who want to contain our movement know that power, which is why, when the Delaney Hall protests started gaining support from activists in other states including New York, Mikie Sherrill launched a smear campaign against “out-of-state actors.”
Some activists are working to link our current fights, including a vigil in Newark to demand justice for Oscar Belgal and celebrate the release of Martín Soto, the leader of the Delaney Hall hunger strike who was recently freed as a result of community pressure. The Labor Eyes on ICE coalition, which has held monthly protests against Delaney Hall, brings together unions in New Jersey and New York City. We need more actions like these, which expand our understanding of community and form links across states, if we hope to build the type of national movement against ICE terror. Importantly, North NJ DSA’s executive committee put out a statement condemning the shooting of Belgal and echoing the demands of the social movements in New York to abolish the brutal Strategic Response Group (SRG) and remove Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch from her position.
Ultimately, we have to form a nationally coordinated movement. But New Yorkers and New Jerseyans are in a unique position to show what coordination beyond our local efforts can look like as the attacks on immigrants in New York City and in New Jersey are deeply interconnected.
We must champion each other’s demands and actions. Every immigrant rights activist in New Jersey should champion the demands to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and disband the Strategic Response Group. From New York, we need activists supporting our efforts in Jersey to close Delaney Hall and Elizabeth Detention Center. We need organizations that people look to for leadership, from NGOs like Cosecha or Make the Road to socialist organizations like DSA to raise this framework of regional and national coordination. This can be the start of a renewed effort to abolish ICE.
The post New York and New Jersey Activists Must Unite to Close ICE Detention Centers appeared first on Left Voice.
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