Delaney Hall

Delaney Hall is an immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey, operated by the private prison company CoreCivic under contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since reopening as an immigration detention facility, it has become the site of sustained protests by family members, faith leaders, immigrant rights organizations, and community activists. On June 17th, 2026, the day described in this essay, detainees were engaged in a prolonged hunger strike to protest conditions inside, demand medical care, and call for the release of medically vulnerable people.

I am a Dutch-born photographer and visual journalist living in New York City. I have been involved in civic organizing and protest, from serving on a Manhattan community board to documenting demonstrations and participating in them. I also play samba reggae, an Afro-Brazilian style of street percussion rooted in resistance, celebration, and community. The surdo, the large bass drum I brought to Delaney Hall, is the heartbeat of that music.

I almost always carry a camera. On this day, I forgot it.

I spent the drive home furious with myself. The dead grass. The DoorDash deliveries. The sewage. The release. I had no photographs to help me remember what I had seen. So, I wrote instead. What follows is, in some ways, a contact sheet made of words: an attempt to preserve the sequence of images before they faded.

 

Yesterday morning at 9 a.m. I picked up two women I had never met on Avenue B. Friends of a friend. I loaded my drum into the car, although I wasn’t sure I would use it, and we drove to Newark. Getting there felt fitting somehow. 

Around Delaney Hall everything becomes industrial and strangely hostile to people. Bad signage, endless fencing, trucks moving too fast on roads that seem designed for freight, not people. I missed turns twice. We talked about where to park because we had heard stories that protesters sometimes get towed. I had also heard people talk about surveillance of cars parked nearby. 

I parked anyway. I’m not interested in behaving as if dissent is something shameful.

Before we saw the building, we smelled it. 

There is a sewage treatment facility nearby, and the smell thickens as you approach. Not metaphorically, literally. 

First we saw a medic tent, then a young guy who appeared to be living there, then the interfaith tent—childcare, water, shade, folding chairs, a place for family members waiting for someone inside. We introduced ourselves, asking, “Anything you need?” The woman there looked tired but calm: “Just don’t scare family members. Don’t block cars.” 

That request stayed with me. Not “free everyone,” not “be louder,” just “don’t make this harder.”

The three of us moved off to the side of the gate. We tried singing. We were terrible. I pulled up videos from the week before to remind us of chants. Then I took out the drum. There were only three of us, but once I started drumming I stopped feeling self-conscious. 

The drum wasn’t performance. 

It gave structure. 

It made us feel less small. 

It said: We are here. 

Hours passed. Inside were people detained by a private company paid with public money. That sentence sounds abstract. But detention is weirdly ordinary up close. People go to work, answer emails, maintain landscaping, order lunch, clock out. Cruelty becomes administrative. 

When a white Mercedes pulled up, we felt the rush of adrenaline. I don’t remember exactly what I yelled. Something about my tax dollars. Something about locking up our neighbors. Then I realized: It’s DoorDash. Someone is just delivering lunch. 

That wasn’t the last delivery. More arrived. 

And that was somehow worse. 

Not because people shouldn’t eat, but because inside, people were on hunger strike. The compas were refusing food in protest—demanding the release of vulnerable detainees, demanding medical care, protesting sexual violence and conditions inside. 

Outside, lunch arrived. 

No one seemed conflicted or hurried. 

The app worked, lunch arrived, and life continued.

A phrase kept entering my head: the banality of evil. Not because individual workers are evil or because the delivery driver is evil. But because systems can become normal with shocking speed. With enough people doing ordinary things, eventually almost anything starts to feel ordinary. People clock in. People order lunch. People go home. 

Meanwhile, other people stop eating because it is one of the last forms of control left to them. At some point we started chanting: Eat the food you serve our friends. 

After a while, there were no more DoorDash deliveries. 

Later, around noon, a man came out to water sod. Fresh sod had been installed along the fence. Badly. It had already died. And there he was, watering it. Behind him: detention. In front of him: dead grass. 

I suddenly became irrationally angry. 

Not because of the grass. 

Because of what it represented. 

That suffering can exist just out of frame while someone keeps watering grass that was dead almost from the moment it was laid down. 

At one point a man in a light blue polo shirt on the other side of the fence called us losers. I wanted to argue, because I don’t actually like humiliating people. Even when I disagree. Even when I am angry. I don’t think contempt builds much, and besides—that wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t convincing him. The point was refusing to become invisible. 

Eventually someone was released. No speech, no television moment, no swelling soundtrack, just a person walking out. One body crossing a threshold. Everyone acting as though this was both extraordinary and completely normal. Two women who had been waiting quietly stood up. Then they hugged and walked away. 

Three women. 

One drum. 

Industrial Newark.

DoorDash.

Dead grass.

Someone going home.

And this unsettling realization: Cruelty does not always announce itself. Sometimes it smells like sewage and sounds like lunch arriving.