As immigrant detainees inside a two-story detention center enter the sixth day of a hunger strike to protest conditions inside the facility, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed their complaints and chalked up their actions to a lack of “ethnic food.”
“They’re refusing to eat because they want their ethnic food,” he said during a meeting with President Donald Trump’s Cabinet on Wednesday.
“Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want,” he said. “We’re giving them the calories they want. This isn’t Holiday Inn.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in military gear with heavily armored police trucks continues to stand off against protesters at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, where demonstrators have rallied for days to support striking detainees inside.
“These aren’t protesters. These people are fake. They’re all paid for,” Trump said Wednesday. “We run the finest facilities anywhere in the world of their type. … There’s nobody that runs a facility like we do.”
Two people were arrested late Tuesday during another night of clashes between ICE agents and demonstrators who say officers deployed pepper spray into the crowds.
Mullin announced on X that 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.”
Roughly 300 people have been on a hunger and labor strike since May 22 to protest conditions inside Delaney Hall, where detainees and members of Congress who visited them have alleged unconstitutional and inhumane conditions, including rotting food, due process violations, a lack of access to legal counsel and retaliation from ICE agents for their ongoing strike actions.
“We feel vulnerable and, in a way, kidnapped — detained without justification — not to mention that we are being tortured physically and psychologically due to the poor food resources provided in these detention centers,” detainees wrote in a letter shared by attorneys last week.
They signed the letter “S.O.S.”
New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, among several lawmakers who visited the facility in recent days, was hit by chemical agents on Monday night after ICE agents fired pepper spray and pepper balls into a crowd of protesters.
Mullin said he shouldn’t have been there.
“You have one of the senators complained because he got splattered with a pepper ball,” Mullin said Wednesday. “I’m sorry, you probably shouldn’t have been there.”
After the incident, Kim said ICE sent in an armored vehicle and armed agents who only “poured gasoline on the fire” instead of speaking with him about conditions at the jail.
“Delaney Hall is a failure; it’s this administration’s failure,” he wrote. “The only way to make this right for our communities is to shut it down and make sure the failures we’ve seen never happen again.”
Kim’s fellow New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker called the detention center a “moral assault” on the state.
“It should close and should never have opened in the first place,” he wrote. “A private, for-profit detention facility should never be allowed to profit from the pain and fear of vulnerable human beings.”
The 1,000-bed, two-story facility opened May 1, 2025 and is operated by private prison contractor GEO Group, which was awarded a 15-year, $1 billion contract to run it.
The strike and ongoing protests follow urgent demands from immigrants, lawyers and members of Congress to address the growing populations in similar prison-like facilities, which are facing an avalanche of lawsuits over conditions inside them.
The Trump administration is expecting to deport at least 1 million people a year and hold as many as hold at least 99,000 immigrants in detention on any given day, according to ICE.
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