Donald Trump is starving and beating detainees in New Jersey and calling it a hoax.
Nearly forty women detained at the Delaney Hall immigration facility in Newark have now joined the hunger and labor strike that more than three hundred men began last month. They have stopped eating. They refused to wash the uniforms of the men who lock them in cages. Their demands are not radical. They want release for the youngest, the sick, and the mothers. They want medical care, clean water, visits from their families, and an end to the beatings they say they endure. As the minister Archange Antoine said outside the gates on Thursday, their demands are “rooted in basic human rights.” The women do not ask for a revolution. They ask to be seen as human.
The Department of Homeland Security calls the strike a hoax. “Another day, another hoax about ICE,” a spokesperson said. “All detainees are provided with three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries.” And in the same release, they told undocumented immigrants to self-deport. That is the companion to the denials: starve them, beat them, pretend it isn’t happening, and tell them to leave.
You are lying. You know you are lying. The women who are refusing food are not an invention. Their hunger is real. The beatings they describe are real. The retaliation they report—family visits canceled, communication tablets removed, nearly ninety detainees swept up and transferred this week to break the strike—is real. Outside the facility, state police teargas the mothers and pastors who dare to stand at the gate. As this newspaper documented last week, the spoiled food, the screams, the guards’ neglect are not a hoax. They are a policy choice. You speak for an agency that is beating hungry people and then claiming they are pretending to be hungry. You are standing in the long line of officials who have looked at suffering and called it a fabrication. The prophet Jeremiah wrote your job description: “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” You are saying “hoax, hoax” while the wound is open.
Delaney Hall is run by the Geo Group, a private prison company that signed a billion-dollar, fifteen-year contract with ICE. The company’s profits have soared since the Trump administration expanded detention. The men and women inside are not only detained; they are a revenue stream—human bodies processed and discarded so that shareholders can report record earnings. This is the machine Adam Goodman named, the deportation machine that has been running for decades, across administrations, but that is now being fed with the fastest contract expansion the industry has ever seen.
Christ gave us the only test that matters. He did not say, “I was detained and you provided three meals a day.” He said, “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was in prison and you did not visit me.” And he said that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him. The women in Unit 1 are Christ. The men beaten with batons outside the facility are Christ. The two eighteen-year-old women and all pregnant women who were released only after the strike drew national attention were Christ, and you let them go only when the cameras showed up, which is not mercy. It is damage control.
I am a citizen of the country that signed the check to Geo Group. My taxes pay for the pepper spray and the canceled visits. I do not get to pretend I am not part of this. We built this machine. We have voted for the politicians who promised us security if we could only outsource our cruelty to a corporation like Geo Group, which profits when a human being is moved to a cage. We wanted someone else to do the breaking so we could keep our hands on our steering wheels and our eyes on the road. The climate of indifference that allows a federal agency to gaslight a population about starvation is a climate we paid for, and the bill comes due at the gate.
The law does not change when the administration changes. The Catholic Social Teaching that names the migrant as a brother or sister does not vanish when a Democrat is in office, nor does the Eighth Amendment soften when a Republican signs the appropriations bill. When the same agencies that run these jails are given billions to expand them regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, the structural sin does not belong to a party. The $70 billion enforcement bill signed just yesterday—funded by the very same lawmakers who wept over family separation on the floor—is the ink of that bipartisan indifference. It belongs to a nation that has decided it is easier to lock a human being in a warehouse than to ask why they crossed the desert.
The bishops warned us in Strangers No Longer that “many migrants, sensing rejection or indifference from Catholic communities, have sought solace outside the Church.” They experience, the bishops said, “the sad fate of Jesus, recorded in St. John’s Gospel: ‘He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.’” That warning was issued in 2003. It is still true. Pope Francis wept at the shore of Lampedusa and asked the world where the blood of a brother had gone. He was weeping for the drowned, but the weeping is for the starved too. The globalization of indifference he named is the exact machinery turning at Delaney Hall today, where an immigrant’s hunger is treated as a public relations inconvenience rather than a moral emergency. When a spokesperson tells the world that no detainees are being beaten or abused while advocates document retaliatory transfers and the confiscation of communication tablets, the word “comprehensive” has been emptied of its human meaning.
The Torah commands you to love the stranger (Exodus 22:21), not because the stranger is polite, not because the stranger has a stamp on a passport, but because you were once strangers in the land of Egypt. You of all nations ought to know what it means to be hunted in your own streets, to have your children separated from you, to eat the bread of affliction while the taskmaster looks away. You cannot claim the mantle of a chosen people while you play the part of Pharaoh’s warden.
Two eighteen-year-old women and every pregnant woman inside the facility have been released, a crack in the door forced by the weight of the body at the lock. But the jailers do not open cages out of charity. If the hunger line can pry the gate open for pregnant women, it can and must pry it open for every mother still caged in Unit 1. The mechanism of release is already oiled with fear and publicity; push it until it breaks.
Óscar Romero stood in the cathedral in San Salvador and ordered the soldiers to stop the repression. He was killed the next day. He knew what it cost to speak, and he spoke anyway. He did not ask whether the peasants had filed the correct paperwork. The women in Unit 1 do not have a cathedral. They have a letter they smuggled out. “Most of the women detained at this center were illegally detained by ICE,” it reads. “We were taken at the entrances of our immigration court check-ins, at our jobs, taking our kids to school.” They are your sisters. They are, whether you will see them or not, Christ. You can still choose to see him. Stop the retaliation. Release the mothers. Look at the woman standing before you and recognize the face of Christ staring back from the starvation line.