NJ State Police take over Delaney Hall protests, deploy tear gas and pepper spray; six arrested

On Friday, May 29, 2026, the New Jersey State Police took over the security perimeter outside Delaney Hall, the privately operated, 1,000-bed ICE detention center in Newark run for profit by the GEO Group. Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announced the move after a week of escalating nighttime clashes between federal immigration agents and demonstrators who had gathered in solidarity with roughly 300 detainees inside the facility — detainees who had launched a hunger and labor strike on May 22 to protest conditions they described as inhumane, including moldy food with live worms, inadequate medical care, and retaliation by guards. State Police spokesman Lt. Col. David Sierotowicz said troopers would establish marked peaceful-assembly zones ringed by more than 600 yards of bike racks and that ICE agents had agreed to "remove themselves from the immediate area." Sherrill cast the takeover as an effort to "cool things down" and deny federal officials a "pretext" to intervene further.

Despite that framing, the state-led operation brought its own use of force. Over the weekend, troopers — some in riot gear and on horseback — deployed tear gas, pepper spray, flashbangs and smoke, pushing crowds back and making arrests; six people were taken into custody on Friday night. Newark imposed a nightly 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew covering the half-mile around the facility, and on Sunday, after dispersal warnings issued in English and Spanish beginning at 8:15 p.m., police arrested a number of demonstrators that authorities did not quantify. New Jersey Attorney General Jen Davenport said those arrested were "armed with helmets, shields or gas masks" and had ignored the dispersal order; the U.S. Department of Homeland Security separately alleged a "coordinated campaign of violence" against law enforcement and denied that any hunger strike was underway.

The episode drew sharply contested accounts. State officials presented the deployment as a de-escalating, rights-protecting handoff that removed ICE from the confrontation; immigrant-rights advocates described an unannounced, militarized crackdown that "brutalized activists." Nedia Morsy of Make the Road New Jersey said troopers used excessive force against unarmed people exercising First Amendment rights, while others reported being chased away well beyond the curfew zone amid loosely defined boundaries. The assembly-rights dimension of the response — designated protest zones, a half-mile barricade, and a nightly curfew — is significant but maps to no abuse currently tracked in the archive, and is noted here rather than force-mapped. This state-police phase is distinct from the May 26 confrontation in which federal ICE officers sprayed chemical irritants at the same facility, already recorded separately in the archive.