The steady drone of an alarm announced our impending arrival at the prison facility. If you went to a public high school anywhere in the United States, then you have the exact tone and volume of the sound in your head. The blare had been absent on my first afternoon there the prior week. At a guess, standing next to the facility it was at about 100 decibels. This would prove to be the soundtrack for the entire evening.
Delaney Hall sits tucked out of the way in the pocket of one of the busiest shipping hubs in the country. Located directly behind Newark Airport, the private prison building is truly cast off – sharing the same square mile as a waste incineration plant, an animal carcass rendering facility, and a busy commercial road. Periodically a train screams by, shuddering its way to the incinerator to offer up its gift of our trash for the fire. The facility is about the size of a Costco, with a 1,000-bed capacity.
At Delaney Hall, mutual aid is fast-paced and often uncomfortable. Despite this, the care exchanged between the families of detained people and the volunteers is sharp, bright and unmistakable. This is work that ought to be shared, and these voices deserve a bullhorn.
The New Jersey Globe reports that the ICE detainees are almost meeting the capacity of the prison at any given time. This also seems to be supported by the estimates of the volunteers based on direct observation. As they render aid they count the visitors and the tinted-windowed vanloads of people entering the facility to be stashed. They are a mix of people who’ve been there for a few days and those who’ve been there for weeks, stuck in a legal limbo. Some have been in the system for months – transferring between detention centers in Louisiana, Texas, and then back to Delaney – seemingly with the dual purpose of keeping them hidden or underrepresented in the legal system. It also creates a good excuse for GEO Group (owner of Delaney and often the largest private prison company in the states) to run up quite the tab with the obsequious federal government, as the Brennan Center for Justice recently reported.
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My second visit was filled with that strange pressure that builds after a long day spent in constant, semi-automatic problem acquisition and resolution. Beginning the day before, I prepared food for visitors that evening. Easy enough for a career line cook and practiced caterer. I love a fresh logistical problem, and the poor weather had left both volunteers and donations thin on the ground. The facility is open Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday for visitation; more than 150 visitors (250-300 on the weekend days) show throughout the day. They stand and wait in groups of 30-40 or more at a time based on which “group” their incarcerated loved one falls into. On Tuesdays, it is groups 2a/2b through groups 5a/5b, though the schedule seems to change on a regular basis.
That means 8 rounds of families, staggered every half hour, enter the facility beginning at 4:00 pm through to 8:00 pm. ICE encourages them to show up ahead of time to register with the khaki-uniformed guard standing at the gate, who references a clipboard with the names of prisoners and their grouping. The visitors are also encouraged to download an app giving them updates on the status of their loved one, though frequently it will not be up to date – leading to panic and confusion when someone has traveled (often at considerable expense) to this bleak wasteland only to be informed that their person isn’t there, despite the app saying otherwise.
Throughout visitation hours, volunteers offer a warm, dry place to receive additional information, grab spare clothing to meet the dress requirements for the prison , and to hopefully have a cup of coffee or some warm food. The food end of things is the least important in terms of real, immediate aid for the families. The primary goal of the volunteers is to create a safe environment: safe from the elements, safe from prying eyes, and safe from barreling trucks as visitors cross the street. Additionally they aim to help with the more abstract dangers imposed directly by the state, like the chaos of constantly changing visitation schedules, arbitrarily enforced dress codes, and other forms of bureaucratic harassment.
The food service has its own value, however. As any veteran, first responder, or volunteer will tell you, intense environments do not negate a body’s need for sustenance. Beyond that, good food made with care has an exponentially greater effect on functionality and cohesion within a group than MREs or trailmix. Food, like music or love, bridges most cultural or linguistic gaps. I don’t need to speak Spanish to see a smile when I serve someone food, and feel the softening of tension. The visitor gains a moment to really internalize that this group of volunteers isn’t there to sell them something, or to further bamboozle them. It circumvents the panic endemic in groups of strangers who are being forced to jump through hoops simply to tell their husband or father that they love them – possibly for the last time in person.
For my menu I decided to opt for empanadas. It takes a lot of work to make 50 empanadas by hand, fry them, and package them in foil to serve them safely. They are, however, made from relatively inexpensive components that require little actual brainpower to assemble. Perfect, because I’m doing all this in between my day job and other volunteer work. Since I was already condemning my kitchen to a messy death by deep-frying, I figured I would fry up some bombolini for good measure (sugar-coated doughnuts, filled with some kind of sweet goo). I left that afternoon with what I hoped would be enough food for everyone to get a bite.
We live about an hour’s drive from Newark, and my partner, who began volunteering at Delaney several weeks before I did, drives a pick-up truck. They offer their truck’s bed in service of ferrying the supplies from the volunteer tent to the communal storage unit, and back.
On this particular visit, their truck was needed to pack out the spare clothes, diapers, documents, and equipment at the end of the evening. The second massive snowstorm to hit New Jersey this winter left a foot or more of snow blanketing the sides of the roads. Anxiety-provoking, as the previous week a team of three of us struggled for several hours to break up vehicle-sized chunks of ice obstructing the walkways and parking spots around the tent – ice that lingered from the first snow storm a month prior. This time we came with shovels and a spade of our own, bearing no illusions about the situation created by the weather.
The storm drains were in worse shape than we expected. New Jersey’s inexpert snow removal always makes me shudder as a seasoned New Englander. The weather was warm enough after the snowfall to begin a significant melt, as well as to firm up a wicked layer of icy fortification along the roadsides. We hit the ground running as we dodged our way past barreling trucks and honking federal agents, our arms filled with supplies. In addition to the empanadas and donuts, I pack out a trauma kit; writing and note-taking supplies; spare clothes; the aforementioned spades; flashlights; and prepaid Uber cards for emergency transport needs (vital to the volunteer’s work).
Immediately the environmental objective for the day was obvious: there were vast puddles filling portions of the volunteer tent, as well as the “walkways” between the gate to the prison and the tent. The most savage puddle spanned the whole entrance to the prison gate, exactly where people approaching the guard to check-in stepped. Within 30 minutes I watched no fewer than 10 people step directly into the deceptively deep puddle (it went up to my ankles). We tried to erect a bridge built of plastic shipping pallets to at least allow for dry passage while we began chipping away at the ice.
The mayhem, and the obviously hostile atmosphere that always hangs over Delaney, tends to cause disorder and confusion in visitors. It’s a similar effect to the moments after stepping off of a plane: people’s brains need a few minutes to reorient, but they are being told to keep moving. Visitors will be dropped off by a friend or an Uber at this industrial park sort of setting, with a ton of noise and moving vehicles. They have their kids to contend with and are eager to visit their loved one. Nobody can blame them for rushing headlong past the pallets we laid out and straight into a freezing puddle.
The puddles were a hazard beyond the obvious medical risks of hypothermia (it was a cool 40 degrees and dropped below freezing by the end). Famously, Newark housed a staggering amount of our chemical industry from the nineteenth century onward. Companies like DuPont and Dow Chemical produced munitions, DDT, Agent Orange, and other highly toxic chemicals in the area, dumping waste and runoff directly into the Passaic. The correlation between this activity and environmental or health impacts is well documented. Cancer rates, birth defects, asthma, COPD and autoimmune disorders are shockingly high. They primarily affect communities of color.
It’s enough to make me wonder: is there really much difference between killing people this way, versus lining folks up and shooting them? For over a century, capitalists and the state have subjected the people of this city to various environmental poisons – and now the people detained in this facility are trapped in their fumes while confined indefinitely. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But arguing semantics about degrees of murderousness from our federal government sort of misses the point. It really isn’t supposed to be murdering people, slowly or otherwise. From what I understand at least.
This is also why I really, really wanted to get rid of those puddles.
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Three hours into the shift and I was about as miserable as can be. It was damp, so damp. The Sternos I used to reheat the foil-wrapped empanadas guttered in the cold, moist air. My best solution at the moment for heating food without power was a single hotel pan (not a chafing dish). I was constantly rotating and flipping the foil-wrapped empanadas so they didn’t burn over the direct heat. I fed the volunteers first. Encouraged by their positive response, and flattered by one of the volunteers straight-up asking me to sell her empanadas (this is a part of the world where empanadas aren’t scarce), I finished setting out the food. Then I pivoted into assisting with clothing distribution.
As the primary point of contact (because the distribution happens right outside of the gate), the clothing station is critical for communicating with the visitors and ensuring they are admitted to see their loved one held inside. It’s also the volunteers’ least popular station during the winter months because it’s exposed to all the elements the Newark Bay has to offer. The work is cold, wet and boring – made worse by having only a concentration camp to stare at.
Besides the weather and the setting, this shift had the constant trill of the building’s malfunctioning alarm as its soundtrack. Freezing, bedraggled, and miserable, I hunched over totes filled with donated clothes that hopefully met the requirements for visitor clothing. I say “hopefully” because some days the guards say “no, you cannot have a sweater with a hood on it,” and other days the guards will switch it up and call someone out for a shirt with a hole in it. No tight pants. No baggy pants. No dresses, no jackets, no keys, no phones, no, no, no. All afternoon long people come running back from inside the visitation office, through the gates, and up to the volunteers with their totes.
I found myself stuck on clothing detail for hours. I don’t mind this, but I was untrained and uninformed about what my particular role was while standing by the gate. I don’t speak Spanish particularly well. But people were frantically asking me for details about what was allowed in, what groups were entering now. One woman was near to tears as she explained that she saw her husband was at Delaney on the ICE app this morning, and was told by the guard that he wasn’t here after all. Pop. Just like that her husband disappeared, and she was met with the old bureaucratic shrug. She took off work and drove from Fort Lee. I couldn’t help her. Then she plunged into the oil-slick-shimmer of a puddle.
I was relieved at several points to go back to the propane-heated tent and check in on the food. It was all gone by 6 pm, and more people kept coming. An older Egyptian woman who comes to offer her support, though she’s relatively disabled and doesn’t speak much English, needed food to break her Ramadan fast. Luckily I brought some hummus for myself to eat, so I was able to furnish her with some iftar.1The second meal of the day, which during Ramadan is when Muslims break their fast. She was thrilled to hear me stammer out a few words of greeting in Arabic: “Salam, marhaban.” I ran to the gas station across the street to get any backup food I could. Corn chips, Hostess brand bread. Hostess brand bread was new to me. The kids especially were thrilled to eat, and the relief in the parents’ eyes – though modest, and quickly giving way to the general exhaustion and anxiety – was palpable.
~
My ability to feed folks fully exhausted, my partner and I set ourselves to finally breaking the dams of ice. Lit only by the streetlights, our work must have seemed doomed to the mostly city-dwelling volunteers. But my partner Raven is a landscaper, and as I already mentioned, I know my way around ice.
It was satisfying to have a contained and linear objective rooted here in the physical world. After hours of feeding the endless waves of visitors and rendering aid to people destined to fade immediately back into the oppressive gears of the state, we set to breaking up the ice damming the road outside Delaney Hall and watched as puddles rushed down into the storm drain. Obvious metaphors of smashing ice at the ICE facility aside, the moment when a puddle that’s been your direct opponent throughout the day begins rushing down a storm drain is truly magical.
We cleared the critical puddle in front of the prison gate after about 30 minutes of work. Heaving our shovels into the yellow-gray ice, we made our way along the barely visible curb toward the tent. I desperately wanted to find the drain that would clear the puddle encroaching on the tent itself. We were unsuccessful. In hindsight we should have used a satellite map to find the drains. Nonetheless we felt good as we packed up. We were covered head to toe in perhaps the worst substances it was possible to be covered in, but the other volunteers expressed their thanks and praise for the effort, and that softened the prospect of sitting in our damp clothes for the next hour of driving.
The night drew to its natural conclusion as the last of the visitors trickled out from the prison. Supplies packed and clothes thoroughly soaked through – both the sets I’d brought – we waved our goodbyes and made for the truck. A load of totes needed to be dropped in the nearby storage container, which entailed something like the dead drop of a communal key fob. But I was done working for the night. I settled back into my seat and then contemplated the task ahead of me. Uncoiling all this tightly wound experience would be no easier than the physical push of this volunteer work. The alarm squawk still ringing in my ears, I closed my eyes and drifted, uneasily, to unconsciousness.~
