Just months after the private prison company Geo Group opened its 1,000-bed immigrant detention center called Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, people held there rose up to protest conditions, some smashing windows, saying they’d been served a slice of bread for a meal one too many times. Since June 12, 2025, near daily solidarity demonstrations have taken place on the other side of the barbed wire fence in an industrial area north of Newark airport.
A similar riot erupted south of the airport almost exactly 30 years earlier on June 18, 1995 at the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC). Fauziya Kassindja, an asylum seeker from Togo who lived through it, recalls in her 1999 memoir, Do They Hear You When You Cry, how some male prisoners kept her and other terrified women safe during the turmoil, only for her to suffer multiple beatings by police who later took control.
This vivid scene is excerpted in Elizabeth Detention Center: A Social History of Immigration Detention In New Jersey and the United States, a new collection of essays by those held at EDC, along with activists, lawyers and academics at Rutgers University. Detention Watch Network executive director Silky Shah calls it a “testament to the decades-long movement that helped prepare us for this moment” when a growing number of people want to shut down the camps and block new ones from opening.
“The threat of the camp is not idle, abstract, or in the future. It is now,” longtime journalist John Washington warns in his complimentary new book on the broader struggle, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention. “While the threat is concentrated on otherized populations, anybody, everybody is a target. You are a target.”
Together, these two new books foster the intergenerational sharing of knowledge, tactics and lessons about fighting the growth of the detention system that “created one of Donald Trump’s main weapons for carrying out his white supremacist agenda,” as Shah writes in her epilogue to the compendium on EDC.
Three Decades, Hundred of Volunteers
When EDC first opened in 1993 it was operated by Esmar Correctional Services and few people had heard of immigrant detention. After the riot, Corrections Corporation of America, now called Core Civic, took over the contract, and still operates EDC today, even as activists keep working to shut it down. In the first chapter on “Why Immigration Detention Must Be Abolished,” Amy Gottlieb, U.S. migration director for the American Friends Service Committee, “honors” the memory of a Kenyan asylum seeker named Abraham Zuma with “charisma and charm to spare” who she worked to free from EDC. He had arrived at JFK airport seeking help, only to be put in shackles and jailed, and the ordeal contributed to his early “preventable death” at a psychiatric institute.
For decades, hundreds of volunteers have written to and visited people held at EDC, making personal connections like calling them by their name, not their detainee number. Some contributed to the book, like Will Coley, who worked with the Jesuit Refugee Service to teach English classes at EDC until the officer in charge told him: “You’re giving them too much hope” and ended the effort. William Westerman, a Rutgers professor who co-founded First Friends of NJ and NY, describes visiting asylum seekers in the late 1990s while meeting monthly with fellow volunteers at the Rustic Mill Diner in Cranford, NJ, “long before we had an office.” They also formed an advocacy-focused group called IRATE: Interfaith Refugee Action Team – Elizabeth. “Direct action and concrete humanitarian support are intertwined,” Westerman writes. He later helped pass a 2021 New Jersey law to prohibit state and local entities and private prison companies from renewing ICE contracts or entering new ones. Many county jails ended their ICE contracts, but CoreCivic sued the state and last year a federal appeals court overturned the law.
Lessons from Beyond New Jersey
Meanwhile, Washington talks to people like Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel for Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, who fought immigration camps for two decades and helped stop at least nine in the Midwest. Tsao describes his “playbook”: “You need to do a power analysis… What are the potential obstacles? Are there environmental issues? Could there be litigation? There may be local legislation, resolutions, other easy ways to throw sand in the gears.” Tsao acknowledges the landscape has changed with ICE’s super-sized budget under Trump, and argues, “we need creativity. We need to find more effective ways to rally the opposition.”
Closing camps is “foremost about freeing those currently locked inside,” Washington argues, but must also focus on “freeing communities from a predatory system that siphons their wealth, corrodes their politics, and endangers their health.” In a fascinating chapter, he recounts a campaign to stop a notorious CoreCivic prison from reopening as an ICE detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas, home to a federal penitentiary and the “epitome of a prison town.” Former guards who hated the place joined with residents mobilized by a public education campaign. An activist with Decarcerate KC told Washington they focused on listening and “meeting people where they’re at,” and “leaving seeds” of their abolitionist agenda.
Both books relay lessons for today, such as how activists learned to disavow the good/bad immigrant binary that fuels the deportation regime. They draw on Silky Shah’s 2023 book Unbuild Walls that rejected the “innocence framework” because it “reinforces the idea that immigration enforcement is about public safety.” Even former New York Times immigration journalist Nina Bernstein writes in her introduction to the EDC essays that ICE’s sprawling network of detention centers is “an abyss that threatens us all.”
This year marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, which led to the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Dept. of Homeland Security, replacing the Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Dept. of Justice. So it was interesting to read the account of a New Jersey teenager named Bilal who was one of 13,000 Muslim, Arabic and South Asian men who complied with special registration orders starting in 2001, only to be arrested in an immigration raid on his family’s home and sent to EDC.
As the United States marks a quarter of a century of its ICE age, the defining feature will be the rise of detention camps even though many have vowed “never again.” The future of the camps remains unwritten.
Elizabeth Detention Center: A Social History of Immigration Detention In New Jersey and the United States
Edited by Ulla D. Berg and Carolina Sánchez Boe
Rutgers University Press, 290 pages, July 2026
How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention
By John Washington
Haymarket Press, 248 pages, July 2026
