ICE pepper sprayed a senator on Memorial Day
Memorial Day is supposed to be about honoring sacrifice. Parades. Flags. The thing where you feel vaguely guilty eating a hot dog because somewhere a veteran exists.
This Memorial Day, on American soil, federal agents in riot gear pepper-sprayed a sitting United States Senator.
That’s not a metaphor. That’s not hyperbole. That is the thing that happened on May 25th, 2026, outside a detention facility in Newark, New Jersey called Delaney Hall. And if you’re thinking “okay but I’m sure there’s more context that makes this less alarming” - there is more context. It makes it significantly more alarming.
Let me explain.
Delaney Hall is a 1,196-bed ICE detention facility operated by a company called GEO Group, which you can think of as “a private prison company” because that’s what it is. It opened in May 2025 under a 15-year, approximately $1 billion ICE contract. Newark was already suing GEO Group over allegedly opening without a valid Certificate of Occupancy when it opened. City inspectors documented plumbing, fire-code, and electrical violations. GEO opened it anyway. ICE moved people in anyway.
So from day one: a facility that the city it’s located in was actively suing, for not being legally safe to occupy, opened and started filling with human beings. Cool start.
In the year since: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside the facility for trying to inspect it - charges later dropped. Rep. LaMonica McIver was federally indicted for being present at that same oversight visit - charges not dropped. Four detainees broke through an interior wall and escaped during a riot over food (the wall was, per Sen. Andy Kim, “essentially just drywall with some mesh inside”). A 41-year-old Haitian asylum seeker named Jean Wilson Brutus died within 24 hours of entering custody; his family’s attorney noted he arrived alive and without signs of medical distress.
One year. One facility. An arrested mayor, an indicted congresswoman, an escape through drywall, a death in the first 24 hours. Those are just the highlights.
Here’s what happened this weekend.
On May 22nd, approximately 300 detainees launched a coordinated hunger and labor strike. They had sent out a letter - signed by around 300 people, obtained by Gothamist - describing conditions inside: worm-infested food, spoiled meals, no air conditioning, medical requests going unanswered for weeks, a pregnant woman not receiving prenatal care, a woman who miscarried inside. Threats of deportation to Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, both currently experiencing Ebola outbreaks.
DHS’s response was to announce that no hunger strike was occurring.
Not “we’re looking into the claims.” Not “our standards require adequate medical care.” Just: no hunger strike. Nothing to see here. The 300 people refusing to eat are eating fine.
Phone and tablet access inside went dark for several hours after the strike started. So: detainees launched a strike, and the response was to cut off their communication with the outside world, while officially announcing there was no strike. I want you to sit with the logic of that for a second.
Sen. Andy Kim and Rep. Rob Menendez Jr. toured the facility Saturday evening and spoke with detainees. Kim relayed what he heard: an 18-year-old missing her senior prom. A single immigration judge in Newark scheduled to hear 74 cases in one day.
74 cases. In one day. That’s one case every - let’s see - about five minutes, if you work a standard eight-hour day with no breaks and no lunch. Five minutes per person whose fate you’re determining. Five minutes per human life. Which is a perfectly reasonable amount of time if you’re ordering a coffee, but is perhaps not quite enough to adjudicate whether someone gets to stay in the country they’ve built their life in.
But I’m sure they’re being very thorough.
On Sunday afternoon, things escalated.
Martin Alonso Soto Hernandez had been inside Delaney Hall for three months. He’d spent the previous four days on the hunger strike. He had already won a federal habeas corpus petition - a U.S. District Court judge had ordered ICE to hold a bond hearing within seven days. The U.S. Attorney’s office had told his attorneys he would not be transferred that day.
ICE loaded him into a van anyway.
His wife Gabriela - who is pregnant - was outside the gates to visit him. She saw him through the window, shackled, banging on the door. Protesters formed a human chain and blocked the gate. The van reversed back inside.
ICE waited until the early hours of Monday, used tear gas to clear the entrance, and transferred him through a side gate.
Was this a violation of the court order? Technically maybe not - the order barred transfer “outside the District of New Jersey,” and the facility they sent him to is still within the district. But the U.S. Attorney’s office had given assurances he wouldn’t be moved that day. He’d won his habeas case. The transfer happened in the middle of the night, mid-strike, after his pregnant wife had spent four days organizing protests that had attracted national attention.
By the time his attorney reached him, he reportedly weighed 110 pounds. His attorney told CNN he looked like he could be blown away.
Monday morning: Gov. Mikie Sherrill arrived at Delaney Hall with members of Congress and was formally refused entry to a federal facility in her own state. She said publicly the denial raised serious questions about what ICE was trying to hide.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin called it a political stunt. His office continued to maintain there was no hunger strike.
Around 5 p.m., ICE agents in tactical gear deployed pepper spray and pepper-ball rounds to clear the entrance. Sen. Andy Kim - who had gained access only by personally calling Mullin, and who had positioned himself between ICE agents and the crowd with his arms raised - was hit. His state director was hit. Several people were arrested.
ICE then threatened to transfer more than 100 hunger strike participants to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas - which aren’t just other states, but states specifically chosen because they make legal representation effectively impossible for people who already lack adequate legal access.
The governor of New Jersey was turned away from a federal facility in New Jersey. A United States senator was pepper-sprayed on Memorial Day. The official federal response was to call it a stunt.
I’ve been writing about how this infrastructure gets built - the manifestos, the contracts, the ideology that makes the machinery feel inevitable before it arrives. Here’s what the machinery actually is.
Palantir Technologies holds an ICE contract - starting at $30 million in April 2025, now expanded to over $145 million - to build something called ImmigrationOS: the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System. It runs on top of a case management platform that, per DHS’s own Privacy Impact Assessments, supports “management of detention facility assignments, bed space, transfer of detainees among detention facilities, and coordination of travel.”
Software was involved in the decision about where Martin Soto would sleep last night. That is not an abstraction. That is a fact.
And GEO Group - the company running Delaney Hall - is no longer only a detention operator. Its subsidiary BI Incorporated already tracks approximately 180,000 immigrants outside detention via GPS ankle monitors and smartphone apps. In December 2025, BI won a separate ICE contract worth up to $121 million for “skip tracing” services. The mechanism: take the location data immigrants were required to provide as a condition of staying outside detention, and use it to find them and arrest them.
Let me restate that plainly: they made people hand over their location data as the price of not being detained, and then used that location data to detain them.
GEO Group’s CEO has publicly argued the federal government should purchase detention facilities outright so it can invoke the Supremacy Clause and escape state oversight laws - like New Jersey’s. In other words: the company running Delaney Hall is actively lobbying to make it so states can’t inspect Delaney Hall.
What happened to Martin Soto wasn’t a rogue decision made by a bad actor. It was a workflow completing. The manifesto provided the ideology. The contracts built the infrastructure. The infrastructure processed a human being.
2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention in two decades - 31 people. 2026 is on pace to be worse. CNN reviewed county medical examiner reports for the vast majority of in-custody deaths since early 2025 and found at least a dozen cases where better care could potentially have prevented death - through earlier diagnosis, swifter emergency response, or basic medication management.
ICE is planning to expand to 92,600 detention beds through mega-centers and regional facilities. Congress’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” - that’s the actual name, that’s what they called it - appropriated approximately $45 billion to fund it.
Delaney Hall holds 1,200 people. It was designed to be a template.
I don’t know how this ends. I don’t know if the hunger strikers will be transferred to Louisiana and Texas - that threat was still unconfirmed Monday evening. I don’t know if charges will be filed against the people who showed up to witness. I don’t know if Martin Soto will get the bond hearing a federal judge ordered he receive.
What I know is that a pregnant woman watched her husband get loaded into a van in shackles and ran alongside it as it tried to leave. That federal agents cut off detainee communications while officially announcing no one was refusing to eat. That a sitting governor was turned away from a federal facility in her own state. That a sitting senator was pepper-sprayed on Memorial Day - the holiday we set aside to honor sacrifice and ask what this country is actually for.
And the official response was to call it a political stunt.
Whatever you want to call the system doing all of that - I’ll call it what I called it before: fascism. And it’s not hiding anymore.