BAP NYC/NJ calls on the masses to oppose the immigration incarceration system and imperialist population control in Our Americas.
Originally published in Black Alliance for Peace.
On Wednesday, February 26, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced plans for the “imminent reopening” of Delaney Hall, a privately owned detention center in Newark, NJ, which has the capacity to hold up to 1,000 undocumented immigrants. The over $1.2 billion agreement between ICE and the Boca Raton-based GEO Group would expand ICE’s detention capacity in the Northeast as they “pursue President Trump’s mandate to arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from [U.S.] communities.” The Black Alliance for Peace New York City/New Jersey Citywide Alliance condemns this brazen act of ruling class collusion and calls on the African/Black masses and all anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace forces in Newark and throughout the Northeast to organize for the defense of people(s)-centered human rights in our region.
Even with the news of this agreement, BAP-NYC/NJ understands that anti-immigrant sentiments and policies are bipartisan. Despite Joe Biden’s 2020 “Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice” campaign plan, which proclaimed that “the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants,” two years into his term as the 46th president 9 out of 10 people held captive by ICE were detained in privately owned or operated facilities. In fact, the Biden administration’s dependence on private prisons eclipsed that of Donald Trump’s first term.
Moreover, when CoreCivic (one of the largest private prison operators in the United States) sued the State of New Jersey over the passing of AB 5207, the Biden administration sided with CoreCivic, paving the way for the company to continue its partnership with ICE at the Elizabeth Detention Center. AB 5207 is a state law prohibiting “the State, local government agencies, and private detention facilities operating in [New Jersey] from entering into, renewing, or extending immigration detention agreements.” In a statement of interest filed in July 2023, the Department of Justice under Biden deemed AB 5207 “unconstitutional” and feared that “[i]f other States passed laws like AB 5207, there may be a near-catastrophic impact on ICE’S ability to meet its mission.” Thus, while the exorbitant contract between ICE and GEO comes in the early months of Trump’s second presidential term, it would be misguided to fall victim to the fashionable trend that places all blame at the feet of Trump and the right-wing forces of the imperial white supremacist settler-colonial project known as the United States.
As a formation dedicated to defeating the war against African/Black People in the U.S., throughout the Americas, and abroad, BAP-NYC/NJ sees global and domestic imperialist violence as integrally linked. This is why we are calling on the African/Black masses in Newark, in New Jersey, and throughout the Northeast to organize for the liberation and people(s)-centered human rights of both Haitians in Haiti and the over 1,000 Haitians captured by ICE in Newark from 2020 to 2024. This is why we are calling on the African/Black masses to organize for the liberation and people(s)-centered human rights of both Afro-Ecuadorian youth in Ecuador and the 5,581 Ecuadorians captured by ICE in Newark from 2020 to 2024. We are calling for this because we understand that it is often the subversive maneuvers of the United States that leave many of those throughout and beyond our Americas caught between an imperial rock and a hard place: victims of extraction and destabilization in their homelands while being criminalized and kettled when seeking relief in the U.S. Attributing mass deportations to the xenophobic attitudes and sound bites of overt white supremacists clouds the ways global and domestic imperialism work together to control populations. Across multiple presidential administrations, U.S. political and economic interventions throughout the Global South have manufactured these migrant crises in order to feed the bottomless hunger of the ruling class by way of the extraction of resources.
As we stated in the days immediately following the most recent election, “The anti-democratic duopoly is made up of representatives of the capitalist class and provides cover for what is, in reality, the dictatorship of capital.” Both versions of the imperial, settler-colonial base of operations known as the White (People’s) House have heavily invested in militarized police forces and the infrastructure necessary to warehouse African/Black, oppressed, poor and working class people. They have made it abundantly clear that their commitment is to white capital and holding on to what remains of their waning domination of and withering influence in the world. Thus, we not only denounce this agreement with GEO Group and the re-opening of Delaney Hall – we also denounce the longstanding white supremacist settler colonial project that made it possible!
Now is not the time to beg for crumbs and concessions from the neofascist, plutocratic Trump administration. Nor is it the time to return to the imperial DEI reformism that called for the funding of police, led the destabilization efforts in Haiti, and bankrolled the destruction of Gaza and the massacre of the Palestinian people!
Now is the time for the African/Black masses, the working class, anti-imperialist, anti-war forces in the United States to organize, coordinate, and lock arms with those same forces around the globe in the fight for peace. And as we say, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.”
People of Newark, where are you?
Workers, poets, singers, drivers, mechanics, professors, small business owners, where are you?
People of Brooklyn, where are you?
People of the Bronx, where are you?
People of Philly, where are you?
Now is the time!
No compromise!
No retreat!
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