Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

The meaning of the hunger and labor strike inside ICE's Delaney Hall detention center in Newark

Edited by Sam Thielman

IF I AM SUPPOSED TO WORK the day after the Knicks earned a trip to the NBA Finals for the first time in the 21st Century, it's because of the urgency of the hunger strike at ICE's Newark detention facility, which today goes into its fourth day.

I've been away for the Memorial Day weekend and haven't gone to the scene yet, so take this for what it's worth. But Delaney Hall, a massive, for-profit Newark detention complex that has barely been open a year, now hosts a hunger and labor strike by what is said to be hundreds of men and women caged within it. "Close Delaney Hall and free every person in there," was how Gabriela Soto, the wife of Delaney detainee Martin Soto, summed up the strikers' demands. 

What they are saying boils down to something that ought to shame a United States that celebrates its 250th anniversary in little more than a month: Give me liberty or give me death. Unlike the overwhelming majority of those who will wave a flag on July 4, those inside Delaney Hall actually know what those words mean. 

Martin Soto has a habeas corpus petition pending. ICE appears to have moved him to another cage in neighboring Elizabeth, NJ, seemingly as a measure to break the strike. Gabriela is organizing protests outside Delaney while pregnant. These are what freedom fighters look like. 

Sadism within Delaney Hall prompted nearly 300 detainees to smuggle out a letter two weeks ago telling the world that ICE and GEO Group, Delaney Hall's facility manager, are "tortur[ing them] physically and psychologically." It is not the first such letter from inside that same facility. One from February makes for gruesome reading:

We feel vulnerable, in a way, kidnapped or detained without justification. We see with profound helplessness and frustration that the right to due process & legal counsel were violated, and benefits granted in the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution were unacknowledged. In addition, families are being destroyed and separated, especially where there are minor children and nephews who are suffering a very strong psychological impact because they do not understand the situation, and in some cases, they were subjected to witnessed the arrests of their wives and fathers, who are devastated by the tragedy and the economic burden, since we are the providers and heads of our households. 

Additionally, the ICE agents have arrested people with mental health issues, physical disabilities such as deaf and non-verbal, elderly individuals, and young people with juvenile status, with whom we have to live in the detention centers that are overcrowded. The flu is a constant problem among the detainees, as are stress, fever, and general body aches; which could lead to an outbreak of illness or an epidemic.

I encounter the Delaney Hall hunger strike after reporting and writing a book about a man, Majid Khan, who went on repeated hunger strikes inside CIA black sites and the most secret part of Guantanamo Bay. There is no way to avoid the parallels, large and small. 

Those of us who have never been caged, let alone been on a hunger strike, may have a hard time understanding what a hunger strike is. I know I have read the words hunger strike and thought I understood them. After all, those two words are intelligible together. But until I interviewed people who have endured hunger strikes, I didn't have any real idea. 

A hunger strike is all-consuming physical agony. It is the body turning on itself, viscerally and painfully, in a desperate struggle with the mind for survival. Pain is experienced in the throat, the stomach, the head and then the muscles. Fatigue both physical and mental can lead to fugue-like states. Should someone survive extensive hunger striking, their internal organs may be permanently affected. Majid went through a lot of hunger strikes, and he holds in awe an old friend, kept in a different part of Guantanamo, who survived a hunger strike that lasted on and off for a decade. A thirst strike is even harder to endure. 

Why would anyone do this? Why would someone risk their life in such a horrific way? 

Because they have been pushed past the limits of their endurance. Hunger strikers are beyond despair. I mean that in a Nietzschean sense. Despair was a reaction to their hopes getting crushed. Without hope, despair has no fuel. The hunger striker has reached a point of understanding that there will be no deliverance from their torment, no matter what nonsense their captors tell reporters about due process and humane internal conditions. Death is all they have, and so death must be put to use. They seek to inflict upon their captors unbearable political pressure or die trying. Think the Irish revolutionaries Bobby Sands or Dolours Price, or the imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi.

There is a reason those most likely to engage in hunger striking are political prisoners and the deeply religious. They see a cause worth suffering and dying for. They recognize something—liberation, God—whose power is greater than their captors'. It's easy to clock such people as fanatics. It's harder to pursue the depth of their devotion, to ask why it exists at all. To do so might compel someone to pursue the same devotion. [Another quote by Patrick Henry, from whom we take our headline: "It is a debt we owe to the purity of our religion, to show that it is at variance with that law which warrants Slavery."—Sam.]

It's also easy for those of us who only know hunger strikes as media events to consider them futile. Bobby Sands didn't free the six counties, that sort of thing. But the jailers never consider them futile. The jailers are frightened of what will happen to them if their charges show the world that death is preferable to their jailers' standard operating procedures. That, and not any sense of humanity, is why they subject hunger strikes to the torture of forced tube feeding. Deaths inside prisons, even those of the dehumanized, prompt uncomfortable questions for powerful people. When ICE declares that a detainee is not on hunger strike until 72 hours have passed, it is making a statement of policy to deny that hunger strikes are even taking place. It immediately reminded me of Majid's experiences—which you will read about next spring in a book now titled THE DISAPPEARED: A FATHER, A SON AND THE WAR ON TERROR—as well as Gen. John Kelly's decision to euphemize the 2013 Guantanamo hunger strikes as "non-religious long-term fasting." [Kelly, who went on to become Trump’s first secretary of Homeland Security, served on the board of Caliburn, a private prison contractor that builds and maintains Kelly’s most noteworthy innovation, the baby prison—Sam.]

Jailers do not do this against tactics that are futile. 

I hesitate to write this next paragraph because I haven't interviewed anyone inside Delaney Hall, nor their relatives, nor their lawyers. But I feel this piece would undersell the Delaney Hall hunger strike if I did not risk a little presumptuousness. Those within the ICE complex do not fit the typical category of political prisoner. While their imprisonment is unambiguously political, no one is inside Delaney Hall for committing an act in support of a cause. They are inside Delaney Hall because they are nonwhite people who sought to live in safety and freedom, often to escape conditions catalyzed by the very country they have fled to, the country that claims its might is predicated on offering its people prosperity and freedom (if not safety). Their February letter begins, "We’d like to apologize for the way we entered the United States, but we were experiencing safety circumstances that endangered our lives and the lives of some members of our family." I do not say this to set up some scale of the Deserving and to place men like Martin Soto above anyone else. I say it instead to underscore the depravity of ICE, and the political and economic systems that create, perpetuate and seek to preserve ICE.

Delaney Hall is anything but an outlier. Remember how we noted above that the hunger strike is also a labor strike? That's because GEO Group doesn't just steal freedom, it profits by extracting labor value from its detainees to a degree unattainable outside a cage. In the wake of Minnesota, and now that Markwayne Mullin has replaced Kristi Noem atop the Department of Homeland Security, ICE wants to be lowkey. It wants to operate as it does without attracting outrage. It wants to not be abolished, and so it attempts to mask what it does to deserve abolition. It is not denying senators and the governor access to Delaney Hall purposelessly.

But ultimately, there is no masking a hunger strike. Give them liberty instead. 

I'M GOING TO refrain from writing on Iran in this edition because we're in a period of contradiction and confusion and I can't offer any clarity. It's like that sometimes. I'd rather be honest with you than bullshit you. All I will say as an overall dynamic is that a multi-stage ceasefire/negotiation/cessation of hostilities, while perhaps unavoidable given the circumstances, creates many opportunities for sabotage. Ukraine post-Minsk 2015 should also familiarize everyone with war that continues under cover of ceasefire, to say nothing of Israel's "you cease, we fire" strategies in Lebanon and Gaza.

 THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY'S adoption of artificial intelligence is accelerating. 

DESPITE THE DISGRACEFUL DENIAL of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the U.S. has starved Cuba of electricity after ending the Venezuelan oil subsidy and blockading additional oil imports, all to destroy socialism on an island that American capital never stopped considering its due playpen. The certainty of defeat against Iran perversely incentivizes the Trump administration to deliver a final end to Cuban socialism. Now the Justice Department, true to War on Terror form, is attempting to intimidate (or worse) Hasan Piker and Medea Benjamin from attempting to help Cubans survive the latest American crime against them. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence is analyzing how the Cubans will respond to them militarily. They've beaten Washington since 1959 in one form or another.