Luis was released from Delaney Hall after three and a half months and stood on the street outside with his hands shaking, surrounded by cameras and protesters and the industrial smell of sewage and chemicals that hangs over that part of Newark, and said that if they freed us, we wouldn’t generate profit for this business. He was referring to the GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the United States, which operates Delaney Hall under a fifteen-year contract with ICE, a contract signed after New Jersey passed a law in 2021 barring the use of privately-owned facilities for immigration detention, after GEO Group sued to strike that law down, and after the Biden administration intervened in support of the private prison company against the state of New Jersey, ensuring that the facility could reopen, that the contract could be signed, and that Luis and the three to four hundred other people on hunger and labor strike inside could be detained there for however long it takes for the profit to be extracted from their confinement.

Inside Delaney Hall, detainees have reported food containing worms, no air conditioning, poor ventilation, a flu spreading through the units without treatment, delayed medical care, and detainees performing cooking, cleaning, and laundry work for as little as one dollar an hour. A woman had a miscarriage and coped alone. A pregnant woman could not obtain obstetric support. People were detained during routine check-ins with immigration authorities, appearing as required before officials, arrested in the process of complying with the system that then imprisoned them. When one of the hunger-striking men fainted, facility staff did not respond, so other detainees gave him water with salt and sugar and told him to eat. The morning after protests outside grew heated, GEO Group workers arrived, painted yellow no-trespassing lines on the sidewalk, and installed new surveillance cameras. The Department of Homeland Security’s response to reports of the strike was to announce there was no strike, that detainees receive three meals a day evaluated by certified dieticians, clean bedding, comprehensive medical care, and access to phones to communicate with family and lawyers, which would be more reassuring if the facility had not, immediately after the strike began, confiscated the tablets detainees use to communicate with the outside world.

Ninety people have been arrested outside Delaney Hall over the past two weeks, charged with riot, which in New Jersey carries up to eighteen months in prison. The public defender’s office, reviewing the complaints against people arrested on Sunday night, found that every single one contained only boilerplate language describing offenses committed by the crowd collectively, without specifying what any individual person was accused of doing, meaning the state charged ninety people with a felony-equivalent offense without alleging that any specific person did any specific thing, because the offense, as far as the state was concerned, was being present outside a building where a woman miscarried alone and a man fainted during a hunger strike and nobody came. ICE agents pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim when he emerged from speaking with detainees. They sprayed journalists. They chased a protester onto train tracks covered in gravel and Tased him in the back, his body going stiff as he fell onto the stones, officers picking him up and carrying him into the facility. Markwayne Mullin called Democratic lawmakers’ attempts to inspect the facility a political stunt by New Jersey sanctuary politicians for fundraising clicks, which is a remarkable description of elected officials attempting to exercise oversight of a federal facility where the state health department was denied a full inspection and where conditions were, according to the executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, bad enough for people to lose their pregnancies.

What the state has decided to call a riot is people standing outside a building. What the state has decided not to call anything in particular is a fifteen-year contract with a private prison company that requires a steady supply of human bodies to remain profitable, a contract that detains people during their own immigration compliance check-ins, holds them for months while their cases stall, pays them a dollar an hour to do the labor that keeps the facility running, removes their communication devices when they organize, and when a pregnant woman cannot see a doctor, does not send one. The GEO Group said it is proud of the role it has played for forty years in support of the law enforcement mission of ICE. Luis stood outside with his hands still shaking and said they wouldn’t free them because freeing them would end the profit. The GEO Group and Luis are describing the same institution.

There is a version of this story that treats Delaney Hall as an aberration, a particularly bad facility in a system that mostly works, something that better oversight and more funding for legal defense can correct. Governor Sherrill has committed twenty million dollars to legal defense for detainees, which is real and matters to the people inside, and is also an acknowledgment that the system producing the conditions at Delaney Hall is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and the best the state can offer is lawyers to slow it down. New Jersey passed a law to shut these facilities and a private prison company sued and the federal government under the previous Democratic administration took the company’s side, and now there is a fifteen-year contract and a thousand-bed facility and a hunger strike and ninety people charged with riot for standing outside it, and the oversight always arrives after the miscarriage, not before.

The people outside Delaney Hall understand something the institutions keep refusing to, that a facility whose profitability depends on detention cannot be reformed into releasing people, that a system which arrests people during their own immigration check-ins is not a system that made an error, that the Biden administration which helped keep Delaney Hall open and the Trump administration running it are connected by the same contract, the same company, the same logic Luis named with his hands shaking on the street, which is that the profit requires the body and the body requires the detention and the detention requires that nobody leave until the contract decides otherwise. Outside a facility in Newark where a woman lost her pregnancy alone and a man collapsed during a hunger strike and staff did not come, the state is prosecuting ninety people for the riot of having been there to see it.

If this is what federal agents are willing to do to the public, but what are they doing to the people they have in detention?