From Detention Centers to Data Centers: Why the Fight Against Data Centers is a Fight for Democracy

[upbeat music] But before we get into the main conversation this week, I wanna talk about what's going on over in Delaney Hall.

This is a massive ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey, and over the last few days, y'all might have seen that this has really become a flashpoint in the fight against ICE detention and deportation.

I mean, things really escalated over this past weekend, and what we saw happening this weekend came out of a longer fight over private detention.

Delaney Hall is operated by Geo Group, one of the major private prison and detention companies in the country.

And from the beginning, folks were fighting this.

So Newark Mayor Ras Baraka challenged the, the facility over legal permits and threatened to shut it down.

That clash turned into a legal fight.

I mean, he, he, the mayor, was arrested when he tried to go accompany members of Congress on an oversight visit.

Things have continued to build after that.

Uh, about a year ago, in June 2025, the detainees in the center started to protest, you know, food shortages and atrocious living conditions, which of course we're seeing across the country.

There's also been deaths.

In December of 2025, a Haitian man named Jean Wilson Brutus, uh, died one day after arriving there.

But, you know, the detainees and the community have not been taking this.

They've been organizing inside the facility and around it.

And so for months they've been putting out letters, right, written by the detainees who are really giving accounts of not only the conditions under which they were detained in these letters, but they also are talking about what this is costing them in terms of the trauma, the, you know, the psychological torture, the conditions, all of it.

And then this past Friday, they escalated with a hunger strike.

So this started at 4:00 a.m., and, you know, my understanding is, you know, hundreds of detainees are participating in this.

And one of the voices at the center of this is, is a man named, uh, Martin Soto.

He was kind of, like, leading the announcement of the hunger strike, and his wife, Gabriela Soto, has really been leading the organizing and rallying people outside and calling for not just for, for her husband, for everybody to be free.

Um, you know, she's a US citizen, she's several months pregnant, and she's been staying outside Delaney Hall as part of the protest, right? And so on Friday, this hunger strike started.

More people started coming to Delaney Hall out in front.

By the way, I should, I, I just, I do wanna say that there are people who have been supporting the folks inside Delaney Hall for a while, you know? Um, my wife has, has gone with some people that recruited her to, to, to go in there and, and, you know, just talk to the families and support those families in, in, in different ways.

So, you know, it's like now Delaney Hall is, like, right in the center of the news, and it's been at these moments, but even in between, I just gotta shout out the work of those organizers who have been supporting these families and paying attention to what's going on, even when it's not right in the news.So on Sunday, everything ramped up.

You know, Gabriela was waiting to visit her husband when she saw someone being forced into a van, and she thought maybe this is him, but whoever it is they didn't want ICE to just be moving people, especially people who, like, they're moving them 'cause they're leaders of this protest.

So some other visitors told her that this was her husband who was being moved, and she went toward the van and started banging on it, and the protesters joined her and they actually formed a blockade at the gates trying to stop, you know, them from moving this person out of the facility.