ICE just pepper-sprayed a sitting United States Senator. In a parking lot. On Memorial Day. For standing still with his arms up. Andy Kim was outside Delaney Hall in Newark, where roughly 300 detained immigrants have stopped eating to protest medical neglect and the conditions inside: rotten food, no air conditioning, no due process.
He tried to broker a deal so nobody got hurt. ICE answered with an armored vehicle, a line of armed agents, and less-lethal rounds fired into the crowd.
Kim threw his arms up in a stop motion and put his own body in the gap. They sprayed him anyway. "It's just burning," he said while volunteers poured water into his eyes.
Here is what the cameras did not show you.
Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group, a private prison corporation that holds a 15-year, billion-dollar contract to cage human beings on our dime. Last year they posted a record $254 million in profit, roughly a 700 percent jump from the year before, riding Trump's deportation machine straight to the bank.
And people connected to GEO funneled about a million dollars into a pro-Trump PAC.
The investment paid off.
So here is the arrangement. A company gets rich locking up people who, by the government's own leaked numbers, mostly have no violent record at all. The food spoils. The care disappears. And when fathers and mothers refuse to eat in protest, the answer is not a hearing. It is chemical spray in a parking lot.
When the governor of New Jersey asked to inspect the place, she was turned away at the door. When a Senator asked questions, he got a faceful of pepper spray.
If they will do this to people with that much power, in front of that many phones, picture what happens to the people locked inside where there are no cameras at all.
The DHS Secretary dismissed the whole thing as a "political stunt" for "fundraising clicks" and insisted there is no hunger strike and no bad conditions, without bothering to call the Senator who was standing right there.
This was never about paperwork or borders. It is about whether we are still a country that flinches when the people in its custody are starved and gassed.
If that reflex is gone, the rest of us should be terrified of what comes next.
The Trump news cycle is built to bury this by Thursday. Don't let it. The fight for immigration justice must continue.
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