Mikie Sherrill’s state police riot in Newark is a national disgrace

When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016 and the United States began its decade-long spiral into authoritarian madness, there arose a popular meme: Whatever you think you would have done to stop the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, or to end American racial injustice in the 1960s, is what you are doing right now.

Today, a humanitarian tragedy is taking place behind barbed wire and rows of riot cops in the industrial netherlands of Newark, where immigrants snatched by masked agents of American secret police are held in a private lockup called Delaney Hall in squalid conditions — fed rancid food, denied proper medical care, and fearing for their lives.

What are good people doing right now? As news of a detainee hunger strike inside Delaney Hall reached the outside world, a few hundred protesters have made their way toward the gates of the facility run by the for-profit GEO Group — to voice support for the strikers, demand humane treatment, and, for some of them, put their bodies on the line to commit acts of civil disobedience against a human-rights catastrophe on American soil.

What is New Jersey’s newish Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill doing right now?

For two nights now, a battalion of Sherrill’s New Jersey State Police — who the first-year governor had claimed would “lower the temperature” in Newark — has turned up the heat to 11 by firing rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters, and flash-bang grenades while violently pushing back the demonstrators, both with mounted officers on horseback and with riot shields and batons.

“They shot me four times,” Ian Austin, a military veteran from Bryan Athyn, told a livestreaming journalist outside Delaney Hall, revealing large red welts on his torso and his left leg before he returned to the front of barricades with a bullhorn, shouting, “We’re willing to (bleeping) die here!”

Thankfully, no one has died in the Newark protest … yet. But human-rights protesters and free-speech advocates are stunned that militarized cops under the command of a Democratic governor who claims to be fighting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s humanitarian abuses are using such aggressive tactics against citizens fighting the cause she claims to support.

“I thought [the state police presence] was going to be a good thing,” Norma Bowe — a nurse who returned to Delaney Hall after she’d been pushed to the ground by federal ICE agents earlier in the week — told the Gothamist. “I was trusting Mikie Sherrill to think about the security of us New Jerseyans. But as you can see, it’s actually escalated the situation.”

The political director of the ACLU of New Jersey, John Butler, said Saturday that the state police actions in Newark are “an unnecessary response to free speech and the right to peaceful protest … New Jersey’s response must prioritize the safety and well-being of people — not mimic the dangerous and overly militarized tactics of the federal government.”

Just like the late Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley’s legendary 1968 malapropism, the New Jersey State Police are not there to create disorder, but to preserve disorder.

Take a step back, take your partisan mask off for a moment, and ponder what has just happened in the Garden State. It was just Monday that Sherrill won praise — and deservedly so — for demanding unsuccessfully that ICE and the GEO Group allow her inside Delaney Hall, sending in state health inspectors who were also denied full access, and calling for the facility that now detains about 300 migrants to be shut down.

Yet by midnight Saturday, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security was posting on X that, “Together with our state and local law enforcement partners, we have SECURED the area around Delaney Hall,” adding “WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN.”

So is the New Jersey governor at war with the rogue agency that sends masked goon squads into city streets to grab day laborers or Uber drivers and warehouses them in squalid gulags, and that murdered two citizens on the streets of Minneapolis when they tried to protest? Or is she partnering with them? How long can we remain in denial that 21st century America is a police state with “resistance Democrats” as willing partners?

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There’s the famous saying that when you’re a carpenter, every problem looks like a nail. I guess when a rising politician centers her brand on her time as a Navy helicopter pilot, every crisis starts to look like Iraq. What is happening right now in Newark is exactly why I have never trusted the so-called “national security moms” like Sherrill or her partner in feckless centrism, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger — Democrats who ultimately support sending in the tanks, with a rainbow Pride flag on the side.

But what is especially outrageous about Sherrill’s conduct over the last few days is her completely unsubstantiated and outlandish claim that many of the Delaney Hall protesters — nurses, veterans, faith leaders, and other everyday Americans — are “outside agitators,” which thus necessitated the over-the-top police response.

It’s bad enough that the only evidence offered by Sherrill is that four of six people arrested at Friday’s protest are from New York — a state so closely linked to New Jersey that two of its pro football teams play there — while one (the abovementioned Austin) is from Pennsylvania. The inhumane treatment of detainees — the majority of whom have committed no crime — is a national nightmare that ought to be drawing protesters from all 50 states.

But even more appalling is how Sherrill’s language carried painful echoes of America’s worst, violent segregationists who defended U.S. apartheid in the 20th century. The infamous 1965 “Bloody Sunday’ violent attack against peaceful civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. took place after the governor, George Wallace, called out his state troopers to deal with what he dubbed “continued agitation and demonstrations led and directed by outsiders.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed this empty type of allegation in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, writing that “never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea.” Yet New Jersey is living with it again, thanks to a governor who is sounding a lot more Wallace than King. She should be ashamed.

King never endorsed violence, nor should we. Instead, he argued that opposing unjust laws, nonviolently, is a moral obligation. The notion of getting arrested for civil disobedience — what the late John Lewis, who was beaten by Wallace’s state troopers that day in Selma, called “good trouble, necessary trouble” — is central to the concept. It’s OK when people who block an ICE vehicle get arrested, because that is essentially the point.

What is not OK is firing rubber bullets that can maim or blind protesters or bystanders, or the wanton use of tear gas — considered a human-rights abuse in most civilized corners of the globe — or the blocking off or assaulting of journalists, who are only there as the eyes and ears of holding our government to account. If Sherrill is to be believed, her troopers are destroying the First Amendment in order to save it.

Yet another unforgivable aspect of Sherrill’s behavior is that her aggressive policing, which she held a nationally televised news conference on Saturday to defend, is taking all the oxygen from what really matters about Delaney Hall: the systematic stripping of basic human rights from people who’ve done nothing to deserve such mistreatment.

Among the crowd that the governor slanders as “outside agitators” is Gabriella Soto, pregnant with her third child with Peruvian Martin Soto, who has been trapped inside the hell of Delaney Hall since February while doled out vile food containing worms and chunky spoiled milk. She said the federal officials who’ve been allowed brief access aren’t getting the true story, and “I want them to know that what they’re seeing in there is not reality.”

The real criminals of Delaney Hall are the Trump regime flunkies and the GEO Group workers perpetrating this unholy cataclysm, yet Sherrill’s tin soldiers are not deployed against them, but against those who dare to speak out.

This is the unrelenting weight of the American police state — automatically restored to its factory settings of protecting corporate power and crushing dissent, even against unjust laws. Breaking this trap requires radical thought and radical action, not the knee-jerk acceptance of suppression as the American way.

While the latest descent into chaos was taking place Saturday night, I was about 80 miles south with some 20,000 of my Philadelphia neighbors watching Bruce Springsteen wrap up his spring “Land of Hope and Dreams Tour,” a three-hour musical challenge to the suffocation of Trump’s autocracy.

In his closing monologue to an emotionally drained crowd at Xfinity Mobile Arena, Springsteen invoked the Minneapolis sacrifice of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and implored: “Find a way to take aggressive, peaceful actions to respect their country’s ideals. As the great civil rights leader John Lewis said, go out and get in good trouble if you’re feeling helpless, if you’re feeling hopeless, if you’re feeling angry, if you’re feeling betrayed.”

Now officials in Springsteen’s home state are taking it even further, imposing a curfew around Delaney Hall to further choke the public’s right to speak out against injustice — another betrayal. I hope that more Americans will ignore Sherrill’s repression, head to Newark and channel the spirit of Lewis, to fight America’s latest injustice with good trouble. Necessary trouble.

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