Scenes from Delaney Hall (3)
In 1963, an outsider named Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled from Atlanta, Georgia to Birmingham, Alabama to protest injustice there by deliberately intensifying “tension” in that, to him, foreign city. His presence, as well as that of his followers, was questioned by locals:

However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.

King unapologetically doubled down on being an outsider:

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

Much the same thing has happened at Delaney Hall in Newark. People, many of them not residents of Doremus Avenue, traveled to Doremus Avenue to protest injustice there, deliberately intensifying tensions in that, to them, foreign place. I personally took the train from Metropark a couple times, then took the 25 bus from Penn Station all the way to Doremus Avenue. No bus driver was willing to take me all the way in to Delaney Hall, so I did my share of walking.

Activist Asma Elhuni just released from jail, June 1, 2026 (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

Like Dr King’s antagonists, Governor Sherrill apparently found it objectionable that outside agitators had traveled to the 400 block of Doremus Avenue to protest injustice. I’d be curious to know what she thought of Jesus, who traveled all across Palestine to preach the Gospel, or St Paul, who agitated across the breadth of the Roman Empire, or Martin Luther King, who did much the same across the United States, traveling as far as India, Ghana, and Norway in his agitations. Sherrill is the first to brag that she did her military service abroad. Didn’t that make her a violent outside agitator?

“To the people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations: You should not be here,” Sherrill said during a Saturday press conference.

“You are not helping the people detained at Delaney Hall, you are not helping detainee families and you are certainly not keeping New Jersey safe,” she added.

Imagine applying this standard to the U.S. Navy.

Like Dr King’s critics, Sherrill’s statement runs two different ideas together: that the agitators are outsiders, and that they’re violent. It’s a puzzling combination. An outsider need not be violent, and a violent person need not be an outsider. So why fixate on outsiderhood?

Tired but defiant

In any case, she did. In her May 31 press conference, she came out and said that “five out of six” of those arrested that day were from out-of-state. This has now widely been re-interpreted as the claim that “five out of six” protesters–meaning 83% of the total–are from out of state. As it happens, some 90+ people have been arrested since Memorial Day. There’s no logically valid way of inferring from “five out of six people on Saturday were from out-of-state” to “83% of 90+ people arrested since Memorial Day were from out-of-state.” The reasoning there is fallacious, however homegrown. What makes it worse is that it’s a red herring. It doesn’t really matter where the protesters are from, any more than it mattered that Jesus was from Nazareth and not Jerusalem, or St Paul from Palestine and not Cappadocia, or Martin Luther King from Georgia and not Chicago.

The plot thickens. One typically homegrown news source claims that

According to information obtained by our reporting staff, the overwhelming majority of those arrested were not from New Jersey.

This source doesn’t, of course, give us the information obtained by their reporting staff. If you have to ask, I guess, there’s no point in telling you. Such are the mysteries of the Jersey faith, and of the irrelevancy on which it thrives.

Though people object to outside protesters, they don’t object to the fact that ICE is an “outside” agency. It didn’t originate in New Jersey, after all; it originated in and is run from, Washington, D.C. Same with the GEO Group, which owns Delaney Hall. They’re underwritten by Washington, and based in Boca Raton, Florida. How about Delaney Hall’s personnel? Where are they from? Aren’t they outside agitators? No one seems to know or care. The State Police isn’t from Newark, but from all over the state. The cop that got arrested for stealing someone’s photo equipment isn’t from Newark or Essex County. He’s from Sparta, way up in the northern part of the state. In other words, virtually all of the law enforcement side of the equation consists of outside agitators.

To worry about outsiderhood is to misunderstand the geography of industrial Jersey altogether. To state the near-obvious, at least to those who have been there: Delaney Hall is surrounded by ports and businesses specializing in international trade. Kuiken Brothers Supply store brings goods in via outsiders and ships them out to outsiders. So does Fed Ex. So does Flavorganics. Same with Sal Son Logistics, “one mile from the port.” Maersk and ZIM ship bombs to Israel via Port Newark, one mile away. Newark Airport brings a constant stream of outsiders in, and takes a constant stream out. The much vaunted World Cup, taking place within hailing distance of Delaney Hall, is an athletic competition involving a foreign game mostly being played by foreigners to an ethnic audience.

If “outsiderhood” is some kind of problem, someone’s going to have to work harder to explain what it is. New Jersey has, since the Revolution, been a crossroads for outsiders, whether from New York or Philadelphia or beyond. Just think of Thomas Paine, the ultimate outside agitator. Or think of the Underground Railroad. The only authentically indigenous population here is the mosquito.

A picture of what Kant called “moral satisfaction“

Is it really objectionable that so many outsiders are coming in, and insiders going out–or isn’t that an ordinary day in a free country? I guess the implication is that we should just stay at home watching TV, passively imbibing whatever bullshit our talking head propagandists have on offer. Never forget that these are the assholes who told us after 9/11 to go shopping lest the terrorists win, or to go out in public during COVID lest the virus (or Anthony Fauci) win. Now they not only want us to stay put, but want to close down our airport. The only common denominator here is the belief that their whims should be our commands.

It’s a funny thing about the universe these people envision that goods, capital, and well-heeled travelers are mostly free to cross borders, but migrants and political protesters are not. That, after all, is a microcosm of the underlying explanation for our migrant crisis in the first place (see this as well). As the preceding sources argue, NAFTA created a free market for capital, but not for labor, and then created mass unemployment south of the American border. Free market logic dictates that unemployed workers gravitate to where the jobs are, except that the jobs the free market would have promised them were across a border they weren’t allowed to cross.

It’s precisely because capital can cross borders at will but labor can’t, that captive labor is hostage to the disruptions of free capital. Workers impoverished by that asymmetry have no choice but to go where the jobs are, or are thought to be, even if doing so requires making them “outside agitators.” It’s poignant that both sets of people, migrants and protesters, find themselves at the same place, in the same predicament: outsiders who in exercising their rights of movement, stand accused of disrupting the serenity of those who have the luxury of standing still.

In any case, I happened to be at the corner of Wilson and Doremus on Monday when two of my homegrown Jersey friends were released from Essex County Correctional Facility. Take a look of the pictures of them I’m posted: they have a strange tranquility about them for outside agitators. But though they’re both from Mercer County, I guess they’re both still foreign enough to qualify as perpetual outsiders. I doubt that bothers them, considering the company they keep.