People sometimes claim to be unable to decide between the claims of, say, DHS and migrant defense activists. Faced with conflicting stories, people sometimes retreat into a kind of Phyrronian skepticism: each side is incompatible with the other, they’ll say, but neither side’s claims can easily be rejected. So we’re left with an undecidable clash of equal and opposite positions.

What to do? The original Phyrronian skeptics believed that tranquility was to be sought in the undecidable clash of such equal and opposite claims.* So they lived their lives–or tried to–without having any settled beliefs at all. If belief leads to conflict (they thought), non-belief eliminates it, producing the calm equanimity of the perpetually uncommitted. I sometimes wonder whether this is the guiding ethos of our news media and its modal consumer. If “mental health” means tranquility, and tranquility demands perpetual agnosticism, maybe it’s safer (people seem to be reasoning) to give equal credence to every claim, even if the resulting tranquility is purchased at the price of cognitive paralysis.

Delaney Hall, June 29, 2026

Whatever the merits of Phyrronian skepticism generally, there’s no need to adopt it about DHS. DHS lies so routinely, and about so many things, that it sometimes helps to sit there and catalogue the lies in any given pronouncement. To that end, here’s a passage from an article in The Jersey Vindicator about Delaney Hall. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but for present purposes, I’ll focus on one brief passage. All you need to know by way of background is that it’s been very hot and humid for the past few weeks in New Jersey, and that Delaney Hall’s air conditioning unit has broken down for a full week in parts of the facility.

GEO Group declined to comment and referred questions to ICE, which has denied allegations of negligence or poor conditions at the facility.

“Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE facilities are FALSE,” the DHS spokesperson wrote in an email to The Vindicator.

“All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers,” the statement continued. “Make no mistake, these types of lies are contributing to the over 1,300% increase in assaults on the men and women of ICE who put their lives on the line every day to arrest violent criminal illegal aliens to protect and defend the lives of American citizens.”

Virtually every significant claim here is a lie–an obvious, Orwellian, gaslighting-level lie told, apparently, to see what they can get away with. The answer should be: nothing.

Delaney Hall, June 29, 2026

The passage starts with the claim that there are no “subprime conditions at ICE facilities.” “Subprime” is itself a bizarre locution, and one might suspect that games are being played with the phrase “ICE facility,” so as to exclude facilities run by outsource companies like GEO Group. But set that aside. I think it’s fair to interpret the claim as saying that there are no sub-optimal conditions at ICE detention centers, including Delaney Hall. Yet the article itself relays the uncontested fact that the air conditioning is not working in Delaney Hall. And it’s self-evident–and likewise evident from weather reports–that it’s hot and humid out. So DHS is literally lying to us about what we can see and feel, and what they themselves have not contested. Yet they insist on lying to us in CAPS.

“All detainees are provided with proper meals.” This claim is flatly contradicted by the New Jersey Department of Health inspection report, which lays out seven violations in Delaney Hall’s kitchen. The most egregious of these violations concerned food preparation.

18. Cooling: PHFs (Processed Heated Foods) rapidly cooled from 135 F to 41 F within 6 hours and from 135 F to 70 F within two hours: out of compliance.

20. Reheating: PHFs rapidly reheated (within 2 hours) in proper facilities to at least 165 F; or commercially processed PHFs heated to at least 135 F prior to hot holding: out of compliance.

27. Food protected from contamination during preparation, storage, display: out of compliance.

These meals, and any others like them, were improper. Notice that DHS doesn’t acknowledge these documented failings and say that they’ve been overcome. It simply evades the existence of any and all failings, pretending that they never happened. The colloquial and perfectly accurate word for that is lying.

Delaney Hall, June 29, 2026

We’re then told that “these types of lies” lead to assaults on ICE agents, meaning the claims about sub-optimal conditions. The first problem here is that no lies have been identified (because none exist). The second problem is that the claims in question, whether true or false, can’t even in principle cause assaults. An assertion about sub-optimal kitchen conditions isn’t an assault on anyone, and can’t cause one. In other words, what we have here is a classic case of an accusation that’s a confession. It’s in fact DHS that is lying, and DHS that is assaulting and killing people, not the other way around.

A third problem is that the claim about a 1,300% increase in assaults on ICE agents is also a lie. These claims were rebutted last October by Colorado Public Radio and Straight Arrow. Block Club Chicago’s reporting on the “Midway Blitz” has revealed that ICE officers “filed reports with narratives that were contradicted by their own body-camera footage, showing they lied about what they did, misrepresented the action of bystanders and protesters, overcounted alleged assaults against them, undercounted their own uses of force or failed to report some uses of force altogether.”** Having seen it up close, I’m confident that something similar would emerge from reporting on ICE operations in New Jersey. I hope that the relevant reporting materializes.

Delaney Hall, June 29, 2026

I would add that all claims of “assault” against law enforcement systematically misrepresent the issue who initiated the force in question, since self-defense claims by non-officers are routinely discounted. I would also repeat something I’ve said before: it’s DHS/ICE that’s initiating force against people in the form of a campaign of mass deportation and mass incarceration, not the detainees, migrants, or protesters. Though detention, incarceration, and deportation are not legally considered assault, as a matter of moral fact, they are force initiations against the innocent, and should be regarded as crimes. “Assault” is about the mildest, most euphemistic description for what they are, but they’re routinely omitted from counts of “assault.” If we add them to the equation, they dwarf anything happening to ICE agents by orders of both quantitative and moral magnitude.

Finally, we’re told almost in passing that the detainees in Delaney Hall are “violent criminal aliens.” They aren’t. We have data on who they are. This is from Austin Kocher’s authoritative analysis of May 29, “Delaney Hall Detention Center: A Data Profile” (which I highly recommend reading in its entirety; I’ve omitted his visuals in the excerpt below):

Based on the most recent data available, the vast majority of people at the facility have no conviction (88.3%) and the large majority have no criminal history whatsoever (70.5%). Just 11.7% have convictions (more on that in a minute). This tracks with my own findings about the national trend in recent months, but it’s even more acute in the sense that the proportion of people with criminal histories is much lower than the national average (29%) and the proportion of people with only immigration violations is much higher than the national average (40%). To put it simply, if you were looking for an ICE facility that holds a large number of dangerous criminals, Delaney Hall just isn’t it.

Relatedly, the vast majority of people in the facility are classified at ICE’s lowest security level, Level A—ICE’s own determination that the individuals, including those with non-serious criminal convictions, are not a threat to the population and do not need to be segregated. Thus, even regardless of criminal history, it would seem that ICE does not find the vast majority of people held at Delaney Hall as constituting a threat within the facility, either. (It will be curious to see if these numbers change with the next publication of ICE detention data, whenever that happens. It would be plausible that ICE would reclassify anyone participating in the hunger and labor strike.)

But we can go further. Let’s look more specifically at the compositional data on people with criminal charges as of March using stint data from the Deportation Data Project.

Of the 99 people with criminal convictions,2 the most serious convictions listed are: 39 (39%) are for traffic offenses (DUIs and general traffic offenses), 11 for illegal entry, 7 for larceny, 6 for public order, 6 for shoplifting, 2 for assault, 2 weapons charges, and 5 drug convictions, and smaller numbers of other convictions. Not a single conviction for homicide, sexual assault, or drug trafficking was present. Most of these convictions (69%) were misdemeanors, just 9 were felonies, and another 17 were left unclassified.

Only one person was flagged with an aggravated felony, and that appears to be connected to an identity theft conviction. Margaret Stock mentioned aggravated felonies in our conversation the other day in response to my question about what Congress should fix. She explained that aggravated felonies (aka, “agg fells”) are unique to immigration law and are very often neither aggravated nor felonies, but rather a bucket of things that the courts have thrown into it over time.

Kocher goes on, but you get the point. The population of Delaney Hall didn’t consist of violent criminals as of March 2026, and (he shows) has not consisted of violent criminals since it re-opened last year. The Vindicator article I linked to suggests that there’s been some movement of detainees since March 2026; the article happens to focus on out-migration from the facility, but we can imagine hypothetically that there’s been some migration into it. No matter how you slice it, Kocher’s data could only be falsified by an implausibly gigantic and unprecedented influx of violent criminals between March and July. There is no evidence of any such influx, but even if there had been, all it would prove was that DHS drastically changed the demographic composition of Delaney Hall from what had obtained for the prior year. In other words, DHS’s claims are incompatible even with the wildest imaginings of what could be true.

I should add that the list of lies I’ve identified here isn’t exhaustive even of the passage I analyzed. There are too many lies even in that brief passage to produce an exhaustive list of all of them.

There’s no need to give DHS or ICE the benefit of the doubt. They’ve learned their lessons from their master, Donald Trump: if you lie all the time about everything, some of your lies will fool the credulous, and some will fool the complacent. If that’s all you need to get away with your crimes, that will do. The burden is ours to stop being fooled by this shit. The rule to adopt is that DHS/ICE should be presumed to be lying unless we can prove a given claim true. That rule won’t lead you to Phyrronian tranquility, but it’ll lead you at least somewhere near the truth. You have to decide where you’d rather go.

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*I rely for my discussion of the Phyrronian skeptics on John Cooper’s Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton, 2012), pp. 276-304.

**I owe the Block Club Chicago reference to Rachel Cohen.