Scenes from Delaney Hall (6)
Here’s a first: I was at Delaney Hall last night for The Peoples’ Vigil, a quasi-religious event held each Monday at 7:30 pm. During the vigil, Shane Claiborne, a self-described Anabaptist and founder of the New Monastic Movement, made admiring reference to the Cato Institute, of all things. “Even the Cato Institute,” he said, “is against this building…” He was alluding to the research of David J. Bier, Cato’s Director of Immigration Studies and Selz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy, and in particular, to Bier’s paper, “Immigrants Cut Victimization Rates, Boost Crime Reporting” (Policy Analysis 1003, August 2025), which argues that contrary to popular belief, comparatively few immigrants are violent criminals. You’re more likely to be killed by a falling vending machine or hit by lightning than killed by an “illegal immigrant.”
Category Archives: migrant defense
The Fire This Time
Scenes from Delaney Hall (5)
It’s a serious mistake to rely exclusively on the mainstream media for news of what’s happening at Delaney Hall. If you’re doing this, you’re being misled by omission: you’re systematically depriving yourself of information that’s relevant to getting a balanced picture of what’s happening there, or for passing a verdict on it.
To illustrate this, I want to work through a representative example of mainstream journalism, a June 4 article on Delaney Hall in The New York Times. My aim here is not to find fault with the author, or to condemn the article, but simply to point out as a matter of objective fact that whether fault is involved or not, the article systematically misleads the reader to the detriment of the protesters. It fails to supply necessary background context, fails to ask the right questions, fails to answer them, and misses salient points of detail. Again, my point is not primarily that the author should have included this or that, but simply that given what he excludes, he misleads, full stop. Why this is the case is a separate question. How it’s to be remedied, or whether it can be remedied within mainstream media at all, is also a separate question.
Continue readingHolly Schepisi and the Mechanics of Misinformation
Holly Schepisi is a Republican member of the New Jersey State Senate from Montvale, an attorney, and previously, the President of the Holy Name Medical Center Foundation. She’s also a loud defender of ICE, and a loud critic of migrant defense efforts. About a week ago, she posted the following on Facebook. I challenged her to produce evidence for her claims, which she blithely ignored. So let me try again.
Here are some issues with her claims:
Continue readingIan Austin, Outside Agitator
Scenes from Delaney Hall (4)
Just a postscript to my June 3 post, “Nowhere to Hide,” featuring Ian Austin. I heard last night through the activist grapevine that Austin had been arrested. The arrest is obviously a case of targeting one of the most charismatic ground-level leaders of the migrant defense movement. He’s repeatedly been arrested in just this way across the country, most often to have the charges dropped. The point is not to sustain the charges in court but to intimidate and harass him with the intention of undermining the migrant defense movement.
Outside Agitation
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:
Continue reading“Another Night of Violent Protests”
Scenes from Delaney Hall (2)
The next time you see a headline talking about “another night of violent protests,” consider what it does: it primes you to think, in the absence of any evidence or argument, that the protesters were responsible for whatever violence took place, even if law enforcement happened to be responsible for all of it. The phrase “violent protest” implies not that the protests involved violence by unspecified parties, but that the protesters themselves were the main source of the violence.
Nowhere to Hide
Scenes from Delaney Hall (1)
It’s been widely reported that the curfew at Delaney Hall was issued on Sunday night, and was to run nightly from 9 pm to 6 am. This photo was taken at 7:10 pm on Monday, June 1st. The State Police have stopped us at the corner of Wilson and Doremus Avenues, about half a mile from Delaney Hall, and ordered us not to proceed. Delaney Hall we’re told, is off-limits until further notice. That’s not the version of events in the media. It’s the version on the ground.
Here a protester, Ian Austin, asks a Newark police officer for the legal basis for the order. “If the curfew runs 9 pm to 6 am, why are we stopped here at 7:10 pm? And if there’s no curfew right now, why is there no freedom of movement?” The officer goes silent and looks down. How would he know what the law says? He’s just following orders.
Continue readingWould Mikie Sherrill Cover Up Someone’s Wrongdoing?
Our judgments of current happenings always depend on background knowledge of the past. What’s been happening at Delaney Hall these past twelve days or so is specifically a function of Governor Mikie Sherrill’s policies. So her past matters.
One contested question is the extent to which Mikie Sherrill would be willing to accept complicity in someone else’s wrongdoing in the name of, say, misplaced loyalty to someone or something. Would she knowingly cover up someone else’s wrongdoing? Would she tolerate someone’s dishonesty in a morally consequential matter? Would she play dumb if she thought that doing so was somehow justified? Would she, on being called on it, double down?
Continue readingWould Mikie Sherrill Lie to You?
Both sides in the dispute over Delaney Hall have accused New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill of lying about the State Police response to the protesters outside of the facility. A preliminary to litigating any such dispute is to address a prior question: would Mikie Sherrill lie to you? Is she even capable of it? Are there conditions under which you could expect Sherrill to lie?
We’re forced to ask such questions because if one goes by PR appearances, the answer would seem to be no. Mikie Sherrill is a former Navy helicopter pilot, a former prosecutor, a successful former Congressional representative, and an attractive suburban soccer mom. Surely such a civic-minded person is incapable of lying to anyone?
Continue readingTo the Agitators Coming to Delaney Hall from Outside of New Jersey
Ignore our governor and keep coming. Fuck ICE and fuck her.
Policy of Truth 