And so do I
Here at long last is Senator Holly Schepisi’s “response” to my earlier post critiquing her claims about the New Jersey Department of Health’s May 28 inspection of Delaney Hall:
Yeah. That’s really fucking stupid.
Continue readingRe-visiting the May 28 NJDOH Health Inspection (x3)
The mainstream press is systematically misreporting the New Jersey Department of Health’s May 28 inspection of Delaney Hall. This is from an article in today’s NJ.com, “Federal judge demands answers after N.J is again blocked at Delaney Hall detention center“:
In a limited inspection last month, state Department of Health inspectors did not find any serious violations in Delaney Hall’s kitchen.
Yes, they did. The author links to an earlier article of his that quotes from more of the report and makes this same determination, but both articles fail to mention the Department of Health’s overall evaluation of the facility, and both fail to cite the statutory definition of this evaluation (both also fail to link to the report itself).
Continue readingHow to Fail an Intellectual Health Inspection
I’ve recently taken issue with New Jersey State Senator Holly Schepisi’s claims about Delaney Hall regarding who initiated force there, but here’s a post on a different topic. On June 9th, Schepisi posted an item on her official Facebook page claiming that a May 28 inspection by the New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH) had “proven false” migrants’ complaints about health conditions in Delaney Hall. This is her verbatim statement from the June 9 Facebook post, which she doubles-down on several times in the comments of the same post:
There have been so many conflicting comments made by NJ representatives regarding Delaney Hall but most of the claims of egregious living conditions made by Senator Andy Kim continue to be proven false. Here is the most recent example — if maggots were in food, if food was spoilt, the NJ Department of Health would not give Delaney a satisfactory health inspection.
To this end Schepisi cites a June 8 piece in Politico which links to the NJDOH report. The Politico piece summarizes the NJDOH report, and offers up some additional statements by Raynard E. Washington, New Jersey’s Commissioner of Health.
Continue readingGuest post by Paulo Almiron, posted June 2 at the Substack of Resistencia en Acción
This past week has seen it all. A lot has been written and said.
There is no doubt that the violence perpetrated by law enforcement has taken over the headlines. Joint operations between Newark Police, New Jersey State Police, and ICE outside of the Delaney Hall concentration camp are the most distressing news this state has seen so far. We have even spoken about it multiple times, knowing that several in our team had flashbangs explode inches away from us. It is valid and deserved that the repression against the immigrants’ rights movement is called out with no filters.
That said, we must be watchful of the effects this media angle will have. If we are rigid in this view, then we will lose our purpose: to support the strikers.
Continue readingScenes 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 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 readingScenes 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 readingScenes 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.
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 readingOur 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 reading
Policy of Truth 