New Jersey Democrats Should Stop Adding Fire to ICE Protests

National Review Online

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim is distraught.

 

In a video message to his constituents, the senator denounced the “chaos in the streets that ICE has unleashed,” amid ongoing violent demonstrations against the Newark-based detention facility Delaney Hall.

 

“I’m going to do everything I can to try to stop this chaos,” Kim insisted. Nonsense. If anything, the senator has encouraged the civil disorder that descends almost nightly on this facility.

 

For nearly two weeks, New Jersey’s Democratic lawmakers — from Governor Mikie Sherrill herself to much of the state’s congressional delegation on down — have bolstered the violent anti-ICE demonstrators gathering around the facility.

 

Those Democrats maintain that they have been denied access to that privately run facility, alleging lurid tales of the abuse and inhumane conditions that persist behind its walls. The Department of Homeland Security denies the allegations. To the extent that Democrats’ access to the property was only temporarily restricted, that was because of the “riots outside the facility.”

 

Clashes between keffiyeh-clad anti-ICE agitators and security escalated throughout late May (Senator Kim got indecently tear-gassed at one point). Last Friday, state and local police deployed around the facility, and a curfew was imposed. Yet, on Saturday night, the activists precipitated the worst violence yet.

 

Dozens of demonstrators were arrested; acting Attorney General Todd Blanche demonstrated with some graphic photo evidence that officers were beaten and even bitten by the rioters.

 

The demonstrators are driven by the conviction that Delaney Hall is basically an American Dachau.

 

“It’s a concentration camp, and they are disappearing people,” said Hetty Rosenstein, a former organizer with the Communications Workers of America. That sort of hyperbole has been echoed in the far-left press and by Democratic lawmakers. Kim himself has alleged that the roughly 800 detainees inside that facility experience “horrible conditions.” But in a recent interview with New York Magazine, Kim noted that the “main thing” that concerns detainees “is the fact that there’s just no movement when it comes to their cases.” That’s a far cry from the activists’ claims that migrants are being denied medical care and proper nutrition.

 

Indeed, Kim himself noted that he and his Democratic colleagues do have regular access to the facility. That has not stopped media outlets like CNN from spreading the idea that they can’t get in.

 

There’s more where this came from.

 

As one unnamed House Democrat confessed to Axios last year, the party’s base is fed up with the Democratic Party’s commitment to traditional civic engagement in this moment of emergency. “Some of them have suggested,” the Democrat added, “what we really need to do is be willing to get shot.” Judging by New Jersey, the party’s elected leaders aren’t going to do anything to disabuse them of this notion.