The Little Hours of Delaney Hall

O God, come to my assistance. The DHS detention center is in an industrial part of Newark, in between some warehouses and the county prison, a few hundred yards from where the Passaic River flows into the bay. This area must have been estuary before it was concrete—they tell me the stink was terrible when they had protests here in the summer. But on a January afternoon, there was only an occasional smell of gas when some valve was opened in the fuel depot across the street. Behind the fence, above the barbed wire, large letters stuck to the gray cinderblocks told us this was Delaney Hall, the main immigration detention facility in the New York area.