While right-wing influencers were outside Delaney Hall in Newark filming fistfights for clicks and DHS was busy insisting there was nothing to see inside, a small grassroots FM radio station run by immigrant workers was doing something old-fashioned and apparently radical: actual journalism. Radio Jornalera NJ, which translates to Workers' Radio NJ, has been the most consistent, credible, and frankly gutsy press presence at what has become one of the most contested ICE detention sites in the country. They have a volunteer reporter who got arrested for the privilege.
One Guy, One Phone Call, Police Back Down
Here is the kind of thing Richard Torres does on a normal week. State police were turning families away from Delaney Hall's gates last week, even though official visitation hours were supposed to be running. Some of these families had driven hours to get there. The cops at the barricade weren't budging.
Torres, the director of Radio Jornalera NJ, called the detention center directly, confirmed visitation was in fact on, and then went back to the police line and questioned officers repeatedly and personally until they let the families through. Then he got on Instagram and told the community exactly what had happened, in Spanish, in plain terms. 'Officials now know that families are allowed in,' he said in the video, according to the Guardian's reporting. That's it. That's the whole playbook. Call, confirm, confront, broadcast.
Torres told the Guardian his outlet's core mission is to 'empower people and build trust around the community.' Which sounds like something any news director would say, except Torres and his team are actually doing it in an industrial stretch outside Newark while police are making arrests.
What's Actually Happening Inside Delaney Hall
Delaney Hall has been a pressure cooker for weeks. The Guardian has previously reported on a hunger and labor strike by dozens of detained immigrants inside the facility. The Department of Homeland Security and GEO Group, the private prison contractor running the site, have denied there is any strike happening and insist conditions are not 'subprime,' which is a genuinely remarkable word choice for a place people are going on hunger strike to escape.
New Jersey has filed a lawsuit against GEO Group so that Governor Mikie Sherrill can get full access to the facility. Sherrill, a Democrat, has taken heat from some activists over how aggressively she has pushed back, which tells you something about how bad things at Delaney Hall look to people paying close attention.
Meanwhile, detained immigrants have been releasing letters and statements. Radio Jornalera NJ has been outside constantly, interviewing people who have just been released, documenting protests, and providing rolling updates on whether families can even get in on a given day. According to the Guardian, the outlet has been doing this while other media was largely focused on the more visually dramatic protest clashes.
The Media Circus Nobody's Talking About
The scene outside Delaney Hall has not exactly been a model of responsible journalism. Social media streamers have been broadcasting for hours at a stretch, some getting arrested in the process. Right-wing influencers have shown up to antagonize protesters and clip violent moments for content, feeding directly into the Trump administration's framing of the whole situation as a law-and-order crisis rather than a human rights one.
That is the information environment Radio Jornalera NJ is working inside of. Every piece of footage they put out exists alongside a firehose of bad-faith content designed to discredit the people inside. Their counter-strategy is straightforward: keep the camera on detained immigrants and their families, keep reporting the conditions, and don't let the story get swallowed by the spectacle outside the gates.
Asela Perez-Ortiz, the outlet's media production coordinator, put it simply while standing outside Delaney Hall. 'It's been hard for the past couple of days being out here,' she told the Guardian. 'But it doesn't really compare to the things that people inside Delaney Hall are going through. At the end of the day, we have to keep in mind we're doing it all for them.'
A Volunteer Got Arrested. They Kept Publishing.
On May 31st, a Radio Jornalera NJ volunteer reporter was arrested by state police while wearing visible press credentials, Torres told the Guardian. She was released the next day along with others. Local groups are currently pushing officials to drop the charges.
Read that again: a credentialed reporter got arrested for being at a public demonstration, and the outlet she works for kept releasing multiple videos per day. Radio Jornalera NJ has young volunteer reporters, people who, as Torres told the Guardian, 'always wanted to do journalism or media or filming, and never got a chance.' This is their outlet. And their first major story is covering a crackdown on the community they come from, getting arrested in the process.
Torres is not particularly dramatic about it. The work continues. The videos go out. The Instagram posts get updated.
How This Outlet Actually Got Built
Radio Jornalera NJ did not start as a response to Delaney Hall. Resistencia en Accion, an immigrant advocacy group in New Jersey, launched it in 2021 after members of the immigrant community came to them with a specific, clear-eyed complaint about mainstream press coverage.
'They said: hey, we want to build our own narrative. We want to have an outlet where we can say everything that's happening. We're only getting used by the press, they're always looking for a way to use our stories,' Torres told the Guardian. So the community built something of their own. What started as one outlet grew: other advocacy groups and community members launched their own shows. Radio Jornalera NJ now runs eight shows, according to its website, covering labor rights, domestic workers, local activism, healthcare, and public policy.
It is part of a wider network of independent Radio Jornalera outlets in California, Minnesota, and Washington DC, each independently run. Torres is clear that this is not a top-down media organization with a managing editor somewhere assigning beats. It is a community that decided it needed to tell its own story and figured out how.
The Dingo Take
The thing about Radio Jornalera NJ that should make every legacy outlet feel a little sick is that they are doing the basic work of local journalism, the stuff that newsrooms used to staff up to do, with volunteers who are risking arrest to do it. One of those volunteers did get arrested. The outlet's response was to post more videos.
While GEO Group and DHS are running interference and right-wing content farms are turning detained immigrants into engagement bait, a grassroots FM station born out of a community meeting in 2021 is standing at the gates asking cops why families can't get in and broadcasting the answers in Spanish. That's the competition. That's the bar legacy media is failing to clear.
Delaney Hall is not going to be the last place this happens. The Trump administration has made large-scale detention a centerpiece of its immigration enforcement strategy, and private contractors like GEO Group are going to keep insisting nothing is wrong while people inside go on hunger strike. The question of who controls the story about those places matters enormously. Right now, in New Jersey at least, the answer is a small team of workers with press credentials and a phone. Good.
