Will Bunch doesn't pull any punches as he goes after NJ Gov. Mikie Sherrill in his latest column.
"When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016 and the United States began its decade-long spiral into authoritarian madness, there arose a popular meme: Whatever you think you would have done to stop the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, or to end American racial injustice in the 1960s, is what you are doing right now.
"Today, a humanitarian tragedy is taking place behind barbed wire and rows of riot cops in the industrial netherlands of Newark, where immigrants snatched by masked agents of American secret police are held in a private lockup called Delaney Hall in squalid conditions — fed rancid food, denied proper medical care, and fearing for their lives.
"What are good people doing right now? As news of a detainee hunger strike inside Delaney Hall reached the outside world, a few hundred protesters have made their way toward the gates of the facility run by the for-profit GEO Group — to voice support for the strikers, demand humane treatment, and, for some of them, put their bodies on the line to commit acts of civil disobedience against a human-rights catastrophe on American soil.
"What is New Jersey’s newish Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill doing right now?
"For two nights now, a battalion of Sherrill’s New Jersey State Police — who the first-year governor had claimed would “lower the temperature” in Newark — has turned up the heat to 11 by firing rubber bullets, tear-gas canisters, and flash-bang grenades while violently pushing back the demonstrators, both with mounted officers on horseback and with riot shields and batons.
“They shot me four times,” Ian Austin, a military veteran from Bryan Athyn, told a livestreaming journalist outside Delaney Hall, revealing large red welts on his torso and his left leg before he returned to the front of barricades with a bullhorn, shouting, “We’re willing to (bleeping) die here!”
"Thankfully, no one has died in the Newark protest … yet. But human-rights protesters and free-speech advocates are stunned that militarized cops under the command of a Democratic governor who claims to be fighting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s humanitarian abuses are using such aggressive tactics against citizens fighting the cause she claims to support."
