Detainees facing no formal charges going on hunger strike.
Protestors outside the walls and barbed wire.
Rubber bullets being fired at protestors.
Long Kesh in the 1980s? No, Delaney Hall in New Jersey 2026.
The scenes outside this private detention facility in Newark do indeed conjure up memories of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the British government's policy of detention without trial.
The Delaney Hall internees are immigrants lacking full legal status.
They came to America hoping for a chance at freedom and a better life.
America's government said no.
Congress failed to counter this negative. Had current immigration policies and actions been in force in the late 1980s or early 1990s, Delaney Hall, or its then equivalent, might well have been filled to the wire with undocumented Irish.
Those currently behind the wire are mostly from Latin America.
The where they come from is less relevant than the stance taken against them by the federal government.
The rubber bullets were fired at demonstrators outside Delaney Hall by ICE agents.
Anyone with knowledge of the use of rubber bullets during the hard years in Northern Ireland knows full well that rubber bullets are potentially lethal.
Detainees and their supporters point to degrading and inhumane treatment in a facility that was actually founded as a rehabilitation center before becoming a detention one.
A headline in the New York Times speaks to the divided view of the place and its more than reluctant inhabitants: "ICE Says Detainees Are 'Worst Of The Worst' Government Data Disagrees."
Lately, and in the 250th anniversary of the Republic, we are at a crossroads with regard to America and immigration.
Immigration has never been an entirely smooth process.
America's welcome mat has been laid out only to be faced with periodic backlashes, both at the street and government level.
But overall the country's self image, and the image prevailing around the world, has been mostly one of that welcoming mat as exemplified, magnificently, by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
Lady Liberty has pretty much seen it all: the hopeful arriving by the shipload at Ellis Island and later in the harbor berths below her gaze.
New Americans arriving overhead in planes.
She has also witnessed various political acts of exclusion.
Now, not too far away from her perch on Liberty Island, it is the detention of would-be immigrants and the firing of rubber bullets.
And there was this arising from a federal appeals panel last week expressing skepticism about the Trump administration’s view that courts are powerless to stop the construction of the White House ballroom now that the East Wing had been demolished.
A judge said this to a Justice Department attorney: “If the government decides, very quickly, to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty — the people whose ancestors that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast — nothing can be done?”
“I think that’s right, yes,” the government attorney responded.
We can assume that demolishing the Statue of Liberty is not a plan on any government desk.
But rendering the statue - and all that it stands for - increasingly irrelevant would appear to be.
