Protesters and the New Jersey State Police faced off outside a Newark immigration detention center late Saturday, hours after Gov. Mikie Sherrill urged demonstrators to remain peaceful after an overnight confrontation that led to multiple arrests.

Officers in riot gear formed shield lines outside the Delaney Hall detention center, while mounted troopers and officers on foot worked to push demonstrators back. Protesters pressed against police barricades and shields, wielded makeshift shields of their own and at times struggled with officers for control of metal fencing. Police later deployed tear gas and flash-bang grenades as they sought to disperse the crowd.

Earlier Saturday, at an afternoon news conference at a New Jersey State Police station in Newark, Sherrill said that demonstrators must “bring the temperature down” to avoid escalating immigration enforcement operations and endangering the lives of detainees and other immigrants in the state.

“We know what ICE has done in other states,” Sherrill said, standing beside the state’s attorney general and several law enforcement officials. “I refuse to let that happen in New Jersey. I will not give ICE a pretext to expand operations at Delaney Hall or across our state. I will not put lives at risk.”

The admonition Saturday followed the scuffle between protesters and state police late Friday night outside Delaney Hall, which has for the past week been the site of tense protests over living conditions at the facility.

That standoff with about 50 protesters resulted in the arrest of six demonstrators, four of whom had traveled from New York and one from Pennsylvania. State police had assumed control of the area after negotiating the withdrawal of federal agents in hopes of restoring order. However, tension mounted when demonstrators ignored repeated orders to move to a designated protest area, authorities said, prompting the deployment of a public safety response team after a crowd surrounded a law enforcement vehicle.

Sherrill said the troopers’ actions had been “absolutely necessary” to ensure that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents did not swarm the area outside Delaney Hall. She criticized the intrusion of “extremist groups” and demonstrators from outside the state, who she said had been interfering in the protests and distracting from the ultimate goal of improving conditions inside the detention center, and eventually closing it.

“To the people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations, you should not be here,” Sherrill said. “You are not helping the people detained at Delaney Hall, you are not helping detainee families and you’re certainly not keeping New Jersey safe.”

The flare-ups followed a week of tense encounters between protesters and federal agents outside the troubled detention center.

The groups have clashed frequently, with protesters sometimes taunting federal agents and the agents, in turn, tackling demonstrators, spraying chemical irritants and, in at least one case, beating a protester with a baton across the torso, thighs, knee and calves as he tried to flee.

On Wednesday, some members of a group of demonstrators were arrested, and Thursday night, a 26-year-old man from Morris County bit two agents who were attempting to remove him during a scuffle outside the facility, authorities said. The man, Brendan John Geier, was charged in New Jersey federal court Friday with assaulting federal officers and causing bodily injury. He was later released with limitations and barred from returning to Delaney Hall.

A lawyer for Geier could not immediately be reached Saturday.

Relatives of detainees and immigrant advocates have said that detainees inside the facility were beaten and doused with pepper spray this past week after some inmates began a hunger strike.

The Department of Homeland Security has denied that there was a hunger strike. The agency also said that there had been a fight involving detainees inside the detention center and that jail staff had broken it up. Officials said that detainees who had been affected had been evaluated by medical workers and that no one had been seriously hurt.

Sherrill said her focus remained on gaining full access to Delaney Hall for the members of her administration, restoring visitation for families and ensuring that detainees received proper medical care.

“We can’t let what’s happening outside Delaney Hall take us away from that mission,” she said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Maia Coleman and Mark Bonamo/Vincent Alban
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