Anti-ICE “rioters” allegedly blasted federal immigration officers with a chemical substance during a raucous protest that erupted Tuesday outside a Newark immigration detention center for the fifth straight day.
The riotous overnight clash exploded outside Delaney Hall when violent agitators sprayed federal officers with an unknown chemical agent as authorities tried to quell the chaos outside the facility, according to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
Shocking footage showed mobs of masked, keffiyeh-clad rabble-rousers squaring off with dozens of ICE agents, blocking vehicles and causing mayhem outside the detention center.
Mullin said two “rioters” were arrested for assaulting, resisting, and impeding federal officers.
“Assaulting and obstructing ICE law enforcement is a crime and a felony,” he fumed on X. “Anyone who assaults law enforcement will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
President Trump called the demonstrators “all paid-for protesters” during a cabinet meeting in the White House.
“These aren’t protesters. These people are fake,” he said when asked about the ongoing protests outside the facility.
Crowds had thinned by Wednesday morning, as roughly 30 armed ICE agents manned the front gate.
Delaney Hall has been a hotbed of unrest since Friday, when detainees reportedly launched a hunger and labor strike to protest conditions inside the 1,000-bed facility.
Anti-ICE protests have spiraled into growing violence in recent days, with tensions boiling over after Gov. Mikie Sherrill joined demonstrators at the facility on Monday in what DHS dismissed as a “political stunt.”
The migrants inside claim they have been served tainted food, packed into rooms without air conditioning, and had their immigration cases ignored by federal judges, the New Jersey Monitor reported.
However, DHS insists conditions inside its centers are actually maintained “higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold U.S. citizens” and denied claims of a hunger strike.
Mullin on Wednesday said that only “a handful” of detainees have been skipping meals because they’re requesting “ethnic” food.
“Well, they can go back to their country, get whatever food they want,” he said during the Wednesday cabinet meeting. “The fact is, we’re giving them the calories they want. This isn’t Holiday Inn.”
Mullin also blasted Sherill and other left Garden State pols for joining the rowdy protests on Memorial Day.
“It shows the radical left Democrats’ priorities when they decide to go out and protest a detention center where we’re housing rapists, child predators, murderers, drug dealers — and they choose Memorial Day?”