Immigration News Politics
Librarian organizes unionists against ICE
By Kwadjo Otoo
Librarian Karl Schwartz first visited the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in 2017, before national news headlines captured ICE officers and anti-ICE protesters in a kind of combat, replete with billy clubs and tear gas.
“It’s kind of this dystopian atmosphere … I’ve heard others refer to it as a sacrifice zone,” said Schwartz, who works at the Newark Public Library Van Buren branch.
Schwartz, who has been protesting at Delaney for the past nine years, co-leads year-old Labor Eyes On ICE, a coalition of union workers from various sectors who are challenging Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics at Delaney Hall.
Schwartz had been quick to sign on as a collaborator when Ryan Novosielski, of Local 5094 of the Health Professionals and Allied Employees at Rutgers University Biomedical and Health Science division, reached out about picketing outside Delaney regularly. Early on, Labor Eyes On ICE, didn’t attract many supporters.
“It was very small,” Schwartz said. “But, also, there was … a lot of enthusiasm. We said, ‘You know, this is good that we got out this first time. But how can we make this bigger?’”
Other coalition members come from such organizations as Cosecha, a nationwide immigrant rights group, and the Democratic Socialists of America. State Sen. Andy Kim and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka are among elected officials who have stood beside Labor Eyes on ICE picketers in front of Delaney’s gates.
“I don’t want to attribute the releases to any single group,” said Schwartz, 37, of Delaney’s recent release of a New York City Council staffer and a New Jersey high schooler, among others. “But I think people are getting released … because of all the pressure that’s going on on the streets outside Delaney Hall.”
After graduating with a master’s degree in library science from Rutgers University’s Newark campus, Schwartz became a librarian at the branch serving the largely Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American Ironbound neighborhood. He lived there for roughly two years before seeing what, with its 1,000 beds, is the East Coast’s largest immigration detention facility. (The largest in the nation is at Fort Bliss and holds 5,000 detainees.) Delaney is eight miles from Ironbound.
During several recent raids, ICE has detained local undocumented workers, including ones at Oceans Seafood Depot, an Ironbound fish market in Ironbound.
“The problem with this is that none of these people were rapists or murderers or criminals,” Baraka told journalists and others, concerning a 2025 raid. “The problem with this is that ICE went in there without a warrant. We can disagree on politics … What we must agree on is that the thing that separates this country from many other countries around the world is the Constitution of the United States.”
Those beliefs are what compel Schwartz. “The compassion in his work makes him someone that is always political,” Schwartz’s wife, author and librarian, Maisy Card, said of her husband. “ … He can draw people in but also knows how to be safe.”
Protesting can be risky. Cars trying to enter Delaney have hit two protesters. Federal officials arrested a protester they allege bit an officer.
Schwartz views himself as a concerned community member who couldn’t look away from what’s happening.
“Either you can sit at home and you can just watch people’s rights getting violated every day or you can go out and try to do something,” Schwartz said. “We just can’t give up. We have to fight back. There’s no other option.”
Beth Zak-Cohen is president of the union representing Newark’s public librarians.
“In general, libraries are serving our communities and it’s our communities these policies are hurting,” Zak-Cohen said.
Schwartz recalled a student he encountered at the library where he works. Weeping, he said, she asked what she should do if her parents were abducted. She was born a citizen but had never been to her parents’ home country. No response to that question, for him, could ever be good enough.
“We definitely knew after that we needed to do something to help the community and to grapple with this fear,” Schwartz said.
Delaney is tucked inside an industrial area. A parking lot separates it from neighboring Essex County Correctional Facility.
“You’re never going to see it … If you’re not in the group of people that are directly affected by it, it’s easy to kind of get on living your life and not think too much about it,” Schwartz said.
“We need to build a world where we just don’t have these heavily militarized borders, where people are desperate people, where you are the victims of [your] own government.”