(RNS) — Moments before Department of Homeland Security agents fired a hail of pepper balls at the feet of demonstrators outside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, last Monday (May 25), faith leaders say they were frantically working to calm things down.
Kathy O’Leary, coordinator of the Catholic group Pax Christi New Jersey, said she was helping to push the crowd back. Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, said she and a Christian pastor had placed themselves between agents and demonstrators, raising their hands aloft. And the Rev. Robin Tanner, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Summit, New Jersey, said she was conversing with DHS agents as she stood beside U.S. Sen. Andy Kim, who had come to visit Delaney amid reports of a hunger and labor strike staged by detainees alleging inhumane conditions inside.
Then, unexpectedly, DHS agents unleashed the volley of pepper balls. All three faith leaders — along with Kim — were exposed, some left coughing and sputtering as bystanders rushed to help.
“We got hit with the same pepper spray,” said Tanner. “(Kim) got his in his eyes, and I got mine up my nose.”
A DHS spokesperson said in a statement to RNS that the agents used the “minimum amount of force necessary” against “rioters” who “obstructed law enforcement from exiting the ICE facility,” but demonstrators allege the incident is one of many cases of law enforcement using unnecessary force outside Delaney Hall in the last two weeks. During that period, one religious organ …