New Jersey
How Indigenous chefs and farmers are restoring Native American cuisine in New Jersey
There aren’t many places to get indigenous food in New Jersey. You may even not know what Native American food is. A handful of local chefs and farmers are working to change that.
Leo Cordier ran away to home.
After seven years in the foster care system, he left Colorado Springs at age 16 and drove to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he was born, to rejoin his Sicangu Lakota tribe. He brought gifts.
“Going through Nebraska, we’d see box turtles, and I’d get all those turtles and I’d put them in a box in the back of the car,” Cordier says.
He parked at his great-grandmother’s house on the reservation and, overcome with the emotion of being home, he left the box of turtles in his car and walked around the neighborhood, cataloging what had changed and what hadn’t.
When he got back, his great-grandmother had already found the turtles — and was preparing turtle soup.
“Coming back home is very sacred and a common thing for Natives, because we’ve always been displaced or taken away by foster care or boarding schools,” said Cordier. “We have a saying: ‘We always come back.’ My great-grandmother was able to make me that turtle soup as my gift for returning.”
Cordier was reminded of this homecoming story while putting together a menu — turkey breaded with amaranth flour, bison chili, blue corn bread with wojapi and that turtle soup — for Indigenous People’s Day (Oct. 14) events he’ll service through his Indigenous food business, Buffalo Jump NYC.
“My people’s elders mention how they miss turtle soup, so that’s my secret surprise,” he says.
Buffalo Jump NYC is one of the only Indigenous food purveyors in the tri-state area, which is to say it’s one of the only in the U.S.: there are more NFL teams than restaurants serving Native American cuisine in this country.
The scarcity is due to financial obstacles for tribal members, the destruction of ecosystems and historic Indigenous foodways, and a general misunderstanding (or no understanding at all) of what Native American food is.
But a handful of Indigenous people in New Jersey and beyond are working to restore their cuisine in kitchens, classrooms, community centers and farms and elsewhere. The payoff of this work is the revitalization of centuries-old, truly local cooking and the improvement of Indigenous people’s lives. It’s also, these Indigenous food makers say, a recognition of a people long forgotten.
“We are the most invisible diaspora in the United States,” Cordier says.
Chef Joe Rocchi, a Native foods educator in Pennsauken, New Jersey, and a member of the Pamunkey tribe, puts it this way: “Natives aren’t discriminated against because they’re Natives. They’re discriminated against because they don’t exist.”
What is Native American cuisine?
Rocchi recalls asking an instructor about Indigenous cuisine while studying at the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College. He was told there wasn’t one.
After training in the Marine Corps and earning his culinary degree, Rocchi spent a decade building a career in fine dining and opening several casinos in the Philadelphia area. But that original question — what did his ancestors eat? — kept gnawing at him.
“About 10 years in, I asked myself a question: Why can I speak on a niche pasta from the Puglia region of Italy and I’ve never set foot there, but if you ask me a question about Native American food culture, I didn’t have much to say. And I didn’t like the answer.”
He didn’t like the answer because he didn’t have one. So he turned to his mom. He didn’t like her answer — ’I don’t know, we ate chicken casserole?’ — either.
“If your Native American recipe starts with two cans of Campbell’s soup, that’s not Native American,” he says.
Rocchi’s story is common among indigenous people, particularly here in the Northeast. The culinary history of any one family, clan or tribe was lost or obscured in the centuries of violence against Native people and mass relocation of tribes, often to environments with vastly different flora and fauna, from the time Europeans first set foot on American soil in the 1600s.
There are two wicked ironies therein: 1) That if one does happen to think of a Native American food item, it’s frybread, a result of Natives surviving on reservations by making do with measly government rations of flour and lard. And 2) Staple foods we associate with more heralded, European cuisine — tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, beans — originated in the Americas.
“You would not have pizza or pasta without us. You wouldn’t have French dishes or French sauces without Indigenous ingredients,” says Brooke Rodriguez, the Borikua Taino co-owner of Buffalo Jump NYC and founder of Grinding Stone Collective, which works to restore Indigenous foodways in New Jersey and the Northeast. “For [people] to not have that knowledge plays into some much colonialism and Indigenous erasure.”
The examples are endless.
“Ratatouille, you take away the basil you’ve got nothing but Native ingredients,” Cordier says.
“I found out barbecue, as we know it today, the roots of that started in Virginia. When the English traders got here, they saw what Native Americans were doing with smoking with hickory woods over an open hearth,” Rocchi says.
Rocchi, unsatisfied with the answers he was getting about what actually is Indigenous food, did some internet sleuthing, eventually contacting local anthropologists and historians, who helped him discover the culinary history of not only his Pamunkey people, but tribes throughout the country. With a better understanding of Native food, he started to make Indigenous meals at select events (like an Indigenous dinner at Princeton Theological Seminary’s farm on Nov. 7), and switched careers into culinary education, so he can pass on this knowledge.
Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota Sioux chef and author who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, has become an authority on Indigenous cooking. His cookbook, “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” and his Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni, both won James Beard Awards.
Sherman says his focus in cultivating the menu at Owamni was not to replicate what was done in the past, necessarily, but to follow Indigenous food traditions of eating local, native foods, prepared simply, but with culinary adaptations for a modern audience.
“I first just cut out colonial ingredients to showcase a lot of the diversity of food through these different cultures: dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, chicken,” Sherman says. “We really try to feature regional foods by paying homage to the land we’re standing on and the tribes that were here.”
Though Owamni’s menus are thus local to Minnesota, it’s helpful to review them to get a sense of what types of meals modern Indigenous food looks like: bison picahna (chile crisp aioli, roasted tomato, pumpkin seed oil and cured duck yolk) and a smoked rack of elk (with pumpkin carrot purée and cranberry mint) along with plenty of local plant-forward dishes and a menu of teas all made from local herbs.
“I think we try to keep things really simple. Our food isn’t laced with lots of butter and cream, so it comes off really clean,” Sherman says. “A lot of plant diversity, protein diversity. We push a lot of crickets just to showcase protein diversity.”
To put a fine point on it, Indigenous cuisine is a wide variety of dishes made from locally sourced plants and animals that are native to the region in which they’re being served.
Sometimes, though, the foods native to a region are no longer there. Earlier this year, Rodriguez and Grinding Stone Collective held a bison harvest with about 100 people from the Ramapough Munsee Lenape Indian Nation in Mahwah.
“Largely, Eastern Indians are deer people, but they’re also bison people,” Rodriguez says, citing the historic existence of bison in the Northeast. “We skinned the animal and harvested it, and that meat was distributed among the people, and they’re still working on the hide.”
Rocchi recently provided an art show with Indigenous cooking to promote his platform of restoring food sovereignty to Native people. He offered braised bison short rib with wojapi-infused barbecue sauce, sumac dust and jicama slaw; sous-vide duck breast with butternut squash risotto; and a sweet corn parfait. He also made a colorful “three sisters” fettuccine dish with pasta made of squash, beans and corn, in homage to the Indigenous agricultural practice of planting those three crops in a symbiotic pattern that improves drought tolerance, deters pests and boosts soil health.
Millenia-old Native American ingenuity like that is evident in that dish. Providing a platform for that approach to food is what these food makers are trying to do, but it’s also what was almost lost in the last few centuries of violence against Indigenous people.
Why is there no Native American cuisine in New Jersey?
If you want the short answer it’s because Native people have been displaced throughout the country through the reservation system, they’ve battled environmental, financial and health issues, and access to agricultural and foraging grounds to get the native foods integral to their cuisine has effectively been eradicated. Colonization shattered Indigenous culture so thoroughly that only a few Native people have been able to piece together a culinary enterprise that is reflective of their history.
If you want the long story, ask Michaeline Picaro.
Picaro is a member of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, which encompasses Passaic and Sussex counties. She and Vincent Mann, chief of Turtle Clan of the Ramapough, started the 14-acre Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Sussex County in 2019.
The Ramapough are one of three state-recognized tribes in the state (along with the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and the Powhatan Renape). Picaro, though, refers to the group of people in this region via their shared Algonquin dialect: Munsee. This group spanned most of New Jersey into Pennsylvania and New York. They were among the first Native people to encounter Europeans.
By the late 1800s, many of these Munsee-speaking Lenape people were relocated out of New Jersey — to New York, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Kansas and elsewhere. Today, there are more Lenape in Oklahoma and Wisconsin than in New Jersey. There are, at most, 5,000 Ramapough in New Jersey.
Those who stayed have faced hardship. The Ford Motor Co. turned a section of Ringwood into a Superfund site by dumping hazardous waste; housing for the Ramapough was built on that site even though it was never fully remediated, leading to high cancer rates and other adverse health outcomes. (The Record ran a five-part series on the dumping after a nearly yearlong investigation.)
Picaro says it’s just one example (of many) of why expecting Indigenous people to enter the food industry misses the point. They’re still fighting for survival, she says. The plight in Ringwood led her and Mann to consider how they could help, but they had few answers.
“Over the years, we’ve had notable people, congressmen and mayors, the [Department of Environmental Protection] … everybody’s been out here, but nothing happens. All the powerful people and all the movies, all the documentaries and newspaper articles … it gets silence,” Picaro says. “You figure what are you going to do other than win the lottery? Get a job? I have three jobs. Do you ask a dying people to get more jobs? OK, that makes a lot of sense. They have to help themselves out of a mess that was literally dumped on them?”
Picaro and Mann started the farm in hopes it would provide enough free food for the Ramapough people in need. They found a plot of land that had Munsee-Lenape artifacts on it: oyster shells and mortar and pestles. They still had to lease it, though. “That’s like generational trauma to know you have to pay full price, to know you have to ask your landlord what you can and cannot do on that land,” Picaro says.
She says she forewent a mortgage payment on her home in order to rent a tractor for a week. To irrigate the crops, they filled a tote with water from a hose, plugged the sprayer into their truck battery and watered the crops. “Indige-nuity,” Picaro says.
“This is what we did to get it moving in the right direction. So when you go back to that question of why isn’t there more organization in our tribe, well there’s a lot you have to give up in your daily sustainable life to do that extra thing you should be getting money for,” she says.
They were able to donate about 9,000 pounds of food in the first few years, but the last two years have been rough, with floods, other blight and an inability to secure labor. They have been awarded grants, however, to ensure more fruitful harvests in the future.
Imagine trying to make a cuisine without being able to understand how it’s described, or being unable to access the ingredients necessary to make it. Other cultures had relatively uninterrupted lines of communication and access to their homelands. Indigenous people didn’t, and that foundational food knowledge was lost in the centuries of relocation and separation from their tribal members.
So the question isn’t really why aren’t there more Indigenous restaurants, it’s how are there any at all?
How Indigenous people are restoring native food in New Jersey
It’s yet another irony that Indigenous people are the most relocated group in the country. Sometimes, though not often, that relocation is a positive.
Before launching Buffalo Jump NYC, Cordier worked at food halls on his reservation but was also an active participant in Indigenous protests. He was a member of the Red Warrior Camp, which organized direct-action nonviolent protests against pipeline builders at the Standing Rock Reservation in 2016.
After that experience, Cordier was given the option to fight another pipeline: the Pilgrim Pipeline in Mahwah in 2017. It was a less heated protest than Standing Rock — Cordier says he was “able to find his Zen” — and it was there he met Rodriguez, too. After working in a few New York City kitchens and making a few connections, Cordier started catering corporate and nonprofit events with Indigenous food. In just a few years, he was serving food at the first gathering of Indigenous people at Gracie Mansion in New York City in 2023.
Buffalo Jump NYC serves Indigenous food at the Queens Night Market every week, but also does special events in New Jersey and New York. The hope is to open a brick-and-mortar store next year. That’s a start to raising the profile of Indigenous food, but much work is being done to restore the foodways that will help foster more.
Rodriguez and Grinding Stone Collective do this, in part, through workshops, cooking demonstrations and events meant to teach folks about Indigenous food culture, food justice and climate change. They also operate an inter-tribal food pantry to get food from Native producers to Indigenous communities in need. And they’re turning plots of land into Native gardens for use by Indigenous chefs and communities. The group is currently planting 275 species with Sly Fox Den in Rhode Island and has similar plans for the Ramapough community in New Jersey.
Rodriguez says their efforts are rooted in education, reciprocity and action; for instance, they fed 2,000 people with poi, a native taro-based Hawaiian food, after the Maui fires. Intention matters, Rodriguez says, and it guides her group’s actions.
“I think more than anything, Indigenous food sovereignty is a collection of prayers over time,” she says. The guiding force behind starting the collective was the “larger history of not having access to traditional foods, bad health outcomes and not having access to historic hunting grounds due to colonization.”
Rocchi is also restoring foodways among Indigenous communities. He’s working with the Traditional Eastern Woodland Foodways Alliance (TEWFA) to achieve some audacious goals in the area; for instance, the group aims to accommodate every Indigenous person’s food needs in the lower mid-Atlantic region by 2040, with 80% of that coming from Indigenous food suppliers.
Restoring those foodways is a way to restore the community, Rocchi says: “Through food you can change a lot of people.”
And through the North American Tradition Indigenous Food Systems (NĀTIFS) program, Sean Sherman and the USDA are creating connections between Indigenous producers, chefs, tribal members and greater communities by building marketplaces for Indigenous food. In doing so, they also raise awareness of Indigenous food. They’ve also filmed a series of cooking demos from Indigenous chefs tailored to specific regions, including the Northeast. Sherman hopes he can bring an Indigenous market and food concept to the Northeast in the future.
Success looks different to all the people working in New Jersey and beyond, but it starts with ensuring that Indigenous people have control over where their food comes from and that they have enough of it. A greater emphasis on Indigenous food will likely lead to better agricultural processes in this country, and a greater appreciation among the general public for the foods native to the Americas.
But success also looks like an Indigenous restaurant on your town’s Main Street, Sherman says.
“We just want to see more normalization of Native foods,” he says. “We want the next generation of kids, when they go out to eat, are deciding if they want pizza or Chinese … or Native American. We just want to be on that list.”
Matt Cortina is a food writer for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at mcortina@gannett.com.
For hours, the masked protesters and masked ICE agents have stood staring at each other, separated by a thin strip of asphalt. At the edges of the crowd, New Jersey state troopers stand around, arms crossed, looking bored. Daylight hours at Newark’s Delaney Hall immigration detention center are quieter, the crowds thinner, the officers behind the gates more relaxed. It’s when, until recently, families could still go in and out, visiting their relatives inside. But when night falls, things change.
“When sunset happens, they’re going to push us into that cage and mace the fuck out of us,” says a street medic we’ll call Egg. “When they come, they’ll come hard and fast.”
The cage Egg is referring to is a small square of orange fencing set up on the street outside of Delaney Hall. It’s there because New Jersey’s new Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill, has for days tried to quell the protests outside of the detention center, and has determined that what demonstrators need is a designated “protected speech zone.” Temporary fencing isn’t going to cut it, though — not for the protesters and certainly not for the detainees suffering inside of Delaney Hall.
On May 22, a group of detainees in DHS custody began a hunger and labor strike over what they claimed were inhumane conditions inside the facility. In a series of letters, detainees described a horrific list of ailments and injustices, including the persistent spread of disease, long response times by guards in the case of accident and injury, worm-riddled food, insufficient medical care, and dilapidated bathrooms that were in “inhumane condition.”
“We’d like to apologize for the way we entered the United States,” the detainees wrote. “Our American dream is safety and protection — with our families. Although this is a difficult situation, we trust in God and believe in American justice.”
Thus far, the detainees wrote, American justice has been hard to find. They claim that after surrendering themselves to U.S. authorities, they have been held for months, even when they sought to voluntarily return to their country of origin. One of the letters contained hundreds of signatures of detainees who were desperate to get out of Delaney Hall, offering to leave the country by any means just to escape the conditions inside. As news trickled out of the center, families of the detainees set up aid tents and resource centers outside, helping visitors meet with their loved ones during visiting hours. But as the DHS continued to ignore the detainees’ demands for more humane treatment, protests picked up steam, and pressure mounted to allow a full inspection of the facility.
On Monday, Sherrill and other New Jersey politicians attempted to visit the facility. They were allowed inside, but denied full access. “My request for access to Delaney Hall was formally denied this morning, raising serious questions about what they are trying to hide from public view,” Sherrill wrote in a statement afterwards. “I will continue to hold ICE accountable. … In New Jersey, we believe in the rule of law and that everyone deserves to be treated with basic dignity.”
Protests outside the facility, meanwhile, spiraled into violence. ICE agents flooded waves of protesters — including New Jersey Senator Andy Kim — with pepper spray, smashing their bodies into the ground and, in one case, into oncoming traffic on the road outside. They shot pepper balls and fired tear gas. The crowds outside mounted. Delaney Hall canceled visiting hours.
On Friday night, Sherrill sent in the state police — not to open or inspect the facility, but to clear the streets of protesters.
I ARRIVED at Delaney Hall at around 6:30 on Friday evening. Jersey state troopers had closed the road more than half a mile from the facility in either direction, stemming the near-constant flow of semi-truck traffic. Delaney Hall is in a desolate, industrial area of Newark, on a straight strip of road that passes the county jail, shipping companies, an asphalt plant and several fuel depots. When the wind picked up from the south, I could smell the sewage treatment plant nearby. As I approached the facility, I passed an organized row of tents and port-a-potties set up by activists to support families of detainees, along with stacks of boxes overflowing with protective equipment: respirators, goggles, masks, even knee and elbow pads. In front of Delaney Hall, a loose crowd of protesters was set up in the street. Militant, masked anti-fascists stared down a line of ICE agents in full combat gear — body armor, helmets, guns — standing at the gates of the facility.
It was still daylight, and the mood was largely calm. Some elderly protesters chanted and sang on a megaphone, priests and clergy drifted around, activists pushed carts of water and snacks. No one paid much attention to Sherrill’s “protected speech zone,” except to use the empty blacktop as a canvas for chalk art. But there were signs that everyone expected the night to get much more tense.
“You know what’s next, just go home!” a guy wearing a surgical mask in the crowd shouted abruptly. He wasn’t speaking to ICE, though; he was addressing the state troopers loitering around the edges of the protest. “You don’t have to be here! Go home to your wife and children!”
I moved around the crowd, chatting with protesters. Most didn’t want to give their real names. As activism has been increasingly criminalized since Donald Trump retook office, the rank and file of America’s protest movements have become more and more private about who they are. Eventually, I met Egg, the street medic. “Mikie Sherrill sold us out — now they’re here to tell us to fuck off,” he said, motioning to the state police. Egg explained what he thought would happen next. Because of the clashes with ICE agents, who had been brutalizing protesters for days, Egg thought that Sherrill had sent in the state police to keep the protesters in line. He wasn’t impressed with the “cage” — the “protected speech area” — but figured it would be an excuse for the staties to clear the streets later on. He assumed that when it got dark, we’d get a dispersal order, and anyone who didn’t comply would get fucked up. “We’re still here because it’s the right thing to do,” Egg said.
A few minutes later, I sidled up to one of the staties nearby. I asked if they had a timeline in mind, a curfew or a dispersal order at the ready. “Not that I know of.” he shrugged, casually.
But the crowds outside had a clear goal in mind.
“We’re not out here to be like ‘fuck ICE, fuck the state police,’” another protester, who called himself Roland, told me. “We’re here to support them,” he added, motioning to the detainees inside. Delaney Hall is not a huge complex: from the street, you can hear detainees yelling, and see their silhouettes in some of the barred windows.
As dusk fell, things stayed quiet. Protesters sat on the asphalt, taking a moment of rest. “Fuck you ICE!” one yelled, in between bites of a bodega sandwich. There was a brief interlude in which a group of protesters went over to yell at a right-wing livestreamer who showed up to “evangelize,” he said. A smattering of other conservative influencers and streamers also wandered around, largely ignored. Everyone, including me, had a persistent dry cough. One photographer told me he thought so much pepper spray had been deployed that week that its residue was infused into the dust and dirt on either side of the street.
At 9 p.m., though, things started to change. Some of the state troopers, who were in their normal duty uniforms, pulled back off the streets. A few street medics made their way through the crowd with some intel: ICE was planning a shift change. Clashes often happen when vehicles are moving in and out of the facility; earlier in the week, ICE had relocated a detainee that was involved in the internal protests to another facility, prompting outrage from family members and protesters alike. As twilight gave way to darkness, the crowd split as a commotion broke out down the street. The state police were back. On a loudspeaker, a sergeant read out an order to disperse. The crowd yelled back. The sergeant’s SUV drove away. In the distance to the north, way down the street, a line of riot police appeared.
This was it: what both cops and protesters had been waiting for. Everyone pulled on their masks. For the moment, the ICE agents were forgotten. The riot line marched down the street, getting right up in the faces of the protest’s front line. “GET BACK. GET BACK. GET BACK,” the cops chanted, voices muffled by their gas masks. They tossed a volley of flash-bang grenades, three concussions that ripped down the street. The protesters fell back, and the cops stomped forward. Behind the riot line, a squad of mounted police tried to form up, their massive bay horses dancing around as the grenades went off. The line had passed me by quickly as I stood on the sidewalk and expanded to fill the entire width of the street, trapping me in a strange liminal space to the side of the cops’ back line. I watched an officer with a grenade launcher raise and fire a canister of tear gas down the street, and heard it explode with a bang as gas billowed out and blew back towards him. The riot line split abruptly, and the mounted unit charged into the gap forcing the protesters back even more: medieval battle tactics adapted for use on modern streets. The riot line reached the protected speech area, ripping aside the orange fences, the metal clangs making the huge horses skitter at odd angles as they retreated. On the fringes, the troopers started to make arrests, slamming several protesters to the ground. I watched them lead an old man, eyes streaming, groaning and retching, down the street, his hands zip-tied behind his back. “Legal aid! Legal aid! What’s your name!” a volunteer yelled to him. He summoned up enough breath, standing straighter, enunciating every syllable. A few minutes later, the cops led another woman through the gap in the lines. She was moaning in pain, one of her legs unable to support her weight. I couldn’t hear her name.
The protesters’ yells and chants died out as they fought the gas and grenades. The gas drifted down the street, enveloping everyone. The staties pushed past Delaney Hall, where a gaggle of ICE officers watched. As space cleared, a group of the ICE agents struck out from their post, moving across the street to where protesters had stacked aid supplies and food, trashing everything in sight. Behind them, the facility gates opened, and a line of cars streamed out: ICE and DHS officers, headed home for the day.
After the ICE cars were clear, the line of state police fired one more volley of gas and flash bangs, then retreated quickly down the street, melting back into the darkness to the north. The protesters slowly regrouped, catching their breath. “This is all about a fucking shift change,” a volunteer in an orange vest next to me said, as we coughed off the last of the gas. “They did all that so they could fucking leave.”
With the street clear, the protesters turned back to the ICE agents at the gate, the replacements for the ones who had just left. Someone brought out a boombox. For the moment, no one seemed inclined to continue the fight, as groups of protesters peeled off their masks and laughed off the adrenaline dump. Others picked through the wrecked supply camp, collecting witness statements about the ICE agents’ actions. It was around 10:45, roughly 45 minutes since the first call to disperse. The protesters were already regrouping.
“Whose streets!” someone yelled. “Our streets!”
On Saturday, protests continued. During the day, Sherrill re-established special zones for protesters, containing a pro-ICE right-wing counter protest in one and deploying the state police to keep the two sides apart. A small group of Proud Boys showed up, trading insults with the protesters from within their own enclosure, before beating a hasty retreat. The crowds grew even bigger. Left-wing livestreamer Hasan Piker showed up, fending off trolls and an even larger contingent of right-wing influencers who tried to rope him into debates. And after dark, the state police moved in again.
For some protesters, taking a beating night after night can be disheartening. Watching the politicians who say they’re on your side order cops to keep you in line feels like defeat. But the sustained protests have turned the Delaney Hall detainees into a national story. The politicians responsible can’t ignore it now, can’t let it slide as another one of the Trump administration’s many local predations in cities and communities across the country that we never see on the news. Unlike the protests in Los Angeles or Minneapolis, however, the Trump administration didn’t spark the Delaney Hall demonstrations with PR stunts and rhetoric. Those came later, of course — Markwayne Mullin posting constantly about rioters, former DHS commander Gregory Bovino trying to recapture some relevancy. The protests sprang up because of a small, dedicated community response to the mistreatment of a few hundred detainees. The protesters chose this ground, and if what I saw Friday was any indication, they’re determined to stick around.
Visiting hours at Delaney Hall, however, are still canceled. Many families don’t know that and show up anyway, Cat, an organizer with the immigrant rights group Cosecha, told me. What they find, instead of their loved ones, is a militarized compound closed up tight. No one, except the men with guns and armor, goes in, and few come out. Outside, the battle in the streets continues. On Friday, as I walked back to my car, I ran into two long-time activists, a husband and wife, watching the still-raging clashes down the street. “At least when we protested Obama it wasn’t this level of violence,” Giancarlo, the husband, told me, as we watched an officer spray a crowd of protesters at a barricade with pepper balls. “Now it’s just a whole different beast.”
The New Jersey Devils are in a pickle coming into this offseason. It’s the same pickle they had last offseason, but in true Tom Fitzgerald fashion, the Devils sat on their issue and hoped they could address it during the season.
The issue is that they have seven NHL defensemen. Last year, that narrative changed drastically when Luke Hughes signed a seven-year deal worth $9 million per season. It’s really easy to play with seven high-upside defensemen when two are on their entry-level deal. Now, with two players making $9 million and five players making $4 million or more.
The Devils had one of the most expensive defensive units in the league. That could get a lot worse with Simon Nemec’s entry-level contract ending. He’s due a massive raise, and reports say he wants to squeeze as much money out of this negotiation as possible.
Nemec is technically the Devils’ seventh defenseman. Sunny Mehta is going to figure something out this offseason to rectify that situation. For some reason, Fitzgerald gave out multiple long-term contracts to veteran defensemen while also prioritizing defense in the draft. Since taking over as GM, and eventually President of Hockey Operations, Fitzgerald used four of his seven first-round picks on defensemen. Overall, he used 14 draft picks on defensemen, including one that played zero games the season before he was drafted.
The Devils have more defensemen than they know what to do with, and Anton Silayev is expected to join the roster this offseason. Seamus Casey is close to NHL ready if he stays healthy. There are options for Mehta.
This is why Nemec, trade request or not, is expected to be on the move this offseason. It’s becoming a math equation.
Speaking of math, Nemec might be a former second-overall pick, and he’s had some success in the NHL, but many teams would be hesitant to give him the same contract Luke Hughes got. Of course, there was more to the Hughes situation, as they were not going to give him a deal that coincided with Jack Hughes’s deal. Nemec doesn’t have that type of leverage.
Will this Simon Nemec contract “demand” hurt a potential return for the Devils?
Teams looking to upgrade their defense while also getting younger would be interested in Nemec. However, the most viable option many believe with Nemec is using him to get a star forward. Whether it’s a move to get Quinn Hughes on the roster or to get someone huge like Jason Robertson or Robert Thomas, Nemec would be the central piece to the trade.
These teams would be looking to save money. If Nemec is asking for that sizable salary, does it make sense for Dallas or St. Louis to do that?
If they do, it would make the deal less desirable than Nemec on an entry-level contract. Heck, even Nemec on a $5 million per year contract would make him really desirable, even if it was a bridge deal.
At the end of it, teams are going to take a chance on Nemec, including the Devils, if it doesn’t hit the price Mehta is looking for.
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Tensions rose at a Newark, New Jersey, immigration detention center on Saturday as a group of pro-ICE protesters faced off with demonstrators who have maintained a presence outside the facility for more than a week in support of detainees who they say are enduring inhumane conditions inside.
Saturday morning’s protests outside the Delaney Hall facility saw a heavy police presence, including a group of officers with riot shields blocking the entrance. At one point, a group of federal agents, some carrying long guns, and an armored vehicle were stationed outside.
A day earlier, New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced that the state would establish a protected peaceful protest zone outside the facility, citing safety concerns following protests in Minneapolis earlier this year where federal agents killed two American citizens.
Sherrill said Saturday that she was “grateful to the vast majority of protesters who have assembled peacefully and raised their voices about Delaney Hall’s conditions.” She reiterated calls to “keep the temperature down” following the arrest of six people outside the facility late Friday night after protesters failed to follow police orders to disperse. The governor said five of the six arrested were from out of state.
“To the people coming from out of state to create chaos and dangerous situations, you should not be here,” she said at a news conference Saturday afternoon. “You are not helping the people detained at Delaney Hall. You’re not helping detainee families, and you’re certainly not keeping New Jersey safe.”
Sherrill’s announcement followed days of tensions outside the Delaney Hall facility over allegations of abysmal conditions and the use of violence against detainees, which the Department of Homeland Security denies. Nine people demonstrating in support of detainees were arrested Thursday following clashes with ICE officers.
Shouting matches between protesters
The atmosphere on Saturday was tense but peaceful. Police set up fencing to establish protest areas and separate the groups. Later, police officers blocking the entrance to the facility were seen without riot gear.
Protesters rallying in support of immigrants inside the facility banged on drums and chanted, “Shut down Delaney Hall, free them all!” and “Shut this racist system down!”
Some held signs saying “ICE OUT NOW,” and a group of healthcare workers held signs reading “Doctor against deportations” and “Health care worker against deportations.”
Many of the demonstrators have said they were protesting what they described as unsafe and inhumane conditions inside Delaney Hall.
Ashley Kussman said she was protesting for the detainees who were being held “in cruel conditions and who are being abused by our government and by a private corporation acting for our government,” referring to DHS and GEO Group, the private company that runs the facility.
“I am very worried for the state of our country,” she told The Associated Press. “I support the Constitution. I support democracy and I support the freedom to speak, the freedom to gather, the freedom to live without having to worry that you’re going to get kidnapped off the street by somebody in a mask and a uniform.”
Separated by fencing, the group of pro-ICE protesters held American flags and chanted, “USA, USA.”
They held signs that read “Make America Great Again” and “Support ICE.”
“We’re here basically to support ICE and the situations and the dealings that they’re unfortunately coming about. They’re just trying to do their jobs,” protester Michael, who declined to give his last name, told the AP.
“These officers are just under crazy scrutiny,” he said. “They just go out every day to risk their lives on the line and make sure that we make it home safe.”
Some protesters shouted across the fencing at each other.
“For days, we’ve heard reports of unsafe, inhumane and unconstitutional conditions there,” Sherrill said at a news conference Friday. “We’ve seen increasing violence, arrest and pepper spray at Delaney Hall, as well as public threats from the Trump administration, and we’ve seen the risk to public safety rising outside of Delaney Hall.”
DHS said on social media Saturday that ICE agents had “been bitten and faced death threats and assaults from violent rioters in New Jersey.” The agency thanked New Jersey law enforcement.
DHS and GEO Group did not respond to NBC News’ requests for comment on Saturday.
Regarding allegations of violence against the detainees inside the facility, GEO Group said in a statement Friday that staff responded to a “physical altercation involving detainees at Delaney Hall” on Thursday and that, in accordance with its policies, staff used “control measures to safely resolve the situation, including the limited use of chemical agents.”
The company added that its response was “carried out in strict adherence to federal standards and comprehensive training,” and that affected detainees were evaluated by on-site medical personnel and “were cleared with no serious injuries.”
GEO Group also said it categorically rejected what it called “baseless accusations” against the facility, which it said were “politically motivated,” adding that its services are monitored by ICE and DHS.
It said its support services include “around-the-clock access to medical care,” dietitian-approved meals, religious and specialty diets and access to medical care, the statement said.
Another night of tension
The protests remained tense on Friday night. As police erected protest barriers, ICE agents who had formed a line in front of protesters moved inside the building’s perimeter fence, according to NBC New York. New Jersey State Police Lt. Col. David Sierotowicz said ICE officers agreed to stand down as state police assumed responsibility.
Demonstrators had mixed reactions to the barriers. Some staged a sit-in and refused to move into one of the new protest areas police established using metal barriers and concrete blocks.
Around 10 p.m. on Friday night, a large team of state police carrying riot shields moved on protesters after reportedly giving those outside the facility a 15-minute warning.
Police began pushing the group of protesters back and deployed pepper spray. Moments after the chaos unfolded, police approached a marked WNBC news vehicle parked near the commotion and ordered the crew to exit the car into the cloud of tear gas.
Sierotowicz said at the news conference alongside the governor on Saturday that authorities spent several hours the previous night directing protesters to move to a designated area.
After some protesters failed to comply, police issued dispersal orders at 15-, 10- and 5-minute intervals, he said.
“During these announcements, agitators surrounded a marked enforcement vehicle car and made threats towards personnel, creating immediate safety concerns due to escalating safety risks,” he said.
Sierotowicz said some protesters “were observed retrieving face coverings, gas masks, fireworks, rocks, and other projectiles” and a public safety response team was deployed to move the crowd away from the area and create “safe passage for personnel with no significant injuries to the public or law enforcement.”
The ACLU of New Jersey said Saturday that the protests at the facility “have been overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations of people exercising their constitutional right to call out the inhumanity of the immigration detention and deportation system.”
“New Jersey’s response must prioritize the safety and well-being of people — not mimic the dangerous and overly militarized tactics of the federal government,” John Butler, the political director of the ACLU of New Jersey, said in a statement. “The New Jersey State Police’s actions against protesters at Delaney Hall were an unnecessary response to free speech and the right to peaceful protest.”
“The real harm we’re facing isn’t from peaceful protests, but from the rampant ICE raids tearing apart our communities, the brutality of the immigration detention system, and the retaliation and excessive force being used against detainees, observers, journalists, and protesters,” he said.
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