At 11:30 a.m. on June 3, an activation call went out across social media: "CURFEW IS OVER. BACK TO DELANEY." Within minutes, the message jumped from Instagram into encrypted Signal group chats, where hundreds of activists operating under pseudonyms like "framed.unrest" and "Wicked Something" began coordinating transportation, logistics and supplies, goggles, respirators, pepper-spray decontamination wipes and protective knee pads, for what would become another violent confrontation outside Delaney Hall, the Newark, New Jersey, ICE detention facility that has emerged as one of the most contested immigration flashpoints in the country.
The scene outside Delaney Hall over the past two weeks has looked spontaneous on cable news, angry crowds, tear gas, arrests, politicians mugging for cameras. It was anything but.
A Fox News Digital investigation, drawing on ground reporting in Newark, infiltrated Signal chat groups, tax filings, strategy documents and social media posts, reveals a protest infrastructure built over years by roughly 100 organizations, some of them household names, that collectively report annual revenues of approximately $850 million. That figure is roughly equal to the annual budget of the city of Newark itself.
The network, dubbed the "Delaney Hall 100" by nonprofit expert Chuck Flint, includes groups ranging from the ACLU and Indivisible to the Democratic Socialists of America. About 70 of the organizations hold IRS tax-exempt designations, 501(c)(3) charities, 501(c)(4) social welfare groups, and 501(c)(5) and 501(c)(6) labor unions, entitling them to tax-deductible donations and other tax-free benefits. None responded to requests for comment.
The groups share more than ideology. They share messaging. Fox News Digital obtained a strategy document called the "Delaney Hall Creator Brief," recovered by an X user, that directs content creators to call the detention center a "concentration camp," label detainees "imprisoned prisoners" and "captives," and avoid saying detainees were arrested. The preferred language: "kidnapped/abducted/taken."
That kind of coordinated framing does not happen by accident. It happens by design.
Flint, a former U.S. Senate chief of staff and former state prosecutor, put it bluntly:
"Protests like the kind we're seeing outside Delaney Hall are not organic protests. These are manufactured strategic, calculated endeavors by an army of nonprofits meant to push subversive activity. These groups generate annual revenues greater than many of the cities in which they protest. They act like military battalions with the ability to overwhelm a city's public safety resources."
"It's David vs. Goliath," Flint added, with the taxpayers and local police on the losing end.
The encrypted Signal conversations from last Wednesday afternoon offer a real-time look at how the network activates its foot soldiers. The chats read less like a grassroots rally and more like an operations center.
At 1:17 p.m., a user called "Pete InDC" shared video from outside the facility, a car honking nonstop, "ICE OUT" scrawled in chalk on Doremus Avenue. "Come on down!" he wrote. By 1:29, a user named "yarrow" asked about carpools from New York City and whether medics were en route.
At 1:46, participants asked whether one of the main protest organizers, identified as Cosesha, had approved the action. Others began coordinating food, drinks, bike racks, parking and tents, logistics that sounded more like concert planning than a spontaneous demonstration. "So if we do go should we be bringing supplies or only rallying? do ppl need water," asked a user called "Tamale."
Operational security was tight. When a user named "Durga" asked others to "like" the message if they were on Doremus Avenue at 2:11 p.m., another user, "tiny", shut it down fast: "please don't self id in the chat," adding, "or ask others to."
The groups even have their own shorthand. "Otg" means "on the ground." At 3:08 p.m., "Jay D" asked: "Is anyone otg and can give a report?"
By 4:07, the tone shifted from logistics to preparation for confrontation. A user called "Mason D" offered to bring "sudecon wipes for help with pepper spray/tear gas attacks, multiple sets of protective pads for elbows/knees, electrolytes" and "non-ventilated goggles." Sudecon wipes are specialized decontamination towelettes designed to neutralize chemical defense sprays.
Fox News Digital reporters on the ground observed tents stocked with respirators, goggles, protective pads, decontamination supplies and other protest-support equipment, the physical evidence of what the chats described.
The coalition outside Delaney Hall is not a collection of concerned Newark residents. Fox News Digital previously identified a series of far-left groups that self-identify as socialist, Marxist and communist blending in with immigrant advocacy organizations. They include the Democratic Socialists of America, the U.S. Revolutionary Communist Party, Speak Out Socialist, Refuse Fascism, Freedom Road Socialists Organization, Freedom Socialist Party and the Black Panthers.
The Instagram post that kicked off the June 3 mobilization was promoted by a collection of anti-Israel, Marxist and Democratic organizations, from "Palestine Solidarity Working Group" and Al-Awda to Indivisible and 50501.
Late last Saturday, Marxist influencer Hasan Piker showed up for a walk-through wearing a pink gas mask. He told Fox News Digital he was there to advocate for the demands of detainees inside, then left after less than 30 minutes. When confronted with images of tents filled with riot-gear provisions, Piker called the supplies "mutual aid."
Mutual aid that includes pepper-spray decontamination wipes and non-ventilated goggles. That is a curious definition of charity.
The current protests did not materialize overnight. The origins trace to February 2025, when GEO Group Inc., a federal contractor, announced it would reopen Delaney Hall as a federal immigration detention facility under a long-term ICE contract. The facility near Newark Liberty International Airport had previously housed immigration detainees before closing in 2017.
In April 2025, the City of Newark filed legal challenges against the reopening. Fox News Digital found that many of the organizations active today had spent years building coalitions, communications networks, funding relationships and rapid-response infrastructure before the current protests began.
The immediate trigger came in late May, when hundreds of detainees launched a hunger and labor strike. That ignited the wider network, advocacy organizations, legal groups, faith leaders, community organizers, elected officials and national nonprofits, which quickly mobilized around the facility. Within days, congressional delegations demanded access, rapid-response networks coordinated demonstrations across New Jersey, and the story went national.
Military experts say the tactics resemble those of an insurgency. They mirror the system deployed in Minneapolis earlier this year to protest ICE actions, a playbook that has now been transplanted to the streets of Newark.
The financial and legal architecture behind the protests deserves as much scrutiny as the protests themselves. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and lawmakers on the House Ways and Means Committee, the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight Committee have launched investigations into the alleged abuse of nonprofit laws to instigate conflict, sow discord and inspire political violence.
The question is straightforward: Should tax-exempt organizations enjoy the benefits of charitable status while coordinating what amounts to a paramilitary logistics operation against federal law enforcement?
A group of tech researchers on X, operating under handles @DataRepublican, @Astrarce, @bitchuneedsoap and @gunshymartyr, have penetrated the Signal chats and organizational structures, pulling back the curtain on the network's operations. Their work supplied key documents, including the "Delaney Hall Creator Brief" strategy document.
The picture that emerges is not one of grassroots anger. It is one of professional mobilization, funded, staffed, messaged and deployed with a discipline that most small cities cannot match.
The language in the strategy document tells you everything about the movement's goals. Detention centers become "concentration camps." Arrested illegal immigrants become "captives" who were "kidnapped." Law enforcement officers enforcing federal immigration law become the aggressors in a narrative carefully constructed to delegitimize border enforcement itself.
This is not about conditions at Delaney Hall. It is about dismantling the federal government's ability to detain and remove people who are in the country illegally. The hunger strikes, the protests, the coordinated media strategy, the encrypted communications, all of it serves a single political objective dressed up as humanitarian concern.
The people who live in Newark, who pay taxes in Newark, who depend on Newark police to keep their neighborhoods safe, they did not ask for $850 million worth of activist organizations to descend on their city and overwhelm their public safety resources. But nobody asked them.
When a hundred organizations with combined revenues rivaling a city's entire budget can deploy encrypted logistics networks, pre-position riot supplies and coordinate messaging down to the approved vocabulary, and still call it a protest, the word has lost its meaning. That is not democracy in action. That is an operation.
