Resistance to immigrant detention in New Jersey will end where it began, in a desolate industrial district on the periphery of Elizabeth, a mid-sized working-class city just south of Newark. There, in 1995, detainees at the Esmor detention center made national news rioting against the inhumane conditions they faced. A quarter-century later, what is now the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC) stands as the last ICE jail in New Jersey.

As such, it provides a valuable window into the movement to abolish ICE in the Biden era. New Jersey drew national attention when three of its four ICE jails closed in 2021, the result of a years-long grassroots struggle.

But at a time when the Biden administration’s immigration policies barely differ from many of Trump’s, the media attention and the mass rallies of the Trump years have faded from sight, and the very coiner of the phrase “Abolish ICE” has abandoned it to promote faux-progressive politicians, the uphill struggle to actually abolish ICE and the prison-industrial complex that spawned it continues outside the spotlight.