After protesters arrested at an ICE detention facility in New Jersey, federal agents called them at home asking if they would inform on their fellow demonstrators.

"I think the real intent is to divide us, to make us scared to talk to each other, too scared to talk in general, scared to go to Delaney Hall."

— John Mark Rozendaal, arrested at an anti-ICE protest, after being recruited by the FBI

The cello was supposed to be the de-escalation strategy.

John Mark Rozendaal showed up at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, on May 29, 2026, with his instrument and good intentions. The privately run detention center had been the site of daily protests for weeks, sparked by a hunger strike among detainees who were reporting horrific conditions inside. Rozendaal, a musician, considered playing his cello a way to lower the temperature.

It did not last long.

"As I played, I saw this wall of plastic riot shields and cops in tactical gear advancing," Rozendaal recalled. "There were tear gas canisters flying overhead. I could see horses behind the riot shields, flash-bangs. So it was quite dramatic."

Rozendaal was arrested and charged with obstructing law enforcement, a minor offense. A week later, he received a phone call that was nothing minor.

"The agent said, 'We are calling because you were arrested at Delaney Hall,'" Rozendaal told The Intercept. The number traced to the FBI's New York field office. Over the next few minutes, the agent asked whether Rozendaal would be willing to provide information on protesters described as "anybody planning to go to Delaney Hall with not the right intentions."

In plain terms, the FBI wanted him to inform. Rozendaal declined immediately and invoked his right to remain silent.

Translation: the FBI does not need a warrant to call you at home and ask you to betray your community.

Rozendaal was not alone. According to Benjamin Van Meter, a deputy public defender with the Essex County Public Defender's Office, at least half of the approximately 90 people arrested at the Delaney Hall protests received calls from federal agents seeking information. The calls were made from an anonymous tip line number registered to the FBI's New York field office, according to call history logs reviewed by The Intercept.

The pattern mirrors a longstanding federal playbook. The FBI has a documented history of attempting to turn protesters, political dissidents, and members of minority communities into informants. The strategy serves dual purposes: gathering intelligence on activist networks and sowing distrust within them. As Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU's New Jersey chapter, put it, "With every major protest movement in United States history, there have been attempts at infiltration and attempts to disrupt them and to sow discord."

Van Meter took formal action, writing to the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey and two high-ranking FBI officials demanding an end to the contact. "These attempts at contacting our clients at their homes and by phone violate their right to counsel," he wrote in a June 9 letter. "Any further efforts to question our clients are a continued violation of their constitutional right to counsel and our office remains ready to seek all available relief under both state and federal law."

The FBI declined to comment. The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.

The Delaney Hall protests deserve context. The facility, operated by the private prison company GEO Group, sits on an industrial corridor in Newark. Detainees and their families filed complaints about poor conditions and retaliation by staff. In response, ICE agents repeatedly charged protesters, deploying batons, pepper spray, and pepper balls. Some demonstrators were taken into custody.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat who has publicly opposed Trump's deportation initiatives, eventually brought in Newark police and instituted a curfew in the area. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, also a Democrat, sent in state police. The state police deployed tear gas and charged protesters on horseback, kettling dozens for mass arrest.

The arrests were not the end of law enforcement's involvement. Detectives with the Newark Police Department went undercover to infiltrate the protests, according to court records obtained by The Intercept. They embedded in the crowd, reporting real-time information to surveillance units, with the stated goal of identifying and arresting individuals accused of property damage.

One of those targets was Samuel Becker, a 30-year-old protester who had allegedly dragged a tarp into a fire during a previous demonstration. Becker told The Intercept that ICE agents, not just Newark police, participated in his arrest: "An ICE agent chased and grabbed me and quickly handed me over to an NPD officer." He said an ICE agent accused him using language that matched the official police statement released the following day, suggesting intelligence sharing between federal and local authorities.

Newark's criminal complaint omitted ICE's role entirely. It described only Newark police and Essex County Sheriff's Office SWAT personnel.

Newark has a sanctuary law that prohibits local police from assisting immigration enforcement. The law, passed in March, has exceptions for state criminal matters. But the apparent coordination between ICE agents and Newark police in targeting a protester at an anti-ICE demonstration raises questions about whether the spirit of the law was honored.

The psychological toll of infiltration goes beyond individual arrests. Becker described the broader dynamic plainly: "State and local police ramped up their repression of the protestors because ICE agents were having an increasingly difficult time carrying out their daily operations at Delaney Hall by themselves. Without the ramped-up support of the state and local police, ICE and GEO would have continued to encounter growing difficulty suppressing the strike."

Becker also suffered a fractured shoulder when an ICE agent swung a baton during an earlier charge. He was arrested with his arm in a sling.

The FBI's recruitment attempts amplify the effect. Even protesters who are never turned into informants carry the knowledge that someone nearby might be. It creates a climate in which organizers hesitate to share plans and participants avoid speaking freely. Aedan Neary, a defense attorney in Kearny who is not involved in the case, articulated the central question: "At what point do the actions of these undercover agents become a pressure tactic as opposed to a law enforcement tactic? Is this being used to ensure that things remain peaceful? Or is this more about gathering intelligence?"

Karen Paff, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, defended Van Meter's actions as routine: "When law-enforcement officers seek to question individuals who are represented by counsel about matters within the scope of that representation, it is our responsibility to notify the appropriate agencies that counsel has been assigned and that any such communications must comply with the law."

Paff's statement frames the issue as one of procedure rather than principle. But the procedure is itself the principle: when the government calls people in their homes after arresting them at a protest, asking them to identify other protesters as threats, it is not processing cases. It is conducting counterinsurgency.

The Delaney Hall situation sits inside a much larger architecture of federal enforcement expansion. In June 2026, Congress approved roughly $70 billion for immigration enforcement. The previous year, the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act allocated more than $170 billion over four years for the same purpose. The Trump administration is rapidly purchasing detention centers with a stated goal of capacity for 100,000 detainees simultaneously.

Sophia Gregg, senior immigrants' rights attorney at the ACLU of Virginia, described the strategy in blunt terms: "They are using detention as a form of punishment as a way to get people to relinquish their rights to remain in this country and creating conditions that ultimately create suffering in order to induce people to elect to be removed. And so with that being the goal of the administration to deport people as quickly as possible, they have no incentive in creating conditions that are humane."

The protests at Delaney Hall were one small crack in the machine. The hunger strike inside, the demonstrators outside, the musicians playing cellos on concrete barricades: all of it drew attention to conditions that would otherwise remain invisible behind the walls of a privately operated detention center.

The FBI's response was to call the people who showed up and ask them to betray each other. It is the oldest trick in the book, and it tells you everything you need to know about what the government thinks protest is: not a form of speech, but a crime to be infiltrated.

Rozendaal's assessment remains the clearest summary available. "It won't work," he said.

The question is not whether the FBI succeeded in recruiting him. The question is why the government's first instinct, when ordinary citizens gathered to speak out about the treatment of detained immigrants, was to treat them as a hostile network to be penetrated rather than citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

The answer is already visible in the call log.