June 22, 2026 Issue

I know the focus of Ian Frazier’s “Talk of the Town” story in this week’s issue is the new ICE prison in Newark. He vividly describes it: 

Delaney Hall, a thousand-bed privately owned ice prison in Newark, is in the city’s industrial lowlands. Its address, 451 Doremus Avenue, makes it seem like an entity with physical limits, but that’s not how it looks to passersby, unless they are in the air, taking off from or landing at Newark Airport. Delaney Hall occupies tens of thousands of square feet enclosed in chain-link fencing that bulges outward like the front end of a whale, if you can imagine a whale also crisscrossed with razor wire. To a person at ground level, Delaney Hall seems to go on forever.

He describes the incredibly loud noise of the place, too:

When the trucks pass the crowd that is protesting the treatment of the detainees the facility now holds (it is the largest ice prison on the East Coast), some of the drivers honk in support. The horns are incredibly loud. Now and then, a driver will blast his horn for what seems like minutes. Amid the protesters facing off with the ice agents, the volunteers there to help the detainees, the banks of media cameras on tripods, the planes and helicopters overhead, the pipelines, train tracks, telephone poles, and the vast bulk of the prison itself, a long blast from a truck sounds satisfying and right.

But the part of the story that resonates with me is the last paragraph, when Frazier’s attention shifts from the prison and the protesters and the noise to the pond next to the prison visitor’s parking lot. He writes,

Doremus Avenue and the warehouses and tank farms and truck lots and junk yards along it are not far from the Passaic River. This is swampy Jersey, as opposed to hilly Jersey. Next to the prison visitors’ parking lot, a small catchment pond holds runoff. The lawn around the pond had been mowed without anybody picking up the trash beforehand. Two Canada geese and six gangly brown-suède goslings walked among the refuse, while in the near distance the truck horns and the protesters’ chants rose up. The geese had been there off and on for days.

Frazier has a keen eye for urban nature. In the midst of pandemonium, he notices the pond and the geese carrying on life as best they can. I think he draws inspiration from them. They’re a welcome relief from all the man-made chaos happening right next door.