For nearly a week, demonstrators outside an immigration detention center in Newark had clashed with federal agents who fired pepper balls and spray at a growing crowd protesting conditions inside the facility, according to witnesses and video footage of the episodes.
Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, accused demonstrators of inciting riots and warned that he would flood New Jersey’s largest city with more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents if protesters continued to attack federal officers outside the Delaney Hall detention center. Worried that Newark would become the next Minneapolis, where federal officers killed two people amid widespread immigration protests, Gov. Mikie Sherrill brought in the state police to calm the chaos.
But the tumult continued. Late on Friday, at least a dozen demonstrators shoved metal barricades at law enforcement officers while others launched bottles of liquid and set fires in the street, according to the state authorities and footage of the melee. State troopers on foot and on horseback charged through a crowd of roughly 50 people in the middle of the street, sending them running amid a haze formed by smoke grenades.
At a news conference on Sunday, Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, zeroed in on the conduct of some protesters. But she shied away from criticizing the troopers. “I know how well-trained they are — the best in the nation,” she said. “I trust them to follow our Constitution.”
Volatile clashes have created difficult optics for police forces in Newark and across the country, in places including Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and New York. In those cities, the local authorities forbid the police from aiding federal officials in civil immigration enforcement. But at the same time, officers must prevent the public from trespassing, blocking traffic or vandalizing property — and in doing that, they are sometimes perceived as teaming up with federal agents.
Protests at Delaney Hall began a year ago after the facility was reopened as a 1,000-bed detention center. It is run by GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies in the country. During the past five months, most of those demonstrations had been peaceful and without incident.
But tensions erupted on Memorial Day. Demonstrators, who were joined by Ms. Sherrill, had assembled outside the facility to support detainees after advocates and family members said that migrants inside Delaney Hall were staging a hunger strike over claims of rotten food and poor medical care. The demonstrators blocked an entrance and were hit by pepper balls and spray after refusing to disperse, officials said. (The Department of Homeland Security had previously dismissed accusations that detainees were being subjected to inhumane living conditions, saying that the migrants were receiving “the best health care they have received their entire lives.”)
The clashes soon became more chaotic. By the end of that week, Ms. Sherrill had made an announcement: The situation required the immediate intervention of the state police because of concerns about public safety and “threats from the Trump administration.” A “peaceful, protected protest zone” would be established, she promised.
“I will not give ICE the pretext to expand operations in our state,” she said at a news conference last Friday. “We need to take this opportunity to lower the temperature now.”
Instead, the situation grew more heated. Dozens of demonstrators gathered on Doremus Avenue in front of Delaney Hall, a cramped space three blocks from a sewage plant, which, unlike wide city streets, offers little room for demonstrators and the police to maneuver.
On Saturday night, anti-ICE demonstrators said, they were protesting peacefully. Then things took a turn.
Archange Antoine, 43, a minister from New Jersey who was at the demonstration on Saturday night, said that he and others were praying, singing and chanting until troopers demanded that they move. “When we asked them why, they wouldn’t give us any responses,” Mr. Antoine said. “Then they said, ‘You’ve got five minutes.’”
The demonstrators stood their ground. Soon after, the troopers pushed against the protesters using large plastic shields, according to Mr. Antoine and video footage of the impasse. They fired rubber bullets and threw smoke grenades to break up the crowd.
“You had old folks who were falling to the ground who couldn’t even walk,” Mr. Antoine said. “It was just out of control.”
The state police did not respond to requests for comment regarding their handling of the protests. But the state attorney general, Jennifer Davenport, whose office oversees the law enforcement agency, said that she would investigate all allegations of officer misconduct. On Thursday, her office charged an Essex County Prosecutor’s Office sergeant with stealing a photojournalist’s camera equipment while on patrol outside the detention center.
“We take seriously all reports of unconstitutional or unlawful policing, and we will carefully review all such reports,” Ms. Davenport said in a statement.
Ben Dziobek, 25, of Asbury Park, N.J., who was at the protest on Saturday night, said that the troopers had “kept firing more canisters of tear gas further and further into where they were pushing people to retreat.”
“I thought I was going to pass out,” he said, his voice hoarse from inhaling the chemical irritants.
Mr. Dziobek, an organizer for the Climate Revolution Action Network, an environmental justice nonprofit that advocates for political candidates, said that his members had protested outside the detention center for months.
He said he had supported Ms. Sherrill until Saturday night.
“To see Governor Sherrill tell us organizers earlier today that we needed to calm down, and then her state police tear-gases protesters, is absolutely insane,” Mr. Dziobek said.
At least 90 protesters have been arrested since the start of the protests on Memorial Day weekend. Troopers have seized fireworks and a pepper bullet gun from demonstrators, according to the state attorney general’s office.
After the clashes between the troopers and demonstrators, state officials and Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark reached an agreement that city police officers would take control of the protest area outside of the detention center.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Baraka said that the troopers had “helped further escalate the situation” and that their actions “resembled what ICE was doing in the first place.”
He said that he understood the dilemma Ms. Sherrill faced: Act or risk a surge of federal agents. She “made a decision to involve the state police, which is probably the tool that she has at her disposal,” he said. “What I disagree with is the tactics that were employed by the state police when they got here.”
On Thursday, during an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Sherrill said that she believed that if ICE had remained in charge at the demonstrations, “that would have resulted in an incredibly dangerous situation — people dying, huge roundups and really the type of trampling of our rights that I refuse to countenance here.”
Some demonstrators and activists said that they had lost confidence in state troopers’ ability to safely control crowds while also protecting free speech.
“They were very aggressive,” Mr. Antoine, the minister, said. “The state troopers should not have been here whatsoever.”
For Amol Sinha, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, local law enforcement officials must learn how to strike a balance between public safety and upholding demonstrators’ constitutional right to protest.
“If the governor and attorney general tried something with state police, and it didn’t work, there is always time for course correction,” Mr. Sinha said.
“But we need to know what it is that went wrong, why people felt unprotected and unsafe when the state police was commanding the scene,” he added. “We know how we can do better — whether it’s under state police leadership or under Newark police leadership — going forward.”
Tracey Tully contributed reporting.
Chelsia Rose Marcius is a criminal justice reporter for The Times, covering the New York Police Department.
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