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Delaney Hall brought Mikie Sherrill’s ‘first real test.’ South Jersey progressives who campaigned for her say she failed..Delaney Hall brought Mikie Sherrill’s ‘first real test.’ South Jersey progressives who campaigned for her say she failed.South Jersey progressives and immigrant rights activists who campaigned for Mikie Sherrill say they're frustrated with how she has handled protests outside of the Delaney Hall ICE detention center.Josue Barreiro stood in front of a crowd of 200 people seated inside a church last week in Haddonfield.He was there to speak about his experience as one of 61 protesters arrested in one night outside Delaney Hall after Gov.Mikie Sherrill had sent over state police.He told the crowd, gathered for a meeting of the South Jersey progressive group Indivisible Cooper River, that the governor made it seem like she was sending state troopers to protect demonstrators from federal immigration officers.Instead, he said, they brutalized protesters on horseback in riot gear.He showed a video of state police knocking him to the ground.“All accounts say the state police were considerably more violent than the federal government was,” Barreiro, a Bridgeton resident and activist with Los Tequios, told receptive audience members who made sounds of disgust.Sherrill, a former member of Congress whose double-digit victory last year was seen as a rebuke of President Donald Trump, has been in her most high-profile political bind yet as she juggles her opposition to the ICE detention center while facing widespread criticism for her handling of protests outside of it.The first term governor campaigned as a fighter against Trump and ICE.She highlighted her experience as a Navy helicopter pilot and said she was trained “that in a crisis, you run toward the fight.” But to South Jersey progressives who worked hard to campaign for her, Sherrill’s decision to respond to tensions between protestors and ICE with a designated protest zone policed by state officers represented a betrayal.The governor called the decision “absolutely necessary to protect public safety and avoid escalation from ICE.” But the state police’s show of force, video of which replayed across national news and social media channels for days, “kind of resembled what ICE was doing in the first place,” said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, one of Sherrill’s primary opponents who was arrested outside the facility last year.“This was not the kind and quality of leadership we were voting for, or hoping to see,” said Michele Messer, 52, a leader of Cooper River Indivisible, one of the groups that campaigned for Sherrill.A rising star in the Democratic Party, Sherrill overperformed in November in parts of South Jersey that were viewed as fertile ground for her Republican opponent.She flipped back three counties that went red in 2024.Sherrill said she was trying to “lower the temperature” to prevent Newark from becoming another Minneapolis when she announced her plans to send state troopers to Delaney Hall.She later disagreed with a comparison between state police and federal immigration officers in Minneapolis during a tense interview on WNYC’s “Ask Governor Sherrill,” noting that state police didn’t kill anyone.“I don’t think they have the same concern for human life in many cases that I do, and that our police forces in New Jersey share,” she said.Activists said she should have known that sending in police and corralling people into a free speech zone can escalate already fraught demonstrations.“I mean, there’s precedent, there’s history.We’ve all read about how these things go, and yet that was the choice she made,” said Messer, a Haddon Township resident who has protested at Delaney Hall.Patricia Campos-Medina, a former campaign advisor to Sherrill, said the governor’s handling of Delaney Hall — and how she manages “the fallout of her decisions” — has been an early test of her leadership.“It’s her first real test [of] how she manages the duties of being the highest public safety officer of the state leading New Jersey, and then still protecting the immigrant community who lives here,” said Campos-Medina, an ally of the governor who works with the labor movement.Sherrill has built her national profile on fighting the Trump administration, and those who have become the most frustrated with her share that mission.How she navigates this moment could determine whether she can keep that base focused on fighting the president, instead of her.‘I’m not proud to have voted for her’ Sherrill has called for the closure of Delaney Hall and her administration announced multiple measures to support the fight against the detention center since the late May backlash against her began.Activists from across the state rallied in Trenton on June 1 and delivered a letter to Sherrill calling on her to “honor our first amendment rights, cease police brutality and to enable the closure of Delaney Hall.” “As the grassroots who campaigned for you, we also expect ongoing communication with your administration to navigate this perilous time in New Jersey,” the letter continued, signed by about 40 organizations statewide, including Cooper River Indivisible and several other South Jersey groups.The next day, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, Sherrill’s appointee, filed a lawsuit against GEO Group — the private company that runs Delaney Hall — to give the state health department full access to the facility over reports of “inhumane and unsanitary conditions.” Two days later, Sherrill and the state legislature announced an infusion of $20 million to assist with immigration defense and launched a rapid legal defense effort amid concerns about due process.Marie Henselder-Kimmel, 65, a Cherry Hill resident who leads the South Jersey group NJ Voters Who Want More Say, said the reports of bad conditions in the facility aren’t new, so she doesn’t understand why the administration didn’t take legal action months earlier.“I foresee that we’re going to have to keep pressuring to get them to keep doing those more bold things,” she said.Henselder-Kimmel said she feels “torn” about Sherrill’s decision to send state police because she agrees ICE would have escalated otherwise.But she said it seemed like Sherrill may have sent the police in without understanding what they were going to do.Christian Moreno-Rodriguez, who works as the executive director of El Pueblo Unido of Atlantic City, an organization that supports Latino immigrants, said Sherrill’s handling of the protests has fully broken the trust with his community.Sherrill’s campaign made a particular effort to target Latino voters.She did particularly well in New Jersey’s largest Hispanic-majority cities, which moved an average of 18 points toward the Democrat after rightward shifts in 2024.“We’re not going to forgive her for what she’s done,” said Moreno-Rodriguez, who worked for One Giant Leap, a super PAC that supported Sherrill and raised about $9 million by the end of 2025.Sherrill wasn’t Moreno-Rodriguez’s first choice in the primary, but she was a better choice for his community than Republican Jack Ciattarelli, he said.Still, he said he was expecting better from the Democrat.“I don’t regret voting for Mikie Sherrill because she was better than Jack Ciattarelli, but I’m not proud to have voted for her,” he said.Pushing back against ICE has been one of Sherrill’s priorities during her first months as governor.She banned them from staging on state property without a judicial warrant, signed the state’s sanctuary policy into law, and created a portal for people to submit videos of ICE for investigation.She also signed a law banning ICE agents and other law enforcement officers from wearing masks but it’s being fought in the courts.Her administration is also fighting a proposed detention center in Roxbury in court and said she will fight any other proposed centers.Activists have been demanding Sherrill meet with detainees, but she says she hasn’t been allowed in except for one “closely controlled and limited tour” on June 8 in which she w