On May 29, along with scores of others, John Mark Rozendaal responded to calls on social media to gather outside of Delaney Hall, the immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. When Rozendaal went to Delaney Hall, he took his cello with him. “I consider music to be a de-escalatory thing to do,” he told The Intercept. “I sat down on the concrete barricade facing north and started to play.”
New Jersey State Police and ICE agents issued a dispersal order and began to clear protesters from the area by force — with officers deploying chemical weapons and charging protesters on horseback. “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.”
Moments later, Rozendaal was arrested by the New Jersey State Police and, according to an arrest report viewed by The Intercept, charged with one count of obstructing law enforcement. A week later, things took a strange turn when Rozendaal received a call from the FBI. “The agent said, ‘We’re calling because you were arrested at Delaney Hall,’” Rozendaal told The Intercept. In the following minutes, Rozendaal said the agents asked if he would be willing to provide the FBI with information on protesters that they described as “anybody planning to go to Delaney Hall with not the right intentions… So, I mean, they were asking me to inform,” Rozendaal said.
In the weeks since arrests began stacking up at the protests — approximately 90 people have been arrested so far — at least half of those taken into custody have received calls from federal agents looking for information, according to Benjamin Van Meter, a deputy public defender with the Essex County Public Defender’s Office who represents a number of protesters facing charges.
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