Which NGOs Are Organizing the Newark Protests, and How

How a six-word Signal message shut down a thousand-person protest.

On the night of June 1, 2026, journalist @NickSortor drove to Delaney Hall expecting what he’d seen for ten straight days: hundreds of protesters surrounding Newark’s 1,000-bed ICE detention facility, human chains blocking federal vehicles, pepper balls and tear gas, helmets and gas masks distributed from organized supply stations, catered meals arriving on schedule. He found silence. The crowd — 200-plus the night before — was gone, with tens of thousands of dollars in pre-staged gear abandoned in place.

What happened between Sunday morning and Sunday night was a single message in an encrypted Signal group, as discovered by @bitchuneedsoap. A Cosecha NJ communicator posted a six-line announcement: “Cosecha is NOT mobilizing to Delaney Hall tonight. We are talking to strikers and their families to regroup.” No negotiation, no vote, no gradual loss of enthusiasm. Some switch had been flipped off.

The natural question is how a protest of that size can be turned off with one message. The answer is that it was never a protest in the way most people understand the word. It was an operation — assembled, maintained, and disbanded through an organizational structure that looks, once you map it, like a military deployment with a nonprofit org chart.

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The structure has four layers. Each answers a different question. Layer 1 decides whether to act. Layer 2 decides how many show up. Layer 3 decides what happens on the ground. Layer 4 keeps the whole thing running across days.

Understanding these layers is understanding how every major protest in America works, because the same people built the template.

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Layer 1: Strategy

Four organizations sit at the top. They don’t move bodies. They decide if bodies should be moved.

The parent node is the Ayni Institute, a Massachusetts nonprofit founded by Carlos Saavedra. Ayni incubated three organizations: Cosecha (the dispatch network that ran Newark), Momentum Community (which wrote the training curriculum), and IfNotNow (an anti-Israel movement which adapted the model for other movements). Ayni has trained over 13,000 activists globally. It reported $3.29 million in assets for 2024.

Momentum Community, based in Long Beach, California, provides the theoretical framework. Co-founded by Saavedra and Paul Engler, Momentum developed what they call “hybrid organizing” — fusing union-style discipline with mass protest energy. Their key innovation is a concept called “frontloading”: concentrating the bulk of organizing resources into a short escalation window rather than spreading them across years. This is exactly the pattern at Delaney Hall, where crowd size spiked from dozens to 200-plus within four days.

Organizations that adopted Momentum’s methodology include Cosecha, IfNotNow, and the Sunrise Movement — a lineage documented in Waging Nonviolence’s 2021 reporting on the model’s spread. The same activation mechanics used at Delaney Hall have been deployed across climate protests, anti-war actions, and campus occupations.

The third strategic player is NDLON — the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, headquartered in Los Angeles with 69 member organizations nationwide. NDLON created the “ICE Out of NJ” campaign and ran a Justice Bus tour on March 27, 2026, making six stops across New Jersey to map local organizational capacity. That tour happened 56 days before the hunger strike. It functioned as a network dry run: establishing who could do what, where, and how fast.

NDLON’s Organizing Director, Jorge Torres, coordinated the eleven-organization ICE Out of NJ collective from a national perch. NDLON’s communications director, Palmira Figueroa, handled media for the Newark protests from a 425 area code — that’s Seattle. A national LA-based organization’s Seattle-area press person was running comms for a Newark protest. The chain of command was never local.

NDLON received over $2 million in direct Open Society Foundations grants between 2016 and 2022.

The fourth strategic entity is NJAIJ — the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, a 50-plus member coalition that provides institutional legitimacy. NJAIJ doesn’t dispatch people. It provides the respectable umbrella under which action campaigns operate. Its website hosts both the “ICE Out of NJ” and “Eyes on ICE” campaign pages. It is fiscally sponsored by NEO Philanthropy — its donate page routes through Network for Good “care of NEO Philanthropy,” and grants to NJAIJ are received by NEO Philanthropy’s entity — which reported $168.9 million in revenue for 2024. Under current IRS fiscal sponsorship rules, sponsored projects don’t file their own Form 990. The money is invisible.

Multiple organizations hold simultaneous membership in both NJAIJ’s 57-member coalition and ICE Out of NJ’s eleven-organization collective. These dual-membership organizations are the bridge between the respectable policy wing and the action wing. Directives can flow between them without a visible command hierarchy.

Layer 2: Dispatch

This is where the crowd comes from. Layer 2 is how 200 people materialize at an industrial lot in Newark on a Tuesday.

Cosecha NJ runs a cell structure borrowed from movement theory. They call them “circles” — groups of 3 to 7 people, each with a communicator whose job is to receive and relay activation messages. Circles combine into “communities,” communities into “villages.” Any three people who share Cosecha’s vision can form a circle with no permission from national leadership. Cosecha’s own documentation, published on Gitbook, describes the model.

At the 2017 Day Without Immigrants action, approximately 80 circles were coordinated nationally by a 27-member national team. If roughly 50 circles are active in the NJ/NY/PA corridor, a single message to circle communicators reaches 150 to 350 people; the math of the circle model itself. When you see a crowd appear at a protest within hours, this is the mechanism. It’s not word of mouth. It’s a relay network with assigned roles.

Cosecha also operates one of the only statewide rapid response hotlines in New Jersey — a partnership with DIRE branded “Cosecha X DIRE,” reachable at a 1-888 number. Three other hotlines cover individual counties. Cosecha covers the state. When an ICE alert goes out anywhere in New Jersey, Cosecha’s hotline is the one that activates the broadest network.

The dispatch layer also includes Signal-coordinated shuttles along the I-95 corridor bringing participants from New York and Philadelphia to Newark. In the one arrest batch with full geographic data — six arrests on Friday, May 30 — five of six were from out of state.

Cosecha claims zero paid staff. Instead, “over 30 volunteer organizers work for the movement full-time” through what appears to be communal living arrangements. This shows up on the IRS filings: zero executive compensation. The communal living model means organizers have near-zero personal expenses and can be redeployed to any geography on short notice.

Layer 3: Tactics

The people who show up have been trained. The training pipeline runs from Momentum Community’s hybrid organizing curriculum through the War Resisters League NVDA Agenda, the Beautiful Trouble tactical toolbox, and Ruckus Society direct action techniques. NJAIJ hosts the Ruckus Society’s “Direct Action & Safety” curriculum on its own website. Module titles include “Introduction to Blockades” and “Advanced Blockades.”

The Eyes on ICE Substack, with 42,000-plus subscribers, publishes a comprehensive wiki document that teaches the SALUTE report — a standard U.S. Army tactical intelligence format (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) adapted for civilian ICE monitoring. Signal is mandatory. Biometrics disabled. Metadata scrubbed.

At Delaney Hall, the tactical layer deployed human chains, de-arrest positioning, clergy blockades, and lockbox devices — all standard techniques from the documented curriculum. The crowd was executing a playbook.

A small cadre of 5 to 15 serial protest deployers traveled from outside the region. Ian Austin, an Army Ranger from Pennsylvania, had been arrested at a Minnesota church harboring migrants in January before deploying to Newark. John Rozendaal, a 65-year-old cellist from Manhattan, had four prior arrests across climate and police protests. Nicholas Scelfo from Brooklyn was tracked from BLM 2020 to the No Kings coalition to Delaney Hall, where he was charged with threatening to murder an ICE officer. DHS Secretary Mullin said agents arrested people who “came in from Portland to lead.”

These are not locals who got angry. They are repeat deployers who travel between protest sites the way consultants travel between client engagements.

Layer 4: Logistics

Sustaining 200 people at an outdoor protest for ten days requires procurement, transportation, and supply chain management. Fox News documented pre-staged supply stations with organized containers established before the protests began. The gear included standardized kits — helmets, shields, gas masks, respirators — estimated by journalist Nick Sortor at roughly $100 per person. Catered meals arrived at the protest site on schedule. Street medics staffed medical tents.

After the stand-down, all of it was abandoned in place. You don’t leave $100 gas masks on the ground if you’re planning to come back tomorrow.

The confirmed funding floor across the network is $20-plus million: roughly $5 million from Open Society Foundations directly, millions through the Arabella Advisors network (New Venture Fund), $3.5 million from the Ford Foundation to Make the Road, and smaller grants through the Fund for New Jersey. The specific line item for Delaney Hall field costs — the shuttles, the gear, the meals — has not been traced to any single grant. That’s the point. The money flows through fiscal sponsorship arrangements and intermediary organizations designed to make individual expenditures untraceable on public filings.

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The Off Switch

On May 28, six days into the hunger strike and four days before the stand-down, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the White House press room that a joint IRS-FBI investigation into protest funding networks had made “substantial progress.” Then he added the line that mattered: “If a grant recipient is violent, if they are suppressing people’s rights, then YOU are responsible for that.”

That “you” was aimed at upstream funders. NEO Philanthropy, with $168.9 million in revenue, fiscally sponsors NJAIJ. Open Society Foundations had millions flowing to network organizations. Every 501(c)(3) in the chain was suddenly exposed — not for what their staff did, but for what any grant recipient downstream of them did. Rocks thrown at horses, human chains blocking federal vehicles, mattresses thrown at ICE agents, more than 60 arrests. Under Bessent’s framework, every upstream funder was potentially liable for all of it.

Four days later, the stand-down came. A single message in a Signal group. The crowd vanished. Unions that had been holding separate pickets at Delaney Hall the same day — HPAE, 32BJ SEIU — kept going. Same police conditions, same curfew. The unions weren’t in the command structure. Their off switch was their own.

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What This Means

None of this is secret. Cosecha publishes its circle model on Gitbook. Momentum describes frontloading on its website. NDLON’s press releases name its staff. The 990 filings are on ProPublica. The training curricula are hosted on NJAIJ’s own domain.

The infrastructure was built in the open because it’s legal. Nonprofits can organize. People can protest. Foundations can fund advocacy. The question was never whether any of this was permitted. The question is whether the public understands what they’re looking at when they see a “protest” on the news.

What they’re looking at is a four-layer operation with a strategic command that decides whether to act, a dispatch network that assembles the crowd through cell-based relay, a trained tactical corps executing a published curriculum, and a logistics tail that keeps the operation fed, equipped, and transported for as long as the strategic layer decides it should run. The same template — built by the same people, funded by the same foundations, trained through the same curricula — has been deployed at climate actions, campus occupations, and immigration protests across the country.

When the curfew orders came down, perhaps assisted by the machine getting a credible threat to their tax-exempt status, the machine shut down in one Signal message. That is the difference between a movement and an operation. A movement doesn’t have an off switch.