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T
he first ICE detention center inaugurated in the second Trump era is a squat, soot-colored building surrounded by parking lots, warehouses, and petrochemical holding tanks on a deserted stretch of industrial waterfront in Newark, New Jersey.
In May, this patch of asphalt and chainlink was the site of a dramatic showdown between nearly two dozen federal law enforcement officers and four Democratic officials. That encounter has culminated in one of the most shockingly brazen political prosecutions in recent history — a case that, depending on its outcome, could augur a new political reality for anyone willing to challenge the president’s regime.
Delaney Hall is operated by GEO Group, a Florida-based private prison contractor whose for-profit facilities have been dogged by allegations of wrongful death, sexual abuse, and exposing inmates to toxic chemicals. Its corporate PAC was also the first to max out donations to Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign.
Almost as soon as Trump re-took office, GEO Group inked a 15-year, $1 billion contract to warehouse immigrants at Delaney Hall. Before the mothballed facility reopened, inspectors flagged at least two dozen fire code, plumbing, and electricity issues, according to the city’s lawyers, who sued in an unsuccessful effort to prevent GEO from resuming operations there.
Today, Delaney Hall holds 548 individuals — 89 percent of whom have no criminal record — rounded up in the Trump administration’s immigration dragnet.
On May 9, a few days after GEO Group began housing detainees at the Newark detention center, three members of Congress representing New Jersey —Democratic Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez, and LaMonica McIver, in whose district the facility sits —arrived at Delaney Hall to perform an oversight visit.
Weeks earlier, the same delegation checked in on a similar facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. (Such inspections are a routine part of Congress’ function.) But, this time, their tour was being slow-walked. The members of Congress had already been waiting for an hour and half when Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrived. Baraka was standing inside the fenced area — a guard let him in — when nearly two dozen officers arrived and confronted him. They told Baraka he was trespassing, and threatened to arrest him.
Video of the incident shows 80-year-old Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman trying to reason with them. “You are here on private property—” she is saying, as an officer interrupts her. “Ma’am, this is the last warning,” he tells her.
“It’s ‘Congresswoman,’” McIver replies sharply. “Show some respect!”
Baraka agreed to leave, and he was outside the facility a few minutes later when an officer with the Department of Homeland Security announced he would be arresting the Newark mayor anyway, “per the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.” (This is according to body camera footage described in court documents filed as part of an ongoing criminal case over the incident.)
The crowd of protesters already gathered outside the facility was outraged. “Circle the mayor!” one yelled, as officers — some in windbreakers, others in riot gear — fought their way toward Baraka. Later, as Baraka was violently forced into a pair of handcuffs, McIver could be seen pushing through the crowd after him. The entire scene looked more like a mosh pit than anything else, with everyone — demonstrators, journalists, elected officials and federal officers — shoving and struggling against each other.
A judge would later excoriate the Justice Department for its “hasty” decision to arrest Baraka, “a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences” — and a choice that, the judge added, “suggests a worrying misstep by your office.”
The charges against the mayor were dropped a little more than a week later. But they were replaced by new ones: this time against McIver, who was indicted for “assaulting, impeding, and interfering” with a federal officer — a trio of charges that, together, carry a maximum sentence of 17 years in prison.
“The days of woke are over,” President Trump said, speaking about the charges against McIver. “That woman — I have no idea who she is — she was out of control. She was shoving federal agents… The days of that crap are over in this country.”
Trump has been loudly declaring his desire and intention to “lock up” his political enemies since his first campaign for office, but that bluster has taken a more sinister turn since the president returned to office in January, emboldened and enabled by a stable of sycophantic appointees eager to do his bidding. In the last few weeks alone, the Justice Department has announced investigations of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James, each of whom oversaw high-profile investigations of Trump after his first term. The FBI recently searched the home of former Trump adviser-turned-critic John Bolton. The DOJ has reportedly opened criminal investigations into John Brennan and James Comey, the CIA director and FBI director who both served in Trump’s first administration, and, in what may be a prelude of things still to come, Trump’s director of national intelligence has accused Barack Obama and his officials of a “years-long coup” against the current president.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said last month, referring to Obama and members of his administration.
Unlike with California Sen. Alex Padilla (handcuffed and escorted out of a press conference in Los Angeles), or New York City Comptroller Brad Lander (detained at immigration court, before the charges against him were dropped), or some of the other Democrats Trump has threatened or his administration is investigating, the Trump administration appears determined to prosecute McIver to the fullest extent of the law.
Her case will be an important test of what, if any, guardrails remain to prevent the Trump administration from siccing a pack of Justice Department lawyers on anyone with the temerity to question his administration’s authority.
Sitting in her office in June, wearing a pair of fluffy pink slippers and snacking on a pack of peanut M&Ms after a long day on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, McIver doesn’t much resemble the menace U.S. attorney Alina Habba — Trump’s former personal lawyer, and the acting, but disputed, United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey — has portrayed in her indictment.
McIver, who favors bright suits and colorful glasses, is gregarious and warm, fussing over anyone who enters her orbit — staffer, colleague, stranger —like they’re her own child. The quality of her energy can make McIver seem older than she is. At 38, she is among the youngest sitting members of Congress, and, having arrived here in Washington, D.C., less than a year ago, she is also among its greenest.
And yet, with the full force of a weaponized Department of Justice bearing down on her, she remains remarkably composed.
“I really look forward to court,” she tells me with a shrug. “To lay out all of the facts, to go through everything that happened and to make sure that the truth is told.”
“We know why we were there,” she adds. “To do our jobs.”
The first thing you need to know about LaMonica McIver is that, despite her disarming demeanor, she is not afraid of a fight. Growing up in the heart of Newark’s Central Ward, she got into plenty of them.
“I was always getting suspended for fighting,” she says. “My mom, at some point, was like, ‘I’m gonna stop taking you back to school because all you gonna do is get suspended again. I don’t need to keep running back here.’”
It was her fifth grade teacher — future Newark Mayor Ras Baraka —who helped her find an outlet for her energy, inviting her down to his campaign headquarters to volunteer. Baraka was the cool teacher —the one who showed up in Timberland boots, whose voice you can hear on the interstitial tracks on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the one who challenged Newark’s longtime mayor, Sharpe James, running on the slogan “Shorty for Mayor,” when he was just 24 years old.
“She was always feisty, no nonsense,” Baraka says of his former student. “As we like to say: She didn’t take no tea for the fever. But, at the end of the day, she grew up in a rough community, rough neighborhood, and always had to defend herself — or defend other people.”
In those days, Baraka’s campaign headquarters were in a repurposed strip mall doctor’s office, flanked by a Chinese restaurant, a fish market, and a nail salon. “I’ll never forget — the place was so raggedy that it still had the hospital bed in one of the rooms. I remember we used to go back there and take a nap,” McIver says, laughing. Her first day was volunteering at the African American Day parade, where Lauryn Hill was riding with the candidate on the truck, and all the kids from McIver’s school were marching around it in T-shirts that said “Take It Personal” — the campaign slogan that year. McIver was hooked.
She started canvassing the neighborhood for the campaign, handing out literature in her spare time. At first she says that she just liked telling people what to do —”Go out and vote!” —but eventually she was possessed by a larger sense of civic purpose. “Learning your community, learning what it means to be ‘of service,’ learning what it means to care about people — to learn that at 10? To have someone instill that in you? And it wasn’t just Ras Baraka,” she says. “It was all the people around him, who were from the city, involved in public service.”
Baraka ended up losing that race in 1998. But the loss didn’t deter McIver— neither did the many, many losses that followed. Through middle school and high school, she returned every four years when he launched a new bid for office, and helped out with the clothing drives, food drives, voter registration drives they mounted in the political off-season.
By the time Baraka won a seat on the city council, in 2010, McIver was out of college. She had spent the last years of her college career raising her three younger siblings —her brother, in high school, and two sisters, both in elementary school — after her mother entered rehab for drug addiction.
During the 19 months her mom spent in treatment, McIver commuted between college and home, packing her siblings lunches and helping them with their homework between her own classes. “It wasn’t as hard an adjustment as you might think,” McIver’s sister, LaShae McIver, tells me. “She was playing a parent figure in our lives for a very long time — probably since her early teens… Making sure our grades are good, making sure we’re behaving in school. When she would get her paycheck, she would buy me clothes.”
After she graduated, McIver worked in school districts all around the state of New Jersey, before she felt the call to run for office herself in 2018. The Newark city council skewed older and male, and she decided there ought to be someone there advocating for the interests of young parents like herself — by this time, she had her own two-year-old daughter — so she decided to mount a campaign.
She ran against nine men, and won,becoming the youngest woman in city history to sit on the council. Two years later, in 2020, she was elected council president — right as the pandemic was poised to bear down on Newark. “I’ll never forget,” she says. “We were going inside our larger senior buildings, having to get assistance to pull dead bodies out, because the hospitals were taxed, the funeral homes couldn’t take another person. We had to get our police department to rent ice trucks inside of our city parking lot, just to get bodies out of the buildings.”
Those horrific months were followed by protests ignited in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when, McIver says, “We had people showing up from all over the world trying to burn down downtown.”
Things had barely returned to normal in Newark, when she set her sights on a higher office. It was 2024, and Congressman Donald Payne Jr. — who, with his father before him, had represented this district most of McIver’s life — suddenly died of a heart attack.
McIver made it through the special election gauntlet, arriving in Congress in September of 2024, to little fanfare and no orientation — just a massive backlog of constituent services cases to deal with. By then, her district had been without a congressional representative for five months. She was only in D.C. for a week before the session adjourned, and she had to head back to New Jersey to campaign in the general election —her fourth race in as many months.
She won, but returned to Congress in November with a new reality waiting for her, as a soon-to-be member of the minority party, under a dangerously emboldened Trump administration. “It’s been unreal,” she says, looking back. “I did not come here for this.”
“All my life, I’ve been wanting to serve in public service, to work for people, to deliver,” McIver tells me over lunch at The Yard, a burger joint in downtown Newark’s Military Park. Everyone seems to know her here. When we walked in, she was met with applause and pledges to support her legal fund. Her profile, already outsized after representing this area first in City Council and now in Congress, has only continued to grow since she became a target of the Trump administration. “I just feel like, in this moment, there is nothing to deliver. We have a party in control that is not interested in delivering help — at least not for people that I represent.”
Roughly one-third of McIver’s constituents are immigrants, and from the moment Trump took office, the community has been in the crosshairs of the federal government. Two days after Trump’s inauguration, ICE raided The Net, a Portuguese neighborhood in downtown Newark.
“They were out on the street in this little quaint neighborhood with big guns, Army vests, everything —and they scared the crap out of these residents,” McIver says. “From that day on, it’s been downhill, in most of my communities in the 10th [congressional district].”
Weeks before she and her colleagues went to Delaney Hall to perform the infamous oversight visit, McIver and her colleague, Rep. Rob Menendez, met with ICE officials at their office in Newark to discuss the fallout from those raids and, at the very least, try to open a line of communication.
“We were like, ‘Look, the people of the East [ward] are scared to death. Businesses are not booming. This is an area where there are usually droves of people walking, shopping, eating in restaurants. Since ICE came down, though, people are scared —not even because they are here undocumented, just because they’re like I don’t want to be approached,” she says. “We went to these folks’ office to meet with them, saying, ‘Hey, can we try to establish a better relationship? …Let’s just work together. We want a safe border too — a protected one. We just don’t want you harassing communities. So, what can we do?’”
The meeting went smoothly, which is why she was caught so off guard by the disturbingly disproportionate response she and her colleagues were met with a few weeks later at Delaney Hall.
“They say this whole thing is about ‘criminals,’ but it’s not about criminals — it’s about being cruel and attacking anybody who is here that is, basically, not white, to be honest with you,” McIver says. “I just think people didn’t sign up for this, they’re like, ‘Hey, when you get criminals, get the criminals. But not my neighbor. Not the people that cook our food, not the person trying to get their green card or going through citizenship, who is 60 years old, or people who were given protections to be here and now you tell them, Screw you, you’re gone.’… It’s just heartbreaking. To see families being ripped apart, to see kids with cancer being deported, to see people in college who are here —being innovators, engineers and teachers— to see [people say to] them, ‘Oh, your student visa is gone.’ No explanation, no due process.”
It’s just all so senselessly punitive, McIver tells me. And a similar sentiment might be expressed about her own legal predicament —the breathtakingly political prosecution of a sitting member of Congress, one with virtually no precedent in recent history. How that case will ultimately resolve remains an open question.
In June, McIver pleaded not guilty to all three charges against her, and, just last week, her lawyers submitted a new motion to dismiss the charges, drawing comparisons between the conduct she is alleged to have committed against federal officers while exercising her statutory and constitutional oversight responsibilities, and the conduct demonstrated by some 160 rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — “throwing explosives, beating federal officers with baseball bats and riot shields, and spraying them with pepper spray” —all of whom recently had their charges under the same statute dismissed by the Justice Department.
McIver, for her part, is spending as little time as possible thinking about the case. She’s too busy with work. “I’m angry that the administration is choosing to waste taxpayers dollars and energy, to charge me for going there — for doing my job,” she says. “But at the same time, I’m not mad about representing the people that I represent here in New Jersey, or for going to check on their family members at Delaney Hall because that’s what they sent me to Congress to do.
“I can’t be scared about doing that.”
