D.C. Dispatch: What N.J.’s members of Congress did in Washington this week

What had seemed like a modestly slow week in New Jersey politics ended with a bang after the mayor of the state’s largest city found himself in federal custody for allegedly trespassing at an immigrant detention facility, where he had been joined by three of the state’s House members.

Beyond that headline-making showdown, Congress also spent this week debating taxes and Medicaid cuts, trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico, and whipping up a frenzy over the increasingly alarming problems at Newark Airport. Here’s some of what New Jersey’s members of Congress did in Washington this week.

An arresting scene

Tensions over the Delaney Hall immigrant detention facility in Newark have been simmering for months – Newark city officials say the privately owned facility didn’t obtain the necessary permits before it began letting the federal government detain immigrants there on May 1 – but they’ve now exploded into the national consciousness in a massive way.

Four New Jersey Democrats – Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), and Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka – attempted to enter the facility on Friday for an oversight visit. The three members of Congress were granted entry due to their federal elected office, but Baraka was turned away; then, after a brief but intense scuffle just outside the facility, Baraka was led away in handcuffs by federal officials.

Baraka would ultimately be detained for around five hours before a federal magistrate judge ordered his release, and in those five hours, he became a national symbol of Democratic resistance to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. (Following Senator Cory Booker’s marathon Senate speech, it’s been a big year for current and former Newark mayors in the anti-Trump movement.)

Democrats, both in New Jersey and around the country, reacted with shock to the arrest and said that they have Baraka’s back; one of Baraka’s opponents for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller, has already said he intends to make a trip of his own to Delaney Hall on Saturday morning.

“It was an act of intimidation not just to the mayor, not just to us, but to everyone who is watching,” said Menendez, who was present both when Baraka was arrested and when he was released. “They feel no weight of the law. They feel no restraint on what they should be doing. And that was shown in broad daylight today.”

The Trump administration, though, sees it differently, with officials claiming that Baraka had trespassed on the facility’s property (he is now facing trespassing charges in court) and even that he and his congressional allies had “stormed” the facility to gain entry.

“The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon,” interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba said on social media shortly after the arrest. “He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

A gulf between the parties

Internal Republican negotiations on the party’s enormous tax and spending policy bill continued this week, and ran into several roadblocks along the way. 

One key hangup: the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, on which a small group of blue-state Republicans, among them Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), are willing to play hardball in order to raise it as high as possible. On Thursday, New York-based members of the SALT Caucus publicly rejected a proposed deal for a $30,000 SALT cap, bringing the caucus’s fight with GOP leaders out into the open.

As Punchbowl News noted on Thursday morning, the SALT Caucus has a strong negotiating hand, since the SALT cap is set to disappear anyways at the end of this year if Congress doesn’t pass a bill; Kean has said in the past that he’s aiming for full SALT restoration, and that some level of SALT reform is necessary for him to support any tax bill.

Also a continuing subject of debate is Medicaid – specifically, how deeply cuts should be made to the health program (and what constitutes a “cut” in the first place), a top concern for Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) in particular. The House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, will hold a closely watched hearing on the party’s proposals next Tuesday, May 13, putting Reps. Kean, Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), and Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) in the hot seat.

But all of those things were still in the planning stage this week, so the House had to turn to the next-most important issue: renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The measure, which passed on a near-party line vote, drew support from New Jersey’s House Republicans and mockery from its Democrats.

“With all we’re facing – rising costs, crumbling infrastructure, a planet in crisis – Republicans want to waste time on the ‘Gulf of America,’” Rep. McIver scoffed. “They’d rather do geographical fan fiction than governance. Americans need serious solutions, not a rebrand of the ocean.”

A kushy gig

Twenty years ago, Charles Kushner was at his life’s low point, having received a two-year prison sentence for sensational federal crimes that ranged from shady campaign donations to hiring a prostitute to ensnare his brother-in-law. Now, he’s likely headed to France as the United States’s new ambassador.

President Trump named Kushner – the father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the man who pardoned him in 2020 – to be ambassador to America’s oldest ally last year; yesterday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved Kushner’s nomination, sending him to the full Senate for a vote in the near future.

“I don’t sit here before you today and tell you I’m a perfect person,” Kushner said at last week’s confirmation hearing, in response to questions from Democrats about his past indiscretions. “I am not a perfect person. I made a very, very, very serious mistake, and I paid a very heavy price for that mistake… I think that my past mistakes actually make me better with my judgment, better in my view of life, better in my values to really make me more qualified to do this job.”

Senator Booker, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, has a relationship with Kushner that dates back to his first mayoral campaign in 2002, which Kushner supported financially; Booker also collaborated with the Kushners on criminal justice issues during Trump’s first term. But Booker wasn’t present for Kushner’s hearing last week or his nomination vote yesterday, with Democrats boycotting the latter meeting entirely over scheduling disputes, and Kushner’s nomination passed on a 12-0 vote in their absence.

Newark air traffic control is going dark for one-sixtieth of a Farmer governorship

Newark Airport is in the news – rarely a good sign.

The airport, plagued by air traffic controller staffing issues and technological mishaps, reportedly suffered two instances in recent weeks in which its radar systems for tracking planes went dark for periods of around 90 seconds. Those alarming outages, the first of which prompted some air traffic controllers to take trauma leave, have resulted in snarled delays and plummeting confidence in the airport’s ability to handle its duties safely.

New Jersey’s politicians, naturally, have responded by freaking out. Many of the state’s members of Congress have sent letters to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and acting Federal Aviation Administration chief Chris Rocheleau demanding answers and proposing their own solutions to the airport’s woes: more staff recruitment and retention efforts, better air traffic controller pay, infrastructure updates, and more.

“We cannot wait a day longer to fix the technology issues at Newark, or the dire conditions and staffing issues we are seeing around the country,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) said at a press conference on Friday hosted in the airport itself. “We must immediately surge investment and ensure we have enough people in the towers and on the ground to ensure safety in our skies.”

Give them hellicopter

In other aviation-related news, Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) is pushing for new legislation that would prohibit non-essential helicopters from flying within a 20-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty – covering all of New York City and most of urban North Jersey.

The topic of helicopter traffic in and around Manhattan has long been a subject of consternation for locals, who complain of noise and air pollution coming from far-from-essential helicopters that are conducting tours of the city or ferrying the wealthy to their summer homes. But the issue wasn’t an especially prominent one until a helicopter crashed into the Hudson River just outside Jersey City last month, killing its six occupants (its pilot and a family of tourists).

Menendez said that his bipartisan bill, co-led with New York Reps. Jerry Nadler and Nicole Malliotakis, is necessary both to prevent similar tragedies in the future and to address the variety of other issues that helicopter traffic has long posed.

“While we have consistently worked to address the impact of non-essential helicopters on our communities, last month’s tragic crash should be a clarion call for every level of government to take action on helicopter safety,” Menendez said. “Rising congestion of non-essential helicopters, coupled with concerning safety records of air tourism operators, are causing a direct threat to public safety.”

Making sure MetLife doesn’t become MetDeath

As New Jersey (or “New York New Jersey,” as FIFA likes to call the state) prepares to host matches for the 2026 men’s World Cup, the House Homeland Security Committee has created a task force to focus on security at the games – and one of its co-leaders is the New Jerseyan who represents the stadium where the final match will be held.

Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon)’s North Jersey district includes MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, where the cup’s final showdown will take place on July 19, 2026. She’ll be taking the Democratic lead on the task force, which will also focus on security concerns at a number of other events, including the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and the U.S. Semiquincentennial celebrations in 2026.

“With several games including the final match to be played in our district, I take security for the World Cup, as well as other upcoming high-profile events, very seriously,” Pou said. “The coordination among federal, state and local agencies will be massive, complex, and in need of vast resources. We must be ready to meet the moment. Our congressional task force will do its best to ensure that we are.”

Rep. McIver, the other New Jerseyan on the Homeland Security Committee, will also be a member of the task force.

Organ recital

Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester), whose time in Congress has long revolved around the mission of fighting international human rights abusers, got his anti-organ harvesting bill through the House this week, setting up a recurring battle with the Senate.

Smith’s bill, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act, allows for sanctions and passport revocations for those involved in organ trafficking, which Smith says has become an enormous issue for Chinese ethnic minorities in particular. The House passed the bill 406-1, but it passed the same bill by a similarly lopsided margin in 2023 and the Senate never took it up, so there’s no guarantee that it will make it into law without a fight in the upper chamber.

“State-sponsored forced organ harvesting is big business for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party and shows absolutely no signs of abating, which is why we and the rest of the world need to step up, particularly the democracies of this world,” Smith said. “We must act – and we must act decisively.”

Anti-line activists praise secret-ballot conclave vote but condemn lack of transparency

The election of Leo XIV as history’s first American pope was of course a cause of great stateside celebration, and an easy excuse to interpolate American battles into an ecclesiastical context. The pope’s from Chicago! He’s a White Sox fan! He’s tweeted critical things about JD Vance!

New Jersey’s six Catholic members of Congress had more staid reactions, but they, too, focused on various different elements of the pope’s background – his Peruvian connections, his apparent anti-abortion sympathies – in their statements on his appointment.

“I am surprised and super delighted an American has been elected Holy Father,” Rep. Pou said. “The elevation of Cardinal Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, is a milestone for our nation and for the Catholic Church. I also join our district’s large Peruvian community in celebrating the fact that Pope Leo XIV has been a missionary and Archbishop in Peru. This is a moment of great joy for the world.”

“Pope Leo, as Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, said in a homily earlier this year: ‘God’s mercy calls us to protect every life, especially those society overlooks – the child yet to be born and the elderly nearing their journey’s end – because each bears Christ’s face,’” Rep. Smith said. “By underscoring the protection of the right to life as first among the many humanitarian responsibilities of the Church, the Pope strongly reinforces our collective responsibility to care for unborn children and their mothers.”