Facing federal charges, McIver posts largest fundraising quarter ever

Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), elected last year in a quiet special election to succeed the late Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark), did not spend her first year in Congress amassing huge amounts of campaign money – and, representing a deep-blue district based in Newark, she didn’t have to.

But now, facing what she says are politically motivated federal charges over a May altercation at a Newark immigrant detention center, that’s changed in a big way. McIver reported raising $751,704 in the second quarter of 2025, with the large majority of the total coming from small Democratic donors around the country.

Not only is that McIver’s largest fundraising quarter ever, it’s more than McIver had previously raised for her congressional campaigns total. It’s also more than any prior candidate for the 10th congressional district had raised in a single quarter, including during competitive Democratic primaries in 1980, 1986, and 2012.

McIver, a former Newark councilwoman, was one of three House Democrats who accompanied Newark Mayor Ras Baraka on an oversight visit to the privately owned, recently reopened Delaney Hall detention facility on May 9. The visit went south after Baraka was arrested for trespassing, prompting a scuffle between the three House members, immigration officials, and a handful of protestors who had gathered at the facility’s gates.

The charges against Baraka were later dropped, but interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba announced that her office would instead pursue charges against McIver, alleging that the congresswoman assaulted law enforcement officers during the dustup. A federal grand jury returned an indictment last month, with a trial set for November.

McIver, who has pleaded not guilty, instantly became a national figure following the charges, a phenomenon that later repeated itself when Senator Alex Padilla (D-California) and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander had their own alarming interactions with federal immigration officers. The congresswoman’s colleagues in the Democratic Party have stood firmly behind her, with House Democratic leaders calling the charges “extreme, morally bankrupt and lacks any basis in law or fact.”

Evidently, that message has also reached the small donor army that now makes up the core of the Democratic fundraising base. Of the $751,704 McIver reported raising in the second quarter, $466,966 came from unitemized contributions of $200 or less.

It’s possible that McIver may end up using some of her new campaign cash – she ended the quarter with $628,381 on-hand – for her own legal defense, much as now-former Senator Bob Menendez did during his corruption trial last year. The congresswoman has retained two high-profile attorneys, former U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman and former Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Cortes, to represent her in the case.