As Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) faces an assault charge back home in New Jersey for her interactions with federal immigration officials during a May 9 oversight visit, a subcommittee hearing led by one of her home-state colleagues this afternoon may raise temperatures even further in Washington.
The Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee’s 2 p.m. hearing will focus on threats to immigration officials and facilities, including the incident earlier this month at Newark’s Delaney Hall – and it will be chaired by New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis). McIver’s Democratic colleagues from New Jersey, meanwhile, are coming to McIver’s defense, saying that she and the two other Democrats who visited Delaney Hall were simply exercising their constitutional right to conduct oversight.
“We reiterate our support for Representatives [Bonnie] Watson Coleman, [Rob] Menendez, and McIver for upholding their oversight duties as duly elected Members of Congress,” the letter to Judiciary Committee leaders reads. “We commend their efforts to hold DHS and ICE accountable. And we strongly condemn any efforts by the current Administration to block or intimidate Members of Congress from performing this lawful role.”
Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) led the letter, which was signed by every Democratic senator and representative in the state minus the three directly involved in the Delaney Hall incident.
Van Drew has said that his high-profile subcommittee, which he began leading earlier this year, aims to expose how Democrats “have fought harder for illegal immigrants than for their own constituents,” including in this month’s dustup.
“I want to get my colleagues on the record: do they really want to do this?” Van Drew said in a Fox News segment yesterday. “Do they want to close down, for example, Delaney Hall in the city of Newark? They attacked it, they actually put people in danger by what they did with a physical altercation… We’ve got to get them on the record.”
McIver, Watson Coleman, Menendez, and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka had shown up at Delaney Hall in order to tour the facility, which began housing immigrant detainees earlier this month. The three representatives have official oversight authorities and were allowed inside, but as a local official Baraka was not, and he was arrested for allegedly trespassing at the facility.
Interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba announced last night that Baraka’s trespassing charges would be dropped, but she also unveiled new charges against McIver, alleging that the freshman congresswoman assaulted Homeland Security officers during the scuffle that broke out following Baraka’s arrest. (Video footage of the event shows quite a bit of shoving and shouting, both by McIver and by law enforcement, but nothing especially drastic; no injuries have been reported.)
The incident quickly became national news, and has remained in the headlines for the week-and-a-half since. Even President Donald Trump, who hand-picked Habba for her role, weighed in this morning, though he seemed unfamiliar with some key details like McIver’s name.
“Give me a break,” Trump told reporters. “Did you see her? She was out of control. Those days are over. The days of woke are over. That woman – I have no idea who she is – that woman was out of control. She was shoving federal agents.”
McIver, for her part, has strongly rejected the premise of the charges, saying that they are an attempt at political intimidation by Trump’s administration.
“We were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short,” McIver said yesterday in a statement. “Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka. The charges against me are purely political – they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight.”
RELATED ARTICLES
-
October 4, 2018 -
January 6, 2025 -
December 15, 2019