The Case of LaMonica McIver, the Expansion of ICE, and the Growth of the Domestic Security State
U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) was born in 1986 in Newark and has lived there ever since. She grew up in a public high rise with three younger siblings and a mother who struggled with substance abuse. She looked instead for guidance to her fifth grade teacher, Ras Baraka, since 2014 the mayor of Newark, who “hooked” her on public speaking: first on theater (Macbeth) and then, when he started his electoral career, on politics.
In 2004, McIver became the first of her family to graduate college: Bloomfield College, with a degree in English literature, then Seton Hall University, with a Masters in Education and Public Policy. She worked in public schools and founded a leadership nonprofit for young women, and in 2018 ran for and won a seat on the Newark City Council. In 2022 she became council president, a position she held until she resigned in 2024 to run for the congressional seat for New Jersey’s 10th District to replace an incumbent who had died in office. She won the special election and entered the U.S. House of Representatives in September of that year, then won a full term in November, and was sworn in for a two-year term on January 3, 2025.
This is not a CV that suggests the commitments of a constitutional conservative, but its resolute focus on the local over the national and on community over institutions can be extremely relatable to people with those values and views. Perhaps even more relatable is a late and surely unexpected entrée onto LaMonica McIver’s CV. For the last year and a half, McIver has been one of the more prominent targets of federal, executive overreach via ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.
On May 19, 2025, 136 days after McIver was sworn in for her first full term, interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba announced that McIver had been charged “with two counts of assaulting, impeding or interfering with a Homeland Security officer.” The charges flowed from an incident on May 9, outside an ICE detention center in Newark, when McIver, who was shielding Ras Baraka from being arrested by Homeland Security officers and ICE, allegedly “struck one federal agent with a forearm, ‘slammed’ her arm into another and ‘reached out and tried to restrain’ the arresting officer.” Habba’s is an indictment which McIver has tried without success to get dismissed by the Courts: if McIver is convicted, the charge carries a maximum prison sentence of seventeen years.
Federal indictments of members of Congress for alleged violations of public trust are not as rare as one might expect. Between 1980 and 2015 alone, more than two dozen representatives or senators faced prosecutions: most of them on charges of bribery or misappropriation of funds, several others on charges of sexual misconduct. But the case of LaMonica McIver is not one of those cases. As The Washington Post put it, it is “the highly unusual action by the Justice Department” of “charging a sitting representative after a heated clash in which there have been no reported injuries.” The Trump administration justified its action by asserting that McIver had been part of a woke mob intent on gaining access to the ICE facility. According to then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, testifying to Congress a few days after the May 9 incident, a “mob of protesters including three members of Congress stormed the gate and they trespassed into the detention facility.” According to a Department of Homeland Security press release, “lawmakers used an arriving ‘bus of detainees’ as a decoy to gain entrance, then ‘holed up in a guard shack’” and “lawmakers attacked officers, including ‘body slamming a female ICE officer.’” According to President Donald Trump, commenting directly on McIver, “She was out of control. Those days are over, the days of woke are over.”
This is a cinematic narrative, and almost none of it is true. Investigating the actual facts of the case of LaMonica McIver does reveal several arguable errors of judgment by her and the two other congresspeople who visited the detention facility that day. But the majority of the facts point to a different, more disturbing narrative: layers of overreach from Washington DC that culminated first in the incident of May 9, then in the indictment of May 19, and then in an accelerating chain of abuses and dysfunctions at the ICE detention facility in Newark which continue to the present day. The majority of the facts also suggest that the main actors on May 9 were not errant members of Congress but corporate-government bureaucrats—ICE agents, Department of Homeland Security agents, private security contractors—who flouted laws and constitutionality, then used minor misjudgments by the congresspeople to justify an outsized response. This story is considerably more dramatic than the Trump administration’s cinematic narrative when it comes to its implications for the legal and political underpinnings of our constitutional republic, because ICE’s layers of overreach did not happen in a vacuum.
I have reported for the Libertarian Institute on some of ICE’s actions and how they represent an acceleration of domestic militarization by the Executive with the aid of private security contractors with monopolies on government contracts. Less obvious is the way that this domestic militarization has converged with and helped enable the erosion of local and state authority to the benefit of Washington DC and the disempowerment of Congress to the benefit of the Executive and the federal courts. ICE’s actions in Newark represent these processes at work in miniature, in a single location, with concrete consequences. In LaMonica McIver, these trends have converged into a perfect, symbolic storm over a single person standing up for her community—a storm that should alarm anyone who cares about constitutional republican government.
The story of the prosecution of LaMonica McIver starts with the ICE detention facility in Newark. Delaney Hall is located at the Eastern edge of the city between I-95 and the Passaic River, with a truck stop and an energy terminal across the street. Initially a public prison, it was bought by GEO Group, the largest private prison contractor in the country, in 2011. GEO Group operated it as a 450-bed ICE detention center for six years, then the facility went dormant. In 2025, ICE gave GEO Group a contract valued at $1 billion to reopen Delaney Hall, again as an ICE detention facility, this time with 1,000 beds. This was a period of high growth for GEO Group: at the end of 2024, GEO Group had 80,000 beds in ninety-nine facilities, and, in 2025, it opened at least three more in vacant or disused buildings, including the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall. According to The New York Times, reporting on the contract with GEO Group for Delaney Hall in May 2025, “hours after ICE announced it would reopen Delaney Hall, the GEO Group held an earnings call for its investors. The Newark facility was mentioned repeatedly as a core component of the company’s long-term business strategy.”
As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, the second Trump administration’s dealings with GEO Group and Core Civic, the first and second largest private prison companies in the United States, were ad hoc affairs. They were no bid contracts that ended up over-expanding the supply of private facilities, pushing GEO Group’s and Core Civic’s stock price down because detainments were not keeping pace with space. At this point, the Trump administration, which was a recipient of both companies’ campaign donations, upped immigrant arrests and overstocked the facilities, leading ICE to go so far as to pay public prisons to store the human overflow. With all of the confusion, the building of these private facilities was haphazard and sometimes lacked municipal approval, and conditions in those completed facilities which held inmates quickly declined, even as profits increased. Delaney Hall was no exception.
New Jersey had objected to ICE’s construction and privatization spree during the first Trump administration, and had sometimes objected with a broad legal brush. In 2021, the state passed a law barring public prisons and private contractors from working with ICE; a federal judge struck down the part of the law disallowing private contracting off of a case brought by Core Civic. But in the second Trump administration ICE was the one operating with a broad legal brush, in a way that seemed to invite challenges. In 2025, not long after news reports broke about GEO Group’s refurbishing of Delaney Hall, Newark brought a local lawsuit. It alleged that GEO Group was “renovating the building without securing proper permits, has barred city inspectors from entering the facility, and is flouting city code to finish construction” and that its “‘wanton and unlawful occupation’ of Delaney Hall…exposes Newark to potential liabilities.” According to Ras Baraka, commenting on the lawsuit and sounding what for a Democratic mayor might seem an unusually constitutionalist note, “We will not tolerate federal attempts to ignore or evade our laws and statutes, which apply to everyone.”
The lawsuit began its way through the courts; in the meantime, GEO Group finished refurbishments on the building and began housing detainees there, and Newark’s citizens responded. Newark is an unusually cohesive political community: in 2020, it was the rare city where the protests over George Floyd’s death did not get out of hand. According to a New York Times article at the time, this was “a victory that city officials and residents attributed to a combination of tactical decisions” and “community and political leadership.” This communal cohesiveness surfaced again in May 2026 as GEO Group repeatedly refused city inspections even as detainees began being shipped into the facility. Pro-immigrant Newark civic groups began protesting outside the facility, and Baraka turned up there every day, posting a list of code violations on the gate. The people on the other side of the fence responded, obliquely: by May 9, more guards had shown up, wearing masks and zip ties, some of them with GEO Group, some with ICE, and some with the Department of Homeland Security.
This confusion between outside and inside the facility, and between the different cohorts of government agents and contractors inside it, was the order of the day on May 9. When McIver, who sits on the Homeland Security Committee in Congress, arrived that day for an oversight inspection with two other congresspeople, a GEO Group adviser at first would not let them in, a violation of Congress’s right to oversight. After waiting outside, one of the other congresspeople followed a car in through the gates; the other two congresspeople followed and found an ICE agent who knew the rules, and who sat the three representatives in a waiting room. They were kept waiting for an hour and thirty minutes after the warden, a GEO Group employee, informed them that he needed authorization from his “client,” ICE, to allow them an inspection, and called ICE headquarters. The lead ICE agent on site, Ricky Patel, who apparently did not have the authority to allow the inspection, was also in the room. But Patel’s attention was on protestors on the lawn and on Ras Baraka, who was walking to the gate to meet the congresspeople, whom he assumed would be finished with the tour and had arranged to join him at the protest.
Just inside the gate, a GEO Group employee and Baraka spoke about keeping the crowd in check, a skill Baraka had honed in 2020 during the George Floyd protests. But then Patel appeared, telling Baraka that he was on private property and was under arrest. The three congresspeople walked outside and spoke on behalf of Baraka, who agreed to leave the facility; then, as Baraka walked away from the building, Patel placed a call to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who ordered him to arrest Baraka. This is when the wheels came off the wagon. ICE and Homeland Security officers walked to the facility’s public parking lot and approached Baraka. The three congresspeople followed and they and the protestors formed a protective wall around him and a number of people, including McIver and a DHS employee, were caught up in the melee. According to The New York Times, “video of the scrum showed [McIver] pushing toward the gates and being pushed from behind after Mr. Baraka was handcuffed.”
This is where things might have ended—a series of unfortunate exchanges brought on by obscurancy, confusion, and aggressiveness from ICE, DHS, and GEO Group; but also exacerbated by irritations and interferences from their congressional visitors, who arguably let their impatience get the best of them. But things did not end there, because the Trump administration had not only primed ICE to make such events more likely through aggressive behavior but also primed the DOJ to make as much hay as possible out of these events if they occurred, using “a new directive to increase immigration-related arrests” that “encouraged [agents] to investigate and charge citizens and public officials if they ‘obstructed’ immigration agents.”
Continue reading at The Libertarian Institute.