‘History will judge us as cowards or heroes': Ras Baraka, the mayor arrested by Ice, won't be intimidated

The Guardian

2 days ago

It took about two minutes for Ras Baraka to be propelled from being a relatively obscure New Jersey politician into a nationwide avatar. The transformation happened on 9 May when he was trying to inspect Delaney Hall, a privately run federal immigration detention center that he accuses of violating safety protocols, when he was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).
Video footage of those fateful minutes show burly Ice agents dressed in militarised fatigues dragging the mayor into the compound. Baraka, who was accompanying three congressmembers, has his hands yanked behind his back and is handcuffed.
He vainly urges his captors to go easy on him with a plea that, in hindsight, now sounds deeply ironic. 'I'm not resisting,' he says, over and over.
Since the arrest Baraka, 55, has rapidly emerged on the national stage as someone who resists, a lot. The son of a revolutionary poet, and a poet in his own right, he was a high school principal before becoming councilmember then mayor of one of America's less glamorous cities: Newark.
He has articulated an opposition to Donald Trump's march towards 'authoritarianism' with a potency that, apart from sporadic actions, has been lacking from Democratic party leaders.
'History will judge us in this moral moment,' he says. 'These people are wrong. And it's moments like this that will judge us all – as cowards or, you know, as heroes.'
Following his arrest, Baraka was charged with trespassing, had his mugshot taken and was fingerprinted, twice. That second time really irked him. 'That was a little much. Marshals came into the courtroom to carry me out to the basement, for charges that were a class C misdemeanor.'
A few days later, Trump officials abruptly dropped the charges, earning themselves a sharp rebuke from the court. Judge André Espinosa slammed the Trump administration for having made a 'worrisome misstep' in rushing to prosecute an elected representative.
All of that took place in three weeks, at the same time as Baraka has been running in the Democratic primary to become New Jersey's next governor. 'It's been a little crazy,' Baraka concedes, with understatement.
The volatility has not ended with his court case, it has just moved onto the streets. Baraka says he is now frequently stopped by people on the Newark sidewalk, praising him for his stand.
When he travels outside Newark, the obverse is true. 'I've had every crazy person calling me all kinds of things. People jumping out of their car, yelling and screaming because you're protecting immigrants.'
For Baraka, the praise and anger has underlined the perilousness of these times. 'The country is really, really divided. And in my mind, really uninformed. And we're seeing how dangerous these people have become.'
Now that he's had time to reflect on this surreal episode, what does he think it was all about? Why did Trump's America – 'these people', as he calls them – pick on him?
'I'm the mayor of the city. That's it. They're coming after the governor, the US attorney, the judges. It's all trying to prove that they're in charge, like regular bullies do.'
We meet 3 miles and a world away from Delaney Hall. The metal fences and khaki Ice uniforms that confronted Baraka on 9 May make way for a rather grander setting: the golden domed beaux-arts wonder that is Newark city hall.
Baraka's office is up a sweeping marble staircase. There are officers guarding his door, also uniformed, but instead of batons they greet visitors with smiles.
The mayor sounds a bit flat when we start talking, as though his mind is elsewhere. But then, he has got a lot on his plate.
A day after our interview he lodges a lawsuit against New Jersey's top federal prosecutor for false arrest and malicious prosecution. The suit also accuses Alina Habba, Trump's appointee as the state's acting US attorney, of defaming him.
On top of that, there are next Tuesday's primary elections in the race to replace the time-limited Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy as New Jersey governor. Baraka is competing in a field of six Democratic candidates in what is turning out to be a tight contest: many polls suggest he is running in second place to the former Navy helicopter pilot Mikie Sherrill, though the outcome remains unpredictable.
Then there's the fact that Trump has come at him with the entire might of the US government. It's not just Baraka in the line of fire, it's Newark.
Trump has long shown disdain for Democratic-controlled cities, especially those that happen to be majority Black and brown. During his first term Trump called Baltimore, Maryland, which is 60% Black, a 'disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess'.
Newark, New Jersey's largest city, is 47% Black and 37% Hispanic, so it's fair to surmise where much of Trump's animus towards it comes from. The president's racist antagonism is targeted at Newark because of its status as a 'sanctuary city' – meaning that it offers protections for undocumented immigrants, and limits the cooperation of its police with federal enforcement operations unless crime is involved.
There's no better manifestation of this collision of values than Delaney Hall. It's 1,000 beds are only currently accommodating 120 detainees, but its presence on the edge of downtown makes its own looming statement.
'It's menacing, a threat,' Baraka says of the detention facility. 'They said they were arresting criminals, but people know that's not true. You can't find 1,000 immigrant gang members and rapists and murderers, not in Newark. So who else are they going to put in there?'
Baraka says that the fear is palpable across the city. Since Ice carried out a high-profile raid at Newark fish market just three days after the inauguration, there has been a steep decline in people leaving their homes for health or social service appointments, or trips to shops and restaurants.
'People are afraid. It's regular everyday anxiety. These people are running around, grabbing people off the street,' Baraka says.
In the latest salvo, the Trump administration is suing Newark and three other New Jersey cities for 'standing in the way' of federal immigration officers. That's quite something, to have one of the world's most powerful governments bearing down on you like a gigantic bird of prey.
Is he scared? Baraka is surprisingly honest in admitting his own fears. 'You got the apparatus of government, of law, of the police and military – all this stuff to make your life miserable.'
He's warming to his subject now, that early flatness giving way to an intensity of rhetoric clearly honed at campaign rallies. He comforts himself, he says, with the thought that people who came before him must also have been afraid, yet they were unbowed.
'When we were fighting to dismantle Jim Crow in America, people were afraid. When the women's suffrage movement was going, in the fight for labor rights, there was fear, but people still did what they thought was right.'
He hopes he will make the same decision, though he candidly admits it's not easy.
'Of course, this is scary,' he says. 'I just pray that it doesn't turn me into a coward.'
There are plenty of, if not cowards, then collaborators in this 'moral moment'. Universities like Columbia or multibillion-dollar law firms like Paul Weiss, that have capitulated in the face of Trump's assault without so much as a squeak of protest.
Then there's that other mayor ensconced just 15 miles away across the Hudson River. Eric Adams's deal with Trump, in which the New York mayor had his federal corruption charges dropped in return for cooperation over immigration deportations, is perhaps the most shocking of all apparent quid pro quos in this second Trump era.
Baraka is open about his ties to Adams, and though he stressed he didn't agree with what had happened his take on events is slightly ambiguous. It sits somewhere between condemning the man and empathising with his plight.
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'Mayor Adams, I know him, he's my friend,' he says.
For Baraka, the Adams story is another sign of present dangers – not just in the Trump attack, but also in the Democratic response.
'This is what this moment does to people, does to us – it puts us in these precarious situations where we have to choose ourselves over our people, over the things we believe or care about the most. That's why these are very, very dangerous times.'
He has a message for those who think they can save themselves by making a pact with the devil, such as Adams or Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic Michigan governor, whom he also namechecked. Whitmer has cozied up to Trump since his return to the White House, only to find the president now considering a pardon for the men who plotted to kidnap her.
'That's an insane proposition,' Baraka says. 'You think you're protecting yourself, but you're just releasing your rights, your abilities, your values, and making yourself more vulnerable.'
Baraka describes himself as an unabashed but pragmatic Democrat, a progressive who gets things done. 'I'm a pragmatist at heart,' he says. 'As mayor, I don't have the luxury of debating ideology in the egg line at the supermarket. I've got to get people jobs and opportunity.'
His record since he became mayor in 2014, succeeding Cory Booker who left city hall for the US senate, has earned him the plaudits of such Democratic luminaries as Barack Obama. The former president praised Baraka in the New Yorker as being 'both idealistic and practical'.
Under Baraka, Newark homicides have fallen to lows not seen since the 1940s. He is proud of his record on attracting new businesses to the city, improving water quality and increasing childhood vaccinations.
Yet in the gubernatorial race, he still faces the old put-down leveled at progressives: unelectability. He complains that during the campaign he has been labeled 'too progressive, too Newark, and too Black'.
'It's hogwash,' he says animatedly. 'The moderates, they want to keep the status quo and are maintaining these lies to make people do what's safe, as opposed to what's right.'
Trump lost New Jersey last November by six percentage points. That was a 10-point improvement for him on 2020 – the second largest swing in his favour of any state.
Baraka blames that startling result not on Trump's appeal, but on the Democrats' failings, especially in their pitch to working Americans. 'The Democrats lost touch with people, that's the real issue: the Democratic party's ability to connect to its voter base and to attract new voters. Ultimately, they did not inspire.'
He criticizes the party for being afraid of powerful interests. 'People can't pay their healthcare costs, but we're afraid to challenge the healthcare industry; childcare costs are too high, but we're afraid to lean into child tax credits that would end child poverty; rents and mortgages are unaffordable, but we're afraid of developers and big banks.'
His critique does not end there. Democratic leaders are also proving incapable of rising to the challenge of this perilous moment.
'We've seen a bunch of disparate, spur-of-the-moment acts by individuals and smaller groups, but there's no collective offensive strategy. And we've underestimated Donald Trump.'
So why does he stick with it? Why stay in a Democratic party that he believes is abjectly failing?
'It's all we have right now. This is what we got. We got to fight with the weapons we have until there's others. I mean, pragmatically.'
Poetry is not the most conventional tactic in a bid for statewide office. One of Baraka's closing political ads in the primaries has him reciting American Poem, his best-known work which is featured by Beyoncé in her current Cowboy Carter tour.
Baraka argues that poetry can be a powerful tool in reaching out to voters. 'There's a lot of folks who respond to art, poetry, music. And I'm a poet. My dad said: 'Never lose your poetry license'. So I'm not.'
His dad was the prominent Black poet, playwright and jazz aficionado, Amiri Baraka (AKA Everett Leroy Jones AKA LeRoi Jones). Newark born and raised, Baraka Sr was a founding member of the 1960s Black Arts movement; he helped both to chronicle and shape the Black liberation struggle.
Though a radical and at times a revolutionary, Amiri Baraka also worked within the system to promote Black politicians. He was seminal in having Kenneth Gibson elected in 1970 as the first Black mayor of Newark.
It must have been a profound sadness for Baraka, then, that his father died in January 2014, four months before he himself won the mayoral election.
'It was worse than that, I guess,' Baraka reflected. 'My father didn't want me to run for mayor at first – he knew how ugly this thing is. But in the last week or so of his life, he was passing out flyers in his hospital room, encouraging doctors, patients to vote for me. 'My son's running for mayor! My son's running for mayor!' Yeah, that was amazing.'
American Poem is a call for an inclusive definition of America and what it is to be an American. 'It's me saying, I want to hear an American poem that talks about all the things – good or bad – that people refuse to talk about: our communities, our struggles, our lives, our culture, our history – all of which is as American as the KKK.'
The poem was written in the 1990s, when Baraka was straight out of college. That's uncanny, because it reads today with a burning contemporary urgency, as though it was composed as a direct riposte to Trump's ideology of 'America first':
I want to hear an American poem
You know, something made in the USA
Something American and Afro-Cuban
Nuyorican Latin tinge, beaten bone by plena,
Sprawling out of wide open tenement windows
In the middle of winter
Which just goes to show, Baraka says, that the current fight is nothing new. It's as old as the country itself.
'People keep trying to define what this country is. Now Trump is telling us what it is to be an American. But he can't. It belongs to all of us. Yeah, it belongs to all of us.'