ICE officials ‘un-American' for attempts to ‘intimidate' members of Congress, lawmaker says
Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez, and LaMonica McIver appeared on CNN's State of the Union for a joint interview on Sunday. The trio were threatened with arrest by a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson over the weekend after conducting an oversight visit to an ICE facility on Friday — a visit explicitly allowed by the legislation directing funding for those facilities.
They told CNN's Dana Bash that Trump administration officials were attempting to 'intimidate' members of Congress and the White House's critics with threats of arrest and imprisonment. Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, was arrested after attempting to enter the facility on Friday.
'Someone on the phone above the leaders of ICE, who were with us at that facility, instructed them to go out of the facility, go to the private property and lock the mayor of the largest city in the state of New Jersey up. That's absurd. That's un-American,' said Watson Coleman.
She added: 'That's determination to intimidate people in this country.'
Menendez, who tweeted out the clause of legislation defining the legality of congressional oversight visits to ICE detention facilities, told MSNBC on Saturday that 'no one should feel safe' as the second Trump administration seeks to use law enforcement to 'intimidate' critics.
'This is a pattern,' said Menendez on MSNBC's The Weekend Primetime. 'It's judges — federal judges who they disagree with their decision. It's mayors, it's now members of Congress.'
Baraka was interviewed Sunday on MSNBC's The Weekend.
'This is like moving us slowly towards an authoritarian kind of government here, where they are telling people they can't come to a public place, they can't go onto a facility to even get a tour. We weren't protesting. Nobody barged in. We were there peacefully,' said the mayor.
'I was there for over an hour before they decided to escalate it.'
Menendez added on CNN: "They had over 20 armed ICE [Homeland Security Investigations] officers, they were heavily armed, their faces were covered, and they wearing no identification. So this is who they chose to have come engage with the mayor of Newark and three elected members of the House of Representatives."
On Saturday, more than 100 miles away in Albany, New York, Democratic state lawmakers and activists were blocked by police officers as they attempted to confront the White House's deportation czar, Tom Homan, during his visit to the state capitol. Among them was Zohran Mamdani, estimated in most polls to be trailing Andrew Cuomo as the disgraced former governor's main competitor in the New York City mayoral race.
The three lawmakers who visited the ICE facility on Friday were threatened with arrest, with McIver being accused of 'body-slamming' an officer. Video footage released by ICE does not show this, and instead shows McIver being jostled repeatedly, and attempting to push her way through a scrum of officers attempting to block her path. During the scuffle, McIver says she was shoved by an agent before she made contact with other officers. Notably, as McIver said Friday, the scuffle occurred after McIver and the two other lawmakers first entered the facility.
'This scuffle, during which an ICE agent physically shoved me, occurred AFTER we had entered the Delaney Hall premises. We entered the facility, came BACK OUT to speak to the Mayor, and then ICE agents began shoving us.'
Watson Coleman confirmed during her interview Sunday that the clash with ICE officers occurred after the arrest of the mayor was ordered. The lawmakers confirmed that ICE agents proceeded to allow a tour of the facility after the scuffle and arrest of the mayor.
'After Mayor Baraka was arrested yesterday, DHS officials let us conduct our tour as is required by law. So despite the Admin's attempts to spin this, they know we had every right to be there and enter the facility. If you ignore the spin, you'll see there is only one accurate narrative - ours,' said Menendez on Twitter.
On Saturday, a DHS spokeswoman warned: 'There will be more arrests coming.'
The Trump administration has not identified what charges would potentially be brought against McIver or others for the confrontation on Friday and doing so would provoke a confrontation with Democratic leadership the likes of which the White House has not yet seen. The situation played out this weekend as the administration has taken successive defeats in the court system and on Friday saw the ordered release of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student, after weeks of legal battles over her detention and possible deportation. A judge in the case admonished the administration's focus on protected First Amendment activities for the revocation of her visa.
White House officials have not yet openly defied the courts but continue to ignore an order requiring them to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man deported to El Salvador despite a judge ruling that he could not be sent there. U.S. officials maintain that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody and therefore out of the administration's hands.
Federal agents arrested a federal judge in Wisconsin last month and accused her of refusing to allow agents to detain a man outside of her courtroom; her arrest has been widely condemned by legal experts.
Immigration raids continue across the United States as the Trump administration pushes towards a target of deporting 1 million people this year. Raids were reported in Washington DC, Tennessee, and California over the past week.
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Despite being a constitutionally peculiar special district, a lot of effort has been put into giving D.C. a local police force that does not practically function as an arm of the federal government. Even in the seat of federal power, it's understood that a force of federal agents policing everyday life is not something ordinary citizens should have to put up with. That Trump has the power to federalize the D.C. police or deploy the D.C. National Guard doesn't stop his actions from being authoritarian and offensive to the spirit of the Constitution, even if it doesn't violate the letter of it. It's also cold comfort that Trump's declared crime emergency is clearly mostly a performative act to rile up the libs and not a serious effort at combating crime. While the president is staging the performance, it's disconcerting that he's opted to cast himself as the villain in the play. 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