This year marked the start of LaMonica McIver’s first full term as a member of Congress. Rather than a year spent learning the ropes of her new job, the New Jersey Democrat spent much of it fighting against federal criminal charges she sees as political retribution.
On 19 May, McIver was charged with interfering with an arrest outside an immigration detention center in New Jersey earlier that month.
“This is about intimidation. It’s about bullying,” McIver told the Guardian. “It’s about trying to stop our level of government from having oversight and holding this administration accountable.”
The charges weren’t about her, “a little Black girl from the city of Newark”, she said, later referencing Donald Trump: “It was about using me as an example. … He hoped that what he’s doing to me, using me as an example, that it would scare other members of Congress from doing their job, from having oversight.”
Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political enemies and the left writ large has proven a key feature of his second term. He has sought to charge Democratic officials despite pushback from prosecutors. He has filed executive orders that attack specific people and organizations based on his grievances. He has cast a host of activity as related to “antifa” as a way to hinder leftwing organizing. The administration included McIver on a list of supposed “antifa violence”, alongside people charged for bomb threats and violent attacks on federal agents and facilities.
The legal turmoil stemmed from a 9 May visit to Delaney Hall, a detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. McIver, alongside other elected officials, went to conduct an inspection as part of her congressional duties. Members of Congress have oversight abilities at ICE facilities, allowing them to visit without notice – though the Trump administration has attempted to limit these visits.
During these visits, Democratic members of Congress have often found unsafe, unsanitary and substandard conditions and have met with constituents as part of their advocacy for their immigration cases. Democratic lawmakers filed a lawsuit earlier this year to force the Trump administration to follow the law on oversight visits and allow them unfettered access.
At Delaney Hall, the Newark mayor, Ras Baraka, was asked to leave because he is not a member of Congress and was arrested for trespassing. Charging documents noted that people, including members of Congress, surrounded Baraka to create a “human shield” to prevent his arrest and alleged that McIver shouted “hell no” repeatedly. Video of part of the incident shows a chaotic scene, with protesters, elected officials and agents in a scrum.
The Washington Post, after analyzing video from many angles, said McIver “made contact with at least two agents” in the scuffle, but that it was “difficult to discern the force of the contact and to what extent it was intentional or the result of the chaotic moment”.
Charges against Baraka were dropped 10 days later. But McIver was subsequently charged for assaulting, impeding and interfering with an arrest – charges that collectively could carry up to 17 years in prison. She was formally indicted by a grand jury in June. Alina Habba, who was serving as acting US attorney for the state at the time, pursued the charges. She has since resigned her role after a court found her ineligible to hold the job without confirmation.
“At the end of the day, ICE and homeland security, they created the chaos there, and that’s evident as they arrested the mayor, charged him, and then dropped the charges,” McIver said.
McIver was not at Delaney Hall to protest, she said – she was there to do her job. Delaney Hall is in her district. She serves on the homeland security committee. She had a duty as a member of Congress.
She has asked for investigations into the facility and for it to be shut down. The month after her oversight visit, four detainees escaped the facility after reportedly kicking through an interior wall. The Republicans who run the House oversight committee haven’t investigated, she said.
“I’ve seen, in my community, moms afraid to pick up their kids, people afraid to go to the doctor,” she said. “They’re terrorizing people on the street based off the color of their skin, racially profiling. I mean, we cannot allow ICE to operate in the dark.”
McIver has pleaded not guilty and fought to get the charges dismissed, arguing that she was fulfilling her duties as a member of Congress and that she was being selectively prosecuted, noting the president’s pardons of those charged and convicted for their roles in the January 6 insurrection under the same statutes under which she was charged.
A judge denied the motion to dismiss on two of the counts, writing that she had “not demonstrated that her prosecution is a result of personal animus harbored by the prosecution”. A ruling on whether the assault charge should be dismissed is expected soon. A trial date has not yet been set.
After the charges were filed, Trump said he didn’t know who McIver was, but that “the days of woke are over”.
“That woman was out of control,” he said of McIver. “She was shoving federal agents. She was out of control. The days of that crap are over in this country. We’re going to have law and order.”
McIver, 39, was first elected in a special election in New Jersey’s 10th congressional district in September 2024 following the death of Donald Payne Jr. She won a full term two months later. Before Congress, she served for several years in local elected roles. She was an immediate, outspoken critic to Trump after he was sworn in for his second term.
The case has been time-consuming, distracting and expensive. She’s had to pay a million dollars for representation in the case, raising funds for legal assistance because she can’t accept pro bono help because of ethics rules (despite the administration “using your money and tax dollars to prosecute me”). Some Republicans, led by Nancy Mace, sought to expel her after the charges were filed.
The stress of a potential 17 years in prison weighs on her personally as well. She has a nine-year-old child, a spouse, a mother “who’s worried to death about what this administration will do to her daughter”.
“It actually breaks my heart that this is the country that we’re living in with this president who, quite honestly, is cruel and doesn’t give a damn,” she said.
Ankush Khardori, a Politico writer and former federal prosecutor, wrote that the government’s case was “likely to be a dud”.
“The charges certainly appear to many as both politically motivated and, at a bare minimum, unwarranted as a matter of appropriate prosecutorial discretion,” Khardori wrote.
McIver sees the case against her as another example of Trump’s fear-based agenda, a way to make people frightened and thus unwilling to fight back. But her district elected her to protect them, and she’s going to continue doing so, she said.
“Sometimes that comes with a sacrifice, a personal sacrifice, which is what I’m going through right now, and I think my constituents want to continue to see me make personal sacrifices to protect them against a very dangerous president and administration,” she said.
She has faith in the legal system, but said she’s “taking one day at a time” on fighting the charges. “This is a new situation for me. I’m not a known criminal. This is not something that was in my trajectory.”
