Charges against House Dem sets up clash at immigration hearing

Members of Congress are poised for a potentially dramatic clash at a hearing Tuesday after the Department of Justice brought criminal charges against a House Democrat who protested outside a federal immigration facility.

The charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) for allegedly “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” at that May 9 event will sharpen talking points for Republicans serving on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight as it “examines threats to ICE Operations.”

Subcommittee chair Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey Republican, vowed in an interview Monday that “We’re going to go into … the actual scuffle itself.” Van Drew made these remarks shortly before New Jersey interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba announced the charge against McIver.

“What happened in that scuffle?" Van Drew asked. "What was the behavior of the individuals who were involved? Was it appropriate or not?”

For Democrats, the episode at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center has become a flashpoint around oversight of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda. The DOJ’s Monday announcement intensifies their accusations that the administration is intent on punishing its critics.

“Charging Members of Congress for doing our jobs is a dangerous precedent to set,” said the top Democrat on the oversight subcommittee, Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, in a joint statement with the ranking members of the other House Judiciary subpanels. “It reveals the increasingly authoritarian nature of this administration and its relentless, illegal attempts to suppress any dissent or oversight, including from judges.”

The standoff stems from a visit McIver and fellow New Jersey Democratic Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez made earlier this month to Delaney Hall, where they attempted to inspect the Trump administration’s reopened ICE detention center that contracts with the private prison company GEO Group. Critics say the facility is unfit to house up to 1,000 undocumented immigrants.

A tussle erupted amid a group of demonstrators that led to the arrest of Newark’s Democratic mayor, Ras Baraka, and accusations that McIver had been physically aggressive with the law enforcement officers controlling the crowd. McIver, in a statement Monday, said she and the other members were “fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities … and our visit should have been peaceful and short” before “ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation.”

The trespassing charge against Baraka were dropped Monday, according to Habba.

Van Drew said the Tuesday hearing would focus on the conditions of the Delaney Hall detention center and the people held inside the facility. He also said he believed behavior of the House Democrats was “inappropriate.” That sentiment is being echoed inside the larger GOP Conference, where Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) has introduced a measure to strip McIver, Watson Coleman and Menendez of their committee seats.

Among members of the Trump administration, former North Carolina GOP Rep. Dan Bishop — now the No. 2 at the Office of Management and Budget — likened the incident to an“insurrection,” a phrase commonly used to refer to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Bishop also said the incident was “Worse than 9/11.”

A House GOP aide also said Republicans plan to brandish the incident throughout their remarks and lines of questioning of witnesses, including former ICE and Department of Homeland Security officials. The proceedings could mark the latest escalation in Republican attempts to frame Democrats as impediments to efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, a key pillar of Trump’s messaging on the campaign trail.

Democrats, meanwhile, are expected to zero in on their targeted colleagues, too — but in a different way than the GOP.

“The Republicans’ focus of the incident at the Delaney Hall Detention Center only raises the question surrounding Trump’s intimidation campaign against Members of Congress: what is this Administration so afraid of?” a spokesperson for Judiciary Committee Democrats said in a statement. “We've already seen that the Trump Administration is wrongfully detaining U.S. citizens, unlawfully deporting people without due process, and conducting indiscriminate enforcement actions.”

Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff who is set to be the Democrats’ witness Tuesday, said Republicans can use the Delaney Hall episode to portray Democrats as obstacles to immigration enforcement, but it doesn't change the fact that Republicans are still ignoring real problems with the U.S. immigration policy.

“You have an administration not fixing the totality of the immigration system,” said Houser in an interview. “What you have here is a bunch of political operatives in the White House demanding certain things to be done in a certain way.”