When Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark)’s May 9 oversight visit at the Delaney Hall immigrant detention facility descended into chaos, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) didn’t hold back: Democratic representatives had “stormed the gate and broke into the facility,” DHS alleged in a statement, as part of a “bizarre political stunt.”
That statement, as well as several others targeting McIver, has now been removed.
McIver, who faces federal assault charges stemming from the Delaney Hall incident, filed a motion last month demanding that President Donald Trump’s administration cease making “extrajudicial statements” about her and that prior statements posted online be withdrawn. The statements, McIver’s lawyers wrote, “violate long-standing regulations and ethical rules that protect the rights of criminal defendants and the integrity of the judicial process.”
In its response to McIver’s filings, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said that while it does not believe the statements have created any risk of an impartial jury, it had nevertheless asked DHS to take down the five specific posts referenced in McIver’s motion. The posts were still available to view when the DOJ’s brief was filed, but were evidently removed in the week since then.
A spokesperson for McIver declined to comment. DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to DHS’s initial statement on the Delaney Hall scuffle, the other four removed posts were a statement rebutting “fake news” narratives about law enforcement that said McIver had “trespassed” at Delaney Hall; a statement claiming McIver and an unrelated California Democrat were “openly encouraging” violence against law enforcement; a statement once again claiming McIver had “trespassed” while connecting her to a rise in assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents; and a post from DHS’s X account featuring video of McIver “storm[ing] the gate of Delaney Hall Detention Center [and] ASSAULTING an ICE agent.”
Other statements with similar tone and content that were not directly cited in McIver’s motion, however, remain available, including an X post from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that is a near-exact copy of the removed DHS statement. (McLaughlin’s post, like several others from May 9, only references Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez, who were also part of the oversight visit; it’s possible that DHS officials were not yet aware that McIver was also involved.)
Notably, four of the five removed posts contain references to one of the most contentious parts of the entire snafu: whether or not McIver, Watson Coleman, and Menendez “broke into” Delaney Hall in the first place.
That was the line that DHS used repeatedly in the aftermath of the incident, but the three representatives said that they had done no such thing, and video and photo evidence backs them up; federal law guarantees members of Congress access to ICE facilities for oversight visits regardless. And the DOJ’s own detailed timeline of the incident contains no obvious reference to any trespassing or “breaking in” on McIver’s part; it states that McIver and her colleagues “entered through the front gate” and were eventually granted an oversight tour.
DHS did not respond to a question about whether it continues to believe McIver, Menendez, and Watson Coleman were trespassing.
