Earlier this week, attorneys for Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) drew attention to the fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently released yet another statement publicly disparaging McIver amid the congresswoman’s ongoing trial on federal assault charges – and it’s not the only anti-McIver statement from federal officials that’s still accessible online.
At least fifteen other statements mentioning McIver or her May 9 scuffle with law enforcement at Delaney Hall – posted on various platforms by DHS and several of its top officials – remain publicly available. That’s despite the fact that, in September, DHS removed five posts McIver’s legal team had singled out as representative of inappropriate “extrajudicial statements” regarding their client.
In a September 26 post, DHS linked McIver to “Antifa-aligned domestic extremism” and accused her of “physically assaulting” officers during an oversight visit at the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center; it also repeated the largely disproven claim that McIver “broke into” the facility. The statement was released after DHS had removed some of its earlier posts, an action that was seemingly taken at the direction of the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The new post, McIver’s attorneys wrote in an October 6 letter to District Judge Jamel Semper, is further evidence that the government needs to be officially restrained from making “extrajudicial statements” about McIver as long as her trial is ongoing.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment about the post, entitled “DHS is Fighting Back Against Antifa Violence,” or whether it intends to take it down. (Due to the ongoing government shutdown, the DHS website says that it is not being actively maintained and has not been updated since September 30.)
But the post’s content is similar to several of the statements DHS removed last month, and to other posts from DHS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that are still available.
An ICE X post from May 17 said McIver had “attacked ICE officers” during her “unannounced ‘oversight’ visit”; Noem said in a May 13 X post that the conduct of McIver and her colleagues was “disgraceful,” “obstruction,” and “criminal”; DHS called the oversight visit a “bizarre attempt for 15 minutes of fame” in a May 13 Instagram post; and ICE shared a Facebook video on May 10 of McIver “ASSAULTING an ICE agent.”
In August, McIver’s legal team filed several motions asking Semper to throw out the assault charges against her; paired with those motions was a separate effort to restrain the government from making “extrajudicial statements” that could undermine McIver’s right to an impartial jury. The motion specifically mentioned five posts that attacked McIver and her Democratic colleagues, but asked Semper for broader protections against any past or future statements.
In its reply brief, the DOJ argued that McIver had not shown that the posts had “permeated the public as to have hindered the Court … to impanel a fair and impartial jury in this case,” and also noted that it had no direct control over what DHS posts. Nevertheless, the DOJ said it had asked DHS to remove the specific posts McIver had objected to.
Within a week of the DOJ’s filing, the five posts were taken down; DHS did not comment on the removal, instead referring the question to the DOJ, despite the fact that the DOJ had said it was primarily a DHS matter.
But McIver’s attorneys responded that those removals were insufficient, citing eight other disparaging social media posts that went unaddressed. All of those posts remain live online, and the New Jersey Globe subsequently found several more posts on different accounts.
“A criminal prosecution is not a game of whack-a-mole that requires a defendant to police the conduct of the prosecution team and other Executive Branch personnel to receive a fair trial,” her attorneys wrote on September 25, the day before the DHS’s newest “Antifa” post was published. “To the contrary, that responsibility falls in the first instance on the prosecution team, and the Court should direct them to search for, identify, and disclose any other instances in which such statements have been published.”
Oral arguments on that motion, as well as the motions to dismiss the charges, will be held on October 21.
