With one day to go until a judge hears oral arguments on whether to toss assault charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), the Department of Homeland Security has removed another one of its public statements against McIver, this time one that linked the congresswoman to “Antifa-aligned domestic extremism.”
DHS’s statement had been posted on September 26, after it had removed a spate of five prior anti-McIver posts, seemingly at the Department of Justice’s request. The new statement, titled “DHS is Fighting Back Against Antifa Violence,” accused McIver of “physically assaulting officers” and “[breaking] into the Delaney Hall Detention Facility,” the latter of which is a frequent DHS claim that has little factual basis.
McIver’s attorneys sent a letter to District Judge Jamel Semper on October 6 bringing attention to the post, calling it “fresh evidence of the need to restrain the government’s extrajudicial statements related to this case.” DHS did not respond at the time to a question on whether the post would be taken down, and it remained up for at least several days after the letter was sent.
Sometime since then, however, DHS evidently made the decision to take the post down. That’s despite the fact that, due to the ongoing government shutdown, the DHS website explicitly states it has not been updated since September 30 “and will not be updated until after funding is enacted.”
DHS did not immediately respond to a new request for comment.
Ever since May 9, when McIver scuffled with immigration officers during an oversight visit at Delaney Hall, DHS and its top officials have repeatedly made statements referencing McIver and criticizing her actions at the detention facility. In August, McIver’s legal team filed a motion asking Semper to restrain the government from continuing to make “extrajudicial statements” about her, saying that they tainted the case against her.
In its response brief, the DOJ said that it did not believe any action from Semper was needed, but that it had asked DHS to remove the five statements that McIver’s filing had specifically cited as prejudicial. Sometime within the following week, DHS did exactly that.
A short while later, however, DHS posted its new statement on “Antifa violence,” kicking off the cycle once again. McIver’s attorneys and the New Jersey Globe have also collectively identified at least 15 other statements, most of them posted to social media, that reference McIver or the events at Delaney Hall in similar ways to the removed posts; all of those posts remain available online.
