Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) will return to Delaney Hall for an oversight visit this morning, her first time visiting the Newark immigrant detention facility since the dramatic May showdown that led to federal assault charges against her.
The visit, which McIver will conduct alongside Reps. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) and Yvette Clarke (D-New York), comes after a 41-year-old Haitian detainee died in custody on December 12. McIver, like many of her Democratic colleagues, called for Delaney Hall to be closed “immediately” in the wake of the death.
On May 9, McIver, Menendez, and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) attempted to secure an oversight tour at Delaney Hall, which had controversially reopened earlier that month. Members of Congress have an enshrined right to conduct oversight at detention facilities, and the same trio of Democrats had previously paid a similar visit to the Elizabeth Detention Center, a smaller facility that has been operating for years.
The May 9 visit, however, went south when immigration officials Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who had attempted to join along on the visit, was arrested for “trespassing,” which prompted a scuffle outside the facility. The charges against Baraka were later dropped, but the Justice Department is now instead pursuing charges against McIver for allegedly assaulting ICE officers and impeding Baraka’s arrest.
The charges, which have not yet gone to trial, instantly made McIver a national figure in the Democratic fight against the Trump administration’s immigration policies. McIver has had the opportunity to confront Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem multiple times in House committee hearings, and she defeated an effort to censure her in the House this fall – but she had not been back to Delaney Hall, which is in her congressional district, until today.
In the months since the May snafu, a number of other New Jersey Democrats have visited the facility and expressed their own dismay with its continued operations. Menendez returned with Senator Andy Kim for a visit in June after unrest inside the facility, and Kim went again last week, shortly before ICE announced that a detainee had died.
“They’re telling me … the food is disgusting, it’s often frozen, [and] the meat is raw,” Kim told the Jersey Vindicator after his most recent visit. “That’s why I continue to call for this facility to be closed… This place has no place here in New Jersey.”
