U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver is set to be arraigned on federal charges Wednesday, accused of assaulting and interfering with immigration officers outside a New Jersey detention center during a congressional oversight visit at the facility. She has said she plans to fight the charges.
McIver, a Democrat, was charged in a complaint by interim U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, a Republican appointed by President Donald Trump, following the May 9 visit to Newark’s Delaney Hall, a privately owned, 1,000-bed facility that Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses as a detention center.
This month she was indicted on three counts of assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering with federal officials. Habba said two counts carry a maximum sentence of up to eight years in prison. The third has a maximum of one year.
McIver’s lawyer, former U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Paul Fishman, said in a statement that she would challenge the allegations “head-on” in court.
The indictment is the latest development in a legal-political drama that has seen the Trump administration take Democratic officials from New Jersey’s largest city to court amid the president’s ongoing immigration crackdown and Democrats’ efforts to respond. The prosecution is a rare federal criminal case against a sitting member of Congress for allegations other than fraud or corruption.
During the same visit to the detention center, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on a trespassing charge that was later dropped. Baraka is suing Habba over what he called a malicious prosecution.
A nearly two-minute video clip released by the Homeland Security Department shows McIver at the facility inside a chain-link fence just before Baraka’s arrest on other side of the barrier, where other people were protesting. McIver and uniformed officials go through the gate, and she joins others shouting that they should circle the mayor.
The video shows McIver in a tightly packed group of people and officers. At one point her left elbow and then her right elbow push into an officer wearing a dark face covering and an olive green uniform emblazoned with the word “Police.”
It is not clear from police bodycam video if the contact was intentional, incidental or the result of jostling in the chaotic scene.
The complaint alleges that she “slammed” her forearm into an agent and then tried to restrain the agent by grabbing him.
The indictment also says she placed her arms around the mayor to try to stop his arrest and says again that she slammed her forearm into and grabbed an agent.
Democrats including New Jersey Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez, who were with McIver at the detention center that day, have criticized the arrest and disputed the charges.
Members of Congress are legally authorized to go into federal immigration facilities as part of their oversight powers, even without notice. Congress passed a 2019 appropriations bill spelling out that authority.
McIver, 39, first came to Congress in September in a special election after the death of Rep. Donald Payne Jr. left a vacancy in the 10th District. She was then elected to a full term in November.
A Newark native, she was president of the Newark City Council from 2022 to 2024 and worked in the city’s public schools before that.