NEWARK, New Jersey — A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said arresting three Democratic members of Congress is “on the table” following a chaotic scene outside of an immigrant detention center on Friday.
Three New Jersey Democrats — Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver — were there for a tour of a new Trump administration Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, Delaney Hall, which is expected to play a significant role in its Northeast immigration operations. But chaos broke out when federal agents arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democratic candidate for New Jersey governor, setting off a tense scrum including the three members of Congress.
“There will be more arrests coming,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN on Saturday morning. In response to a request for further comment, DHS referred questions to the interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba. Her office did not immediately respond to an inquiry from POLITICO.
The possibility of arrests marks an escalation of the Trump administration’s crackdown on public officials and comes as a Wisconsin judge was arrested late last month for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant evade arrest.
A spokesperson for Watson Coleman said her office had not heard from DHS; it had only seen the public statements by the department.
In response to those, Watson Coleman’s office said it had reviewed body camera footage from DHS and that “proves that DHS has been lying about this incident — blatantly lying.”
Though federal law enforcement officials at the scene did tell Baraka to leave a fenced-in parking lot area, which he eventually did before being later arrested, they did not ever appear to ask the members of Congress to leave. But one official appeared to shove McIver as she was trying to re-enter a secure parking lot at the tail end of the chaotic scrum. Baraka is facing trespassing charges and was released from federal custody on Friday night after scores of supporters gathered outside a separate federal facility where he had been held.
McLaughlin alleged one of the members had “body slammed” an ICE officer, something that a POLITICO reporter on the scene did not witness. She told CNN there was a video of the incident that ICE would be released “very shortly.”
Instead, the members of Congress said they had been variously manhandled, roughed up and assaulted.
Baraka told reporters on Saturday that he heard officials ordered to “take him to the ground” although he said they did not follow through on that. He said he would not have been inside the gate of the parking lot if he had not been invited, though he was later asked to leave. After he did, police and federal agents came outside the gate to apprehend him.
During a scrum at the facility, Watson Coleman and McIver both appeared to surround Baraka while agents tried to arrest him. Video of the incident shows that an agent tried to pry both members of Congress away from the mayor while one of 80-year-old Watson Coleman’s aides shouted, “Get off of her!”
Moments later, as the scrum moved from a public area of the parking lot to a gated area, a federal law enforcement officer shoved McIver, according to both McIver, Menendez and video taken at the time by NJ Spotlight News. On Saturday morning, Fox News posted video it said had been provided by DHS to show McIver was “shoving/elbowing her way past a DHS agent.”
“Other elected officials shouldn’t fear they’re going to be arrested, or judges arrested because they’re behaving in their conscience,” Baraka told reporters Saturday morning. “This is authoritarianism. There’s no other way to describe what’s happening in this country right now, but authoritarianism.”
The mayor of the state’s largest city spent several hours in custody on Friday night, where he was fingerprinted and had his mugshot taken, a city spokesperson said. Baraka has denied any wrongdoing and told reporters on Saturday that he was “invited by the people who owned the property.”
“Somebody allowed me to be there,” he said. “I didn’t climb the fence, I didn’t kick the door down, I didn’t bust a window like their friends did at the Capitol.”
Republicans and conservative media have described the members of Congress “storming” the facility, which has been disputed by elected officials present and video of the encounter. Habba said in a post on X that the mayor “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings” to leave.
“This is all a fabrication,” Baraka said. “And they get on the media and they lie and lie and lie and lie — and you can see the video — and we continue to allow them to lie.”
Baraka said he “will absolutely” be back to visit Delaney Hall. The Baraka administration has sued the private prison operator, the Geo Group, alleging that it does not have proper permits and inspections to operate. Federal officials and the Geo Group have denied that claim.
The mayor’s arrest has seemingly upended the Democratic primary for governor, catapulting him to the national spotlight. He said, however, that he never intended to be arrested — noting that he had been to visit the facility several times that week.
“I didn’t wake up that morning yesterday thinking I was gonna go to jail,” he said. “If I wanted to go to jail, I could have easily went any morning that I was down here.”