Facing 17 Years in Prison, McIver Highlights ICE Abuses and Political Targeting
Washington, D.C. – In case you missed it, this morning, The New Yorker published a long-form profile of Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (NJ-10), who is facing 17 years in prison over a legally authorized congressional oversight visit.
The piece sheds new light on the inner workings of the Department of Justice as it prosecutes McIver and contextualizes McIver’s oversight actions with new reporting, including that based on body cam footage from McIver’s May encounter with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Below are excerpts from the reporting. The full piece is available here.
On the case in context:
- “No one else in Congress is facing what she’s facing,” Lateefah Simon, a Democratic representative from Oakland, California, said. “Typically, we would say, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to scare her.’ They’re actively litigating this case.” At one point, a federal judge ordered Justice Department lawyers to instruct Administration officials to stop lying publicly about the incident.
- In the months since, the President’s taunts on social media have brought Fox News coverage, death threats, and a motion by House Republicans to censure McIver on the chamber floor.
- The prosecution of McIver was the first in a pattern of escalating attacks by the Trump Administration against Democratic officeholders.
On the need for unannounced oversight visits and the critical importance of protecting oversight responsibilities, especially of ICE:
- [In 2019], members of the Homeland Security Committee published a report describing how ICE officials had “used the advanced warning to improve the conditions.” They observed fresh paint, cleaning supplies, the assignment of new guards, and the transfer of detainees from solitary confinement to the general population.
- McIver and her legal team are appealing the judge’s ruling, arguing that her case for legislative immunity should carry more weight. There are compelling legal arguments for this. Josh Chafetz, a professor at Georgetown Law, told me, “Oversight of ICE would include monitoring their conduct outside the gates of Delaney Hall when they tried to arrest the Mayor.”
- As a Black woman, [McIver] felt that the suggestion that she hadn’t been doing her job in May was like being told she didn’t deserve the job. “It brought me back to a different time, a time before the civil-rights movement,” she said. “It was racism. It was lack of respect.” (The morning of the incident, the agent who shoved McIver “used a racial slur to refer to African Americans” in a text message sent to the other agents at the facility, according to a recent court filing by McIver’s lawyers, who’ve seen the messages; for now the texts are under seal by the district court.)
On the unfolding of the case inside the DOJ and the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s office, which was, at the time of McIver’s indictment, led by Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney:
- Habba, who was in sporadic contact with McIver’s lawyers, then seemed to suggest that she might have McIver arrested—to choreograph a perp walk in front of news cameras.
- I recently asked a lawyer who had worked at the Public Integrity Section whether the indictment seemed solid. “I don’t see there being a viable case at all,” the lawyer said. McIver had been at Delaney Hall for an official legislative function, and the officers themselves had seemed to cause “chaos and mass confusion.”
On the administration’s unlimited resources:
- Legislative immunity was also important to [McIver] because, without it, the Administration could punish her even in the absence of a trial. Her campaign was running out of money; the government’s prosecutorial resources were infinite. “It’s all about tearing down a Democratic member of Congress,” she said. “It’s about embarrassing, bullying, intimidating so that everyone can watch.” McIver began to tear up. “They probably thought, No one’s gonna fucking pay attention to her. This is great. Let’s use her as an example.”
- By December, [McIver] had already racked up close to a million dollars in legal fees. Owing to House rules, the expenses have come out of her campaign funds, meaning that, in the months before her 2026 reëlection campaign, the money she’s raising will go almost exclusively toward her defense.
On the abhorrent conditions at Delaney Hall and what McIver witnessed:
- “I expect bad news all the time from these places,” McIver told me, in reference to ICEdetention centers. “But I knew something would happen at Delaney.” When she and the other representatives had toured the facility [in May], they noticed certain irregularities. The phones weren’t working, and they got stuck in an elevator. It was lunchtime, but the kitchen was empty. “You didn’t even have a sniff of food,” McIver told me.
- [In December], ICE announced that Jean Wilson Brutus, a forty-one-year-old Haitian detained at Delaney Hall, had died while in custody. [...] McIver called me a few nights later, sounding both outraged and resolved. The next morning, she told me, she was planning on returning to Delaney Hall[.]
- A Venezuelan woman [detained at Delaney Hall] told McIver that, weeks before, out of desperation to leave U.S. custody, she’d signed a so-called voluntary-departure order. Inexplicably, she’d been transferred to another facility, in Louisiana, then returned to Delaney Hall… McIver’s fiery, sometimes combative public persona was gone; in its place was the heavy-lidded look of someone overwhelmed by what she’d just witnessed.
McIver, on her work, as it continues:
- “I came to Congress literally to do the job and work for people and protect them.”
The New Yorker profile comes as McIver nears an important deadline in her ongoing case. Tomorrow, January 20th, is the deadline for McIver to decide whether to appeal a pretrial motion on legislative immunity related to the final count in her indictment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
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