‘FIRST THEY CAME FOR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS’ McIver indictment escalates Trump’s war on the rule of law

‘FIRST THEY CAME FOR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS’ McIver indictment escalates Trump’s war on the rule of law Published with permission of THE NEW JERSEY DEMOCRAT

by Bob Dreyfuss  and Barbara Dreyfuss May 21, 2025

https://njdemocrat.substack.com/p/first-they-came-for-members-of-congress

Editor’s Note: Fightbackbetter joins any and all calls to immediately vacate the illegal charges being pressed on Cong. MacIver. It is clear that this is a totally pretentious and lawless action by Habba and Trump – a stunt and total abuse of Justice Department purpose.

Questions will arise perhaps not from this particular abuse by Habba and the Trump administration, but from others. The lawless actions of an out of control fascist force unleashed by Trump and now Habba will no doubt lead to pushback and the right to defend our communities will be asserted. That might not be in play in this case but the lawlessness and violence of the administration will reach a limit of what the subjected population can tolerate.

It is important to remind all that Booker and Kim both approved Rubio’s appointment to head the State Department – and Rubio has played a critical role in the current crackdown. Kim also approved ICE cosplay chief Noem – so both sitting Senators empowered by the majority of NJ voters leveraged their power invested in them by NJ voters to unleash ICE terror. Likewise, Josh Gottheimer has invited Habba to come for NJ’s Palestinian American community and the NJ legislature is trying to hand Palestine Advocacy off to Trump through support of IHRA fascist codification to repress criticism to US policy toward Israel. Trump is unleashing these wicked violent illegal and repressive forces but he is getting by with too much help from our dems!

Thank you Bob Dreyfuss and Barbara Dreyfuss for this well researched piece and approving its publication at FightBackBetter.

The baseless criminal complaint against Rep. LaMonica McIver is a declaration of war by Donald Trump’s rogue Justice Department, itself led by a rogue’s gallery of Trump loyalists, ideologues, and utter incompetents. The charges against McIver, along with the spurious arrest of Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor, in the same incident outside a proposed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, Delaney Hall, on May 9, have been widely condemned by a wide range of civil libertarians, lawyers, and leading Democrats.

Despite an utter lack of evidence, the uber-political MAGA U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, has opted to charge McIver with felony assault against ICE officers, part of a scuffle surrounding the arrest of Baraka for trespassing on the property of the detention center. (The charges against Baraka, also ridiculous, were soon dropped.)

And Habba has the full support of the president, the U.S. attorney general, and the secretary of homeland security. “[McIver] was out of control,” opined Trump. “The days of woke are over. That woman, I have no idea who she is. That woman was out of control. She was shoving federal agents. She was out of control. The days of that crap are over in this country.”

It remains to be seen if the national Democratic party, along with New Jersey’s Democrats, understand the seriousness of the unconstitutional behavior of Trump’s DOJ, and if they’re ready, finally, to fight back with everything they’ve got against what Rep. Jamie Raskin called “an outrage against the Constitution and a scandal,” at a hearing on Tuesday. “Members of Congress performing oversight functions intelligence in the Trump world are criminals, [while] violent insurrectionists and cop beating extremists” – referring to the Jan. 6 rioters – “are martyrs and heroes and patriots.”

Since taking office, President Trump has disassembled the Department of Justice, installing at its very top – and down through the ranks of U.S. attorneys – a crew of officials determined to stop at nothing to overturn the rule of law. The White House has conducted what Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee as far back as late January, with excruciating detail, called “an unprecedented purge” at DOJ that “threatens public safety, national security, and the rule of law.” They’ve ousted numerous career prosecutors, installed Trump’s own, unqualified defense attorneys at DOJ’s very top, and named two extreme-right activists to run the FBI.

In Washington, a pair of hard-core ideologues have successively been appointed as interim U.S. attorney: first, Ed Martin, an election-denying lawyer who gleefully defended the January 6 insurrectionists, and then Jeannine Pirro, a huckster from Fox News who’s been made a national laughingstock by Saturday Night Live. And in New Jersey, as The New Jersey Democrat has reported time and again, Trump named a former fashion marketer and lawyer for parking-lot companies, Alina Habba, as U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey.

Habba, a Trump National Bedminster Golf Club party girl, has promised to “make New Jersey red,” threatened to have her office “investigate” Governor Phil Murphy and Attorney General Matt Platkin, and promised to create a task force to unleash the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) against the state’s election and voter registration system.

And now, with the indictment of Rep. McIver, she may have finally crossed the red line that sparks a Democratic revolt. Not only have DOJ and DHS supported the arrest of a sitting judge, offered $5 million to the family of a January 6 rioter, launched a nationwide deportation purge aimed at pro-Palestinian protesters, and tried to overturn the 14th Amendment that provides citizenship to people born in the United States. Now they’re preparing to use the FBI, DHS, and the 93 U.S. attorneys against political opponents, including members of Congress. McIver is only the first.

On May 17 – even as the DOJ was threatening to arrest McIver and two colleagues, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rep. Rob Menendez, who’d joined Baraka at Delaney Hall on May 9 – the Washington Post reported:

Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week. … A Justice Department spokesman confirmed the proposal.

Of course, members of Congress are, by law, accorded the right to enter ICE facilities at any time.

McIver’s indictment is thus a test case.

And the DOJ is going beyond members of Congress and Newark’s mayor. On May 19, following remarks by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson in support of the city’s diversity policies, DOJ said it would go after him, too. “The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into hiring practices at the city of Chicago, according to a letter shared on social media and sent to the Chicago mayor’s office,” reported AP.

It should be noted that McIver, Baraka, and Johnson are all Black.

The ACLU and the ACLU-NJ said, in reaction to the charges against McIver:

The Trump administration’s political charges against Congresswoman McIver is a method more suited for authoritarianism than American democracy. Elected officials represent the people, not the administration’s interests. They have every right to exercise their legally authorized oversight responsibilities for expanded immigration detention in New Jersey. If the Trump administration can target elected officials who oppose its extreme agenda, it can happen to any one of us.

The eight-page criminal complaint against McIver, in the form of a statement and affidavit from an FBI agent, contains no less than ten photographs of McIver at the Delaney Hall event purporting to show her engaged in “multiple attempts to forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, and interfere with agents attempting to take the Mayor into custody.” Of course, ten still photos, some of them blurry, don’t show anything of the sort, especially since countless video recordings of what happened prove the opposite: that McIver was pushed, shoved, and assaulted while joining her two colleagues in surrounding Baraka.

Habba, in her official statement (posted on X, but not yet on the website of her office), accused McIver of assaulting law enforcement officers, adding: “No one is above the law – politicians or otherwise.”

Later the same day Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, from New Jersey’s 2nd congressional district, held a hearing of his subcommittee on oversight of the House Judiciary Committee, about the Delaney Hall events. Van Drew, the Democrat-turned-MAGA Republican, was shameless in providing cover to the DOJ’s charges against his fellow New Jerseyan, McIver.

Members of Congress “used inspections as a weapon,” he charged. “It was a shameful display by members of Congress who stormed into the facility without clearance without following protocol and physically disrupted law enforcement operations, cursed at staff, shoved past security. They assaulted federal law enforcement officers. And for what? To free who? Who are the Dems protecting?” Van Drew displayed photos of alleged rapists, including child rapists, though none of the people he portrayed were being held at Delaney Hall.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee – who himself has been implicated in youth-related sexual abuse scandal, out of which he earned the moniker “Gym” Jordan – attended the subcommittee hearing to stress its importance. Jordan issued veiled threats and warnings against judges, Democratic members of Congress, activists, and anyone else who might protest ICE’s assault against immigrants. Said Jordan:

Rather than seeking to protect the people they represent, they are fighting for criminal illegal aliens to stay in this country. First it was sanctuary cities where local officials were saying they were not going to work with federal law enforcement, then it was sanctuary states, that’s what left-wing policies do. Then it was judges letting the bad guy out the back door while the good guy is coming in the front to arrest him. Now we find out it can even be members of Congress. That wasn’t congressional oversight. … ICE has a tough job and agitators who obstruct them from doing that part of their job are part of the problem.

“The Department of Justice is coming after everyone who speaks truth to power,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the Texas Democrat, warned at the hearing. “These people are out of control, these masked agents running around arresting everyone, pretending members of Congress are out of control.”

Outside Habba’s office, on Broad Street in downtown Newark, protesters angry over Habba’s brazen defiance of prosecutorial norms staged a lively march calling on Habba to resign. “We Habba Big Problem,” read one sign. Michael Paris, a representative of SOMA Action, one of the organizations who sponsored the protest, told the crowd that the Trump administration has engaged in an all-out assault on the rule of law. “We are here to stand up for people who stood between ICE and the human beings that they are engaged in terrorism against,” he said. “What did LaMonica McIver do? She put her body between Mayor Baraka and the armed, weapons-bearing members of ICE.”

“Many of you have been at Delaney Hall over the past nine days, and what you’ve seen is that ICE has militarized the situation on the ground at Delaney, to keep activists, journalists, and the public from finding out what’s going on,” said Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road NJ. She said that the protesters were demanding that the charges against McIver be dropped and that members of Congress across the country follow McIver’s lead in investigating ICE detention centers nationwide.

Referring to the fact that Van Drew would be holding a hearing later in the day, Morsy told TNJD that it was “unconscionable that a member of the New Jersey delegation is making ICE the victim when ICE is threatening people.” Vigils by protestors at Delaney Hall will continue, she stressed, despite the increasing military presence outside the detention center.

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Bob and Barbara Dreyfuss co-edit The NJ Democrat. It’s an investigative journal covering NJ politics and, especially, the Democratic Party, focusing on corruption, mismanagement, and malfeasance. And we tell stories. Enjoy.Subscribe