The Trump administration, which is partnering with a private company to open an immigrant concentration camp in New Jersey, had its ICE Gestapo violently arrest Ras Baraka, the Democratic mayor of Newark, on Friday, apparently to cover up the lack of proper work permits, inspections and certificate of occupancy in the rush to send people of color straight to hell.
Did I mention that Ras Baraka is a Black man, and that he’s running for governor?
So much to unpack here.
“I never thought I would be incarcerated for something I believe is my democratic right, to speak out against what I think was happening there: a violation of city and state laws and a lack of transparency. This thing happening in America is wrong, ” Baraka told a crowd of supporters after his five-hour detention on misdemeanor trespassing charges.
The charges won’t stand – he had originally been allowed inside the gates of the Delaney Hall location that the Trumpers are working to turn into a gulag on American soil by on-site security, and was later arrested outside the facility in a violent scene that seemed to have been generated for TV.
Baraka and city officials have made numerous efforts to get access to the facility to try to ascertain the adherence of the company given the billion-dollar contract to open the people of color hellhole, GEO Group, which has long been criticized for its shoddy operations, to local regulations.
The GEO Group folks did big business with the first Trump administration, which came to a grinding halt in 2021, when Joe Biden signed an executive order ceasing the renewal of contracts with private-prison profiteers.
The Trump administration threw them a lifeline with the billion-dollar contract to reopen Delaney Hall in February.
Newark city officials have been arguing for weeks in federal court that the GEO Group was skirting basic requirements to be able to operate a private prison operation in its jurisdiction.
Baraka had been on the scene on two different occasions this week to demand entry to the facility, and returned on Friday with three members of Congress – New Jersey Democrats Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver.
The lawmakers were allowed inside the facility, but Baraka was told that “congressmen are different, congresswomen are different,” and not allowed to join them.
After leaving the facility, the members of Congress joined Baraka in an area inside the front gate, and as they made their way outside, a group of 20 ICE agents, wearing masks to conceal their identity, rushed on the group.
Alina Habba, the former failed personal lawyer for Trump who is now New Jersey’s interim U.S. Attorney, said that Baraka had been arrested because he had “ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself,” and had chosen “to disregard the law.”
Baraka rebutted the Trump beauty queen-type spokesperson’s claims later in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
“She doesn’t know what happened. Clearly, that is not the context of what happened,” Baraka said. “I was there for over an hour in that space, and nobody ever told me to move. I was in there for an hour. Not a single person, not an officer from ICE, not any of the security guards, nobody told me to leave that place. Somebody from Homeland Security came in at the end and began to escalate the situation, and we wind up being where we are today. And that’s, frankly, the extent of it.”
It would be comical, the ineptitude of the Trumpers, whose bungling on this brought a national spotlight to the effort to otherwise quietly open a concentration camp on American soil, if it weren’t also so needlessly brutal.
Menendez said ICE agents had “put their hands on” Watson Coleman and McIver, and described the arrest of Baraka as “an act of intimidation.”
“They feel no restraint on what they should be doing, and that was shown in broad daylight today,” Menendez said at a news conference shortly after the incident.
Watson Coleman said she had been “manhandled” and described the events as “an abuse of power.”
McIver said the scene bore witness to “the chaos and cruelty that defines the Trump administration’s immigration policy.”
“From roughing up members of Congress to arresting the mayor of our state’s largest city, there is no version of today that does not show the blatant abuses of power of the Trump administration,” McIver said. “Americans should be outraged. Democracy demands transparency, not fear and force. No agency and no administration should be allowed to operate in darkness.”
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Chris Graham
