| LaMonica McIver was sitting in the audience last week for Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing, but she had an unusual perspective on the proceedings. |
| Blanche is the reason that McIver, a first-term Democrat in the House of Representatives, is under criminal prosecution for allegedly assaulting immigration officers in May 2025 outside of Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE detention facility located in McIver’s district in Newark, New Jersey. |
| The case should never have been brought. You can watch videos from that day, or you can read a deeply reported account of the events, but the upshot is that the belligerence and ineptitude of the officials running the facility created needless chaos, and McIver became the Trump DOJ’s attempted scapegoat. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals is currently considering whether the case should be dismissed under the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause. |
| On Tuesday, I sat down with McIver in her office to discuss Blanche’s confirmation hearing and the professional and personal toll that the Justice Department’s case has already taken on her in the form of time, money (the case is on track to cost her $1 million in legal fees), and stress, even as she insists that the case will not derail her work on behalf of her constituents. “Even if I'm breaking in silence,” she told me, “I will never break in public.” |
| We also discussed congressional oversight of ICE, the latest killings by ICE officers, and McIver’s views on why it has become necessary to dismantle the agency. |
| This interview has been edited for length and clarity. |
|
| You sat in on Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing last week. What was it like watching him vie for a promotion? |
| It's honestly unreal, the moment that we're in. Sometimes I have to keep pinching myself, like, “Oh my God, is this really happening? It cannot be this terrible. This cannot be happening.” |
| I think back about how he gave that order to have Mayor [Ras] Baraka in Newark arrested for no apparent reason, and he admitted to doing that in the hearing. That was one of many [problems]. |
| But the entire hearing was just a sham. His responses on so many issues, especially the [Jeffrey] Epstein survivors, he just honestly did not care. Many of the members were asking him, “Hey, will you meet with the survivors?” He's like, “Oh, I have someone on my staff right now with me.” |
| I'm like, “What? Are you serious?” You didn't need to come for this confirmation hearing to meet with those survivors. |
| But honestly, it’s just disgusting that this is where we're at as a country — that we have him being recommended for this job, serving as acting, and at the end of the day, he's just another bad character in this administration. |
| Blanche will probably not be any kind of improvement on Pam Bondi. In certain respects, he may be worse. |
| Correct. |
| It looks like he may be confirmed on a party-line vote. |
| I keep my hopes high because I feel like two Republican senators on the committee may sit this thing out and say no. But once again, you just never know. I know one of the requests from one of them was for Blanche to meet with the survivors, which he claimed he did, to check a box. |
| We should learn from all of these different appointments that we don't need people who are literally there to serve Donald Trump and his interests. We need someone to serve the American people and defend the Constitution and the law. |
| The members that you were just referring to — Thom Tillis and John Cornyn — they're not running again, so theoretically they have nothing to lose. Cornyn lost his primary after Trump endorsed his opponent. You had Tillis say, why don't you meet with these Epstein victims and survivors. That happened, and Tillis seems okay with it, even though the other participants were offended by what happened. |
| There have also been reports about Cornyn working with the administration to get some sort of assurance on the so-called “anti-weaponization fund.” |
| Once again, this is crazy — that it even was thought up and literally made public. |
| It's one thing that they thought it up, but even when [Blanche] was being asked about it or has been asked about it in the past, he's just quick to say that it's not happening anymore. And it's like, no, no, no, let's go back into, “What was your thought?” He's in front of this hearing and talking to people as if, “I don't have to explain myself, and I can give you the meekest or most I-don't-give-a-crap answer.” |
| We saw Pam Bondi do that many times. She would have temper tantrum meltdowns in front of Congress. |
| But to me it was just the disrespect. These people do not have any respect for you as a Republican or Democrat to even answer your questions. |
| The settlement was the result of a sham lawsuit orchestrated by the president's lawyers. The Justice Department didn’t defend it, then Blanche just supposedly settles it and creates a $1.8 billion fund for the president’s allies. |
| The real question is, “Why did you ever think this was a good idea?” |
| They haven't gotten either. They didn't get an explanation of why it was a good idea in the first place or any reassurances that it wouldn't happen moving forward. |
| If you confirm him, he gets his job, they'll be doing whatever they want to do. |
| He's had multiple opportunities to put this to bed. Your colleague Grace Meng asked him to put it in writing. He said no. A judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ordered him to put something in writing. He said no. |
| Dismissive. |
| The thing of it is, a personal assurance from him is not sufficient for one very obvious reason, which is that he will not be the attorney general forever. So I don't even understand — |
| Honestly, you just can't trust anything from them. In their mind, they are above everything and they will do things that they know that they cannot do but they'll still try to do them. |
| That is what their whole purpose and their agenda is. They are so skilled at chaos and cruelty that it's truly unbelievable. It's actually remarkable to watch. |
| And that's most Americans right now are thinking every time they turn on the TV, just like my mom. She's a news fanatic. She's looking for the weather, looking for local things that happen. And she told me, “You know what? I get so tired of turning on the news.” |
| And I was shocked, I was like, “You?” My mom wants to be on the news if she could. |
| She's like, “I just want to get back to hearing regular news, regular things happening.” I'm like, “Regular bad stuff, mom?” She's like, “Anything other than hearing about Trump and the administration.” |
| That's the attitude of Americans. They're exhausted, and their personal experiences and their lives are not getting better while all of this chaos is happening around them. |
| It's been over a year since the incident at Delaney Hall. What has it been like having this case hanging over your head personally and professionally? |
| I think every chapter or time period, it's changed. In the moment that I'm in right now, I'm extremely exhausted. I think maybe it's the pregnancy — the pregnancy hormones, me making a human life — that makes me more exhausted. |
| In the beginning, it was like, this is unbelievable. This is wrong. |
| Now we're being pushed to the limit of this case — having to keep fighting it every step of the way, having to raise dollars personally for this case. |
| I think back when we had the hearing at the Third Circuit and one of the judges was saying, “It's hard for me to look away from the point of this case, a case that you will not get a conviction on, but it doesn't matter for you all because you're just into putting a person through the pain and bleeding blood, sweat and tears for this. And is that right?” |
| Those words just continue to play through my head from that day, because it's like, how unfair is it that these people, this Department of Justice, this president, gets to do something like this to me and many others, that they're charging people with these hideous crimes that make no sense just because they can. |
| And all of the trouble that goes with that for me, for my family, for my staff, for everyone —who repays us or gets punished for that? Who's to protect us from this happening? |
| That's why I continue to talk about this case not just being about LaMonica McIver. This is about every member of Congress on both sides of the aisle. If an executive branch can do this to me, they'll do this to anyone. |
| |
|
“If an executive branch can do this to me, they’ll do this to anyone.” |
|
| That's what we try to push people to understand, to talk about the legal point of this all — the legislative immunity, the right for us to do our job. We continue to push that because people just see a black young girl and they're like, oh, whatever, who cares? And it's like, no, it's not who cares. |
| Of course they're doing this about who I am specifically, but it's about my position too and the position that we have to protect the people that elected us to protect them and this executive branch being able to just do away with that and silence their critics. |
| You've been in politics for a while, but this is your first federally elected position. How did you see your first term playing out? |
| I thought it would be less chaotic and more dry. I didn't think I would be appearing on MS NOW to talk about this. |
| Once Trump was elected and sworn into office, I knew things would change. There wouldn't be much movement of anything [in Congress]. I didn't predict it would be this nutty and crazy. |
| Still, I had my faith in Republicans that they would do what was right for the people that they represent, because our folks have the same issues no matter if they're Democrats or Republicans, and still they failed to do that. |
| This president has created this environment where it's his way or no way no matter what, but I will say that despite all of that we have continued to deliver. We have brought over $10 million back to the district. We make sure casework is up to par. We have been out in the community. |
| Even if I'm breaking in silence, I will never break in public and we will not break to the point where it will result in us not doing the job for the people of the 10th Congressional District. We've been steadfast in making sure that we continue to deliver, continue to show up at Delaney Hall, continue to speak up for people's due process, because we're not going to stop that and they're not going to scare me out of doing the job for the people that I represent. |
| You have a very good lawyer, Paul Fishman. |
| He’s good and expensive. [Laughter] |
| That’s exactly what I was about to say. |
| He better deliver. Put that on the record. [Laughter] |
| About how much have you spent? |
| So far we've spent probably about close to $600,000 in legal bills, but our case itself is stretching out to a million dollars. Obviously we're paying the bills as we get money in, as we fundraise. |
| It's very difficult here in the House to be able to set up legal defense funds. There are so many layers of approval through Ethics and all of these things to get done, an independent person to run it, and we're still navigating that space to get that done. |
| Right now we're just fundraising into campaign dollars to pay for this case, because I'm not a millionaire. I'm just a regular young girl from Newark. So at the end of the day, it's been tough. |
| Paul and the entire team there have been great, they've been understanding, but at the same time, it's just the cost that I obviously did not factor in for. Honestly, I think us as Democrats did not factor [this in], especially how many of us have been attacked and had to get a lawyer. There's no engine set up to be able to defend ourselves against this president. |
| Not only is it costing you money and the time to raise the money, but you also lose time attending meetings, preparing for hearings, attending hearings — time you could be spending doing other things. |
| It's triple work all around. |
| A part of being in office, you're always fundraising, right? You have to have a fundraising operation. I love the idea of getting money out of politics. It's something that I 100% support. We're a long way from there, and it's not something that'll happen overnight. |
| But everybody here in office has to fundraise and try to make sure they have dollars to be able to support a campaign. |
| I have another layer of legal funds, right? Then I have another layer of doing work for the community, right? Getting all of that done, but then having to prepare for these cases. |
| I think so far we might have missed one suspension vote [during this period]. I have literally walked out of court and headed to the airport to get back here for votes immediately. |
| I also don't want my constituents to feel like this situation that’s happening — even though they know whose fault this is and they know the cruelty behind it — I don't want them to feel like I'm focusing on me or doing this and not focusing on serving them. That's my first priority. |
| Do you feel like you've learned anything about the criminal justice system that you didn't know? |
| Oh my God. I'm like a lawyer now. I should just go study the LSAT at this point and go to law school. We have literally had to go through a learning curve and are still going through a learning curve through everything every day. |
| I've never been in trouble with the law before. The most I've had is like a ticket. |
| I don't really think I ever told anybody this. When we got these charges, we had to go through the process of going to turn myself in, getting my picture taken — |
| Pretrial services… |
| Pretrial services. I'm like, what? Who's this person I have to check in with? |
| And they have questions for you! |
| Yes, literally. Once a month, I have to check in with this lovely lady. She asks me these questions, like, “Are you okay?” |
| My husband, he owned a gun. I owned a gun. We had to turn these things in. These are the things I had no idea about. |
| It was me and my husband's anniversary, and we wanted to go away real quick for a weekend. We were going to go to Bermuda or something like that, something quick. And I'm like, “Oh wait, I can't go. I can't go without permission.” And he's like, “Wait, what do you mean?” I'm like, “I can't go out of the country without permission from the courts.” He forgot about that, but even me, it wasn't at the top of my dome. |
| I travel all the time in state and in the country to go to things, but I'm like, “I don't know how fast we'll be able to get permission to just do this weekend getaway, so let's just stay local.” |
| You didn't try? |
| I asked my lawyers about it, but I just didn't want to get into a tizzy about it. I was like, “Let's just go to the beach, spend a day doing that.” |
| These are the things that are affecting my personal life because I'm being treated like a person that committed a crime. |
| Also, if you had gone through with trying to get the approval through your lawyers, that would actually have cost you money. |
| Yes! I tell my team, I'm like, “Don't call them for anything. Don't call.” |
| The meter is running. |
| The meter is running. So when I reached out, I'm like, you know what, forget it. I'm not going to do it, scrap it, because it's going to run me a good $2,000 to request this thing. No, thank you. |
| Legal services are too expensive in this country. |
| We really need a lot of revamping, a lot of restructuring of our legal system in this country. |
| For me, I have the ability to be able to raise, and I have people who can teach me the right way, but just imagine how many people in this country don't. Look at immigrants who are not getting due process. |
| All of these things make me madder. We have a lot of work to do in this country. |
| It's horrible — the system itself — and how it's set up. |
| Last month you had a field hearing at Delaney Hall, and the very basic takeaway is that conditions have not improved. In some respects, it seems like they've deteriorated. |
| Oh, yeah. |
| Can you talk about what you've been able to learn, and also the process of learning it? This has been an administration where congressional oversight has been so challenging. |
| We have to rely a lot on detainees. Delaney Hall was actually one of the first facilities that opened up under Trump 2.0, and it opened up like overnight. |
| We reached out to the administration because that's how I'm used to working. I'm like, “Let's just reach out. Let's send them a letter. Let's call.” They were like, “Screw you. We're not giving you any information.” Nothing. |
| That's what sparked us in the first place to go to Delaney Hall. Because this administration would not answer a question, let alone pick up the phone with us to have a decent conversation. |
| Now, not only am I a member, but I'm also a member of the Homeland Security Committee. So you can't answer any questions for me? Nothing. Squat. |
| So everything that we've had to find out and do investigations on, it's been us working with detainees. That's why the last time, when we went there during the field hearing, they told us we couldn't speak to detainees anymore. They're like, “They have to sign a privacy waiver.” We're like, “Okay, well, let's get some people some paper.” They’re like, “No, that's not our job.” |
| There's so much corruption going on inside of these facilities now, that they're literally like, no one can talk to these people. And when they do talk to us, they end up getting transferred. |
| We've had multiple people who have spoken to us — people who have been on the hunger strike and labor strike, different things — but they've been transferred all around the country, specifically some of them to Louisiana. Anything that they can do to basically punish them and retaliate against them, that's what they've done. |
| We learned the things that we already knew back last May, but now it's worse. People are still not getting adequate food. Food is still spoiled. People are not getting access to medical care. We had women there who were pregnant, who miscarried. We have a bunch of high school students who were there who just turned 18, who've been sitting there for months, not able to graduate, for no reason. |
| |
|
“People are not getting access to medical care. We had women there who were pregnant, who miscarried.” |
|
| These people have no record, and many of them have some type of legal status protection. You have some folks that were on an approved work visa, student visa. Some of them had orders already from previous judges with no action. Still they've been picked up and are being held at these locations. |
| And then also, people who are terminally ill. You had a man who had stage four cancer. We were trying to help him. What did they do? They knew we were trying to help him. They picked him up and moved him to Louisiana. |
| This is a man with stage four cancer, an elderly man. What is he doing to you? Or what kind of harm or threat is he to the community that you even have him in here? |
| We always explain to people that Delaney Hall, before it was this detention center, it was a halfway house. So it's always been a lower-level institution. It's not meant to be a prison. The folks that you bring here, they're not threats to the community, because at the end of the day, this facility is not equipped to hold high-security detainees. |
| So why are these folks here? It's all about the money. |
| We also have a lot of people, a lot of detainees there who signed a voluntary deportation order. If Trump's number one agenda is to deport people, why are you holding people there for over a year, months? |
| If they sign a voluntary deportation, wouldn't you think they're moving fast to get them back to the country they came from? No, they're being held there, sometimes transferred again, just to come back to Delaney Hall. Because it's about the dollars that they're getting per detainee that they're keeping. |
| In the last couple weeks, ICE has killed several more people. What do you think when you read these news reports? |
| There's a mix of emotions — that we have a federal government agency that is being allowed to kill people without any accountability. Even thinking back to Renee [Good] and Alex [Pretti], what has happened? What has been the disciplinary [action] or the investigation that the public has been aware of? Nothing. |
| |
|
“We have a federal government agency that is being allowed to kill people without any accountability.” |
|
| That would not happen with a police department in any town. They would not be able to do that, but this federal personal agency of Donald Trump is able to shoot and kill people in the broad daylight, middle of the street, in front of the world, and nothing happens to them. |
| And people don't feel outraged about that? The entire country should be outraged about that, because that means they can do that to anybody and get away with it. |
| You’ve said that “we should definitely abolish ICE.” That's a phrase that means different things to different people. What do you mean by that? What would you like to see happen to ICE and interior immigration enforcement? |
| There’s been too much corruption and chaos at this point to revive ICE. We've gotten too far away. It's just like when we have police departments that are running rogue, they go underneath these consent decrees and different avenues to be able to straighten up their act. Well, we're past that with ICE at this point. |
| People don't understand that ICE is a relatively new agency. It came as a result of 9/11 and different other things. |
| At the end of the day, it's possible that we can reform back to something safer, more structured, more effective, to the point where it's not a rogue agency where they've hired all of these people we can't account for. Literally they hire anyone. |
| We have to reform. We have to abolish what we have now because it's just too far gone. |
| Am I saying that we should not have enforcement? We do need some type of enforcement, but not to that point. |
| I think back to many other presidents. We've had enforcement underneath these other presidents, and it's never been this bad like this before — not this rogue, not this chaotic, not this unleashed behavior and activity. |
| I think [there’s] a possible way for us to do [that], but we need immigration reform altogether in this country that makes sense. I'm really hopeful and really dedicated to really getting there past this president. |
