Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, was freed after being detained for several hours after being arrested at a new government immigration detention center he was protesting against.
Baraka was finally let go around 8 p.m. Friday after being accused of trespassing and not listening to the threats to leave the Delaney Hall building. As he got out of an SUV with bright emergency lights, he told the people who were waiting, “The truth is this: I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The mayor said he couldn’t talk about his case because he promised the lawyers and the judge that he wouldn’t. He did, however, say that he fully supported everyone in his town, including immigrants.
Baraka said, “At some point, we have to stop these people from dividing us.” He doesn’t care what background, country, or language you speak; he just wants everyone to work together.
Baraka, a Democrat running to replace Gov. Phil Murphy, whose term is up, has joined the fight against illegal immigrants with the Trump administration.
The construction and opening of the 1,000-bed prison center have been strongly opposed by him. He says that the center shouldn’t be allowed to open because of problems with the building permit.
The mayor’s wife, Linda Baraka, said that the federal government was after her husband.
“They didn’t catch anyone else.” Other people were not asked to leave. That’s why they didn’t let her see the mayor, she said. “They wanted to make an example of him.”
The acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba, said on the social network X that Baraka broke the law by entering the jail, which is run by the private prison company Geo Group.
What Habba said was that Baraka had “chosen to disregard the law.”
Baraka was caught when he went back to the public side of the facility’s gate, as seen on video of the event.
Witnesses say there was a heated fight.
According to witnesses, Baraka was arrested after he tried to get into the building with Reps. Robert Menendez, LaMonica McIver, and Bonnie Watson Coleman, all of whom are from New Jersey’s congressional delegation.
Viri Martinez, an activist with the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, says that a heated fight broke out when federal officials stopped him from entering the country. Even after Baraka went back to the public side of the gates, it kept going.
“People yelled and pushed,” Martinez said. “The police then swarmed Baraka.” One of the leaders was thrown to the ground. Baraka was handcuffed and taken away in a car that wasn’t marked.
They said in a statement that the politicians had not asked for a tour of Delaney Hall, even though the department said it would have been happy to give them one. The department said that in the afternoon, as a bus full of prisoners was pulling up, “a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility.”
A spokesman for Watson Coleman, Ned Cooper, said that the three politicians went there without being invited because they wanted to check it out and not go on a planned tour.
“When they got there, they told the guards and facility officials that they were there to do their job as watchdogs,” he said, adding that they were allowed to check out the center between 3 and 4 p.m.
Later, Watson Coleman said that the DHS statement was wrong about how the visit was described.
It was not true what DHS said in the press that we “stood” outside the holding center, she wrote. “The person who wrote that press release didn’t know enough about what was going on that they didn’t even count correctly how many Representatives were there.” We were doing our job as law watchdogs, just like we did at the Elizabeth Detention Center without any problems.
The mayor can be seen on video standing on the gate’s public side.
A federal officer in a jacket with the Homeland Security Investigations logo can be heard telling Baraka he couldn’t get into the building because “you are not a congress member” in video of the fight that was given to The Associated Press.
Baraka then left the restricted area and joined the protesters on the gate’s public side. From video, we can see him talking to a man in a suit through the gate. The man replied, “They’re talking about coming back to arrest you.”
“I’m not on their land.” He answered, “They can’t just arrest me in the street.”
A few minutes later, ICE agents circled him and others on the public side. Some of them were wearing face masks. As people yelled “Shame,” Baraka was dragged back through the gate while he was handcuffed.
A lot of people who work for civil rights and immigration change, as well as government officials, spoke out against Baraka’s arrest. Matthew J. Platkin, the attorney general of New Jersey, said that no state or local police were involved in the arrest during what seemed to be a peaceful protest. His office is defending a state law that bans private immigration detention centers.
As Congressmen, Rep. Menendez said in a statement, they have the legal right to check on DHS sites without warning, and they have already done this twice this year. But on Friday, it was said, “During this whole visit, ICE tried to scare everyone and make it harder for us to keep an eye on things.”
The jail or prison
The two-story building next to a county jail used to be a halfway house.
The Geo Group Inc. was hired by ICE in February to run the holding center for 15 years. Geo put a value of $1 billion on the deal, which was unusually long and big for ICE.
President Donald Trump made the news as part of his plans to sharply increase the number of jail beds across the country from this year’s budget of about 41,000 beds.
Baraka sued Geo right after the deal was made public.
During an earnings call with shareholders on Wednesday, Geo talked up the Delaney Hall deal. CEO David Donahue said it would bring in more than $60 million a year. He said that the building start taking people on May 1.
Hall said that when the center and one in Michigan opened, the number of beds available under ICE’s contract would go from about 20,000 to about 23,000.
In its statement, DHS said that the building has all the necessary licenses and has passed all inspections.