Mother Jones illustration; Michael M. Santiago/Getty; AAndrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty
It’s been just over a year since Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), a sitting member of Congress, showed up to Delaney Hall, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, to do her job.
Members of Congress have the statutory right to conduct unannounced oversight visits at ICE detention centers across the country, and McIver had done it before.
But this time was different.
Things turned chaotic. ICE flooded the facility with agents. The mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, was arrested. And McIver, a first-term Congresswoman, left that day, about to face two federal felony counts and a misdemeanor, for “forcibly impeded and interfered with federal officers,” according to the charges.
For the past year, McIver, who has pleaded not guilty, has been fighting the case, running to keep her seat in Congress, and making the argument that this isn’t really about her. For McIver, it’s about whether Congress can do its job in the Trump era.
“Honestly, it’s been extremely difficult,” McIver told me in this wide-ranging interview. “I think some days I’m still looking back, like, is this really happening? Because it’s truly unbelievable. I never thought I would get to Congress and have to be dealing with something like this, or being targeted in this way or fashion.”
McIver just revealed in an interview with People magazine that she is facing these charges while she is pregnant with her second child.
“This is really America, and it saddens me that this is happening,” she told me. “It definitely feels like I’m on the island alone, for sure, and that’s why I continue to talk about this case and explain that it’s bigger than just LaMonica McIver.”
Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the events of that day, I sat down with Rep. McIver to talk about what happened, what went wrong, and why the Trump administration just won’t let up.
Watch the interview in full here:
