By David Lopez
Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka appeared in federal court last Thursday and pleaded not guilty to a trespassing charge.
That’s because more than a week ago, Baraka was arrested by armed federal agents and cuffed on public space for trespassing. The arrest was made by a masked, unidentified ICE agents – now a symbol for our fragile democracy.
The mayor, a longtime critic of federal immigration policy, sought to enter and inspect Delaney Hall, a private prison operated by The GEO Group in his home city. He was with three members of New Jersey’s U.S. Congressional delegation — Democratic U.S. Reps. LaMonica McIver,Rob Menendez, and Bonnie Watson Coleman. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since threatened those three members of Congress with arrest as well. Coleman is 80 years old.
A DHS spokesperson called the mayor’s actions a “publicity stunt” and acting U.S. Attorney of the District of New Jersey Alina Habba derided, without apparent irony, the mayor’s actions in all caps: “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.” Habba even sat in court for Thursday’s procedural hearing as the assistant prosecutor disputed Baraka’s claims that he didn’t commit a crime.
President Trump‘s entire anti-immigration politics, including the unnecessary arrest of an outspoken political critic, has been one giant photo-op. It is classic Trumpian conquer-and-divide, survival-of-the-fittest cruelty theater which vilifies immigrants as “poisoning” the “bloodstream” of the nation and attacking any allies speaking out for their basic humanity.
It should come to no one’s surprise that Trump’s deportations include labor leaders. Also, to the shame of us all, it includes U.S. military veterans, including a Purple Heart veteran – one of the nearly 100,000 veterans deported by both Democratic and Republic administrations.
But this demand for the cleansing of migrants unlawfully in this country has now quickly morphed with attacks on legal migration, including the administrative gutting of our asylum laws, the planned elimination of legal statuses for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, the detention of law-abiding legal immigrants for no reason other than the content of their speech, and an attack on the 14th Amendment protection of birthright citizenship – a case argued procedurally in the U.S. Supreme Court the same day as Baraka’s hearing.
Republicans want to strip thousands of U.S.-born citizens of their citizenship status to leave them stateless, disenfranchised, and vulnerable to economic exploitation and deportation.
Under these ratcheted up anti-immigration efforts, each one of us is now a potential enemy to our government.
The invocation of the rarely-used Alien and Sedition Act to fight a supposed invader most people never heard of, from a country most Americans can’t find on a map, has accelerated the erosion of due process, leading many judges to speak out against threats to the rule-of-law. Recently in Oklahoma City, a family home was mistakenly raided by ICE — clothes scattered, money and phones snatched, children paraded into street in their underwear in the middle of the night. This anti-immigrant agenda has been used as a pretext for the unprecedented sharing of confidential tax information between the IRS and law enforcement — a genie unlikely to be put back in the bottle.
Now, visitors from Europe and Canada have also been detained and placed in custody. I learned during a recent trip to Europe that there are growing calls for a boycott of the United States, including the upcoming World Cup.
The actions of the New Jersey elected officials upended the Trumpian noise machine, reminding us that the communities and voters they represent are our neighbors, co-workers, co-unionists, co-parishioners, and classmates — many of whom live in terror that their families — will be ripped apart at a moment’s notice.
Just as critically for any elected representative, they hear the concerns of the voters — too often ignored – that the sweeping Big Brother enforcement efforts imperil their own security and freedom and place their own communities at risk.
Further, we have re-learned racial profiling is a feature and not a bug in any mass policing system. During the Newark Ironbound raid, Baraka noted one of those detained was a Puerto Rican U.S. military veteran targeted by the Trump administration. At the same time, we saw complaints from the Navajos – the First Americans - about ICE surveillance and detentions. Into this frenzy, U.S. citizens have been detained and deported.
The dehumanization of the immigrant now leaves many communities fearful whether the next El Paso shooter, drunk on Great Replacement Theory, lurks in their midst.
These concerns drove the New Jersey officials’ presence at Delaney Hall. The contracts between The GEO Group and the federal government will add detention beds and generate a whopping $130 million in annualized revenues – courtesy of taxpayers. GEO and other private prisons have also faced numerous lawsuits for forced labor, many under federal trafficking laws.
It is a predatory billion-dollar industry that does not make us safer or grow the economy in any way. The demand of the New Jersey officials for transparency by our elected officials should be lauded.
But these taxpayers’ costs mask the true cost as workers are pulled away from worksites to be caged and likely deported, leaving the millions of children in mixed status families without parents providing material and parental guidance.
These costs reflect a colossal societal failure of imagination – the same failed carceral math from the so-called War on Drugs era — diverting funds for an indiscriminate enforcement-only strategy that could be used instead to improve our schools, rebuild our decaying infrastructure or modernize our health care system.
This includes reimagining a positive immigration policy which would expand work authorization with meaningful right to organize and labor safeguards, as well as creating pathways to legalization.
Such commonsense policy changes would reduce government threats to our civil liberties, curtail massive government spending, support organized labor and business needs, reinforce family values, and support the faith of millions in this in this country who, like our new Pope, do not believe we need to rank our love for others.
Fortunately, we are now witnessing a growing number of communities across the country stand up for their neighbors. These citizen activists refuse to stay silent. This past week, we have seen neighbors raise their voices and risk their bodies from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Nashville, Tennessee, and Worcester, Massachusetts.
Calling your elected representative in the U.S. House Of Representatives or U.S. Senate is the most effective way to influence policy. To find your representative and senator to voice your position, go to the House website and the Senate website.
David Lopez, a Rutgers Law School professor, was former General Counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under President Obama.
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