Seventeen months after a scuffle outside a Newark immigration detention center turned a freshman congresswoman into a national figure, Rep. LaMonica McIver is still fighting to keep her case from reaching a jury.
On October 9, McIver’s lawyers asked the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to rehear her appeal en banc, after a divided three-judge panel refused in August to dismiss the charges against her. The filing, NJ Spotlight News reported, argues that the prosecution “bear[s] all the trappings of political retaliation.”
No trial date has been reported. McIver, a Democrat who represents the Newark-anchored Tenth District, pleaded not guilty in June 2025 and is running for reelection on November 3.
What happened at Delaney Hall
The case dates to May 9, 2025, when McIver went to Delaney Hall, a privately run detention center in her district that holds roughly 800 people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to conduct what she describes as congressional oversight. She was joined by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and by two fellow members of the delegation, Reps. Rob Menendez and Bonnie Watson Coleman.
A confrontation broke out at the facility’s gate as federal agents moved to arrest Baraka. The mayor was arrested and charged, though those charges were later dropped. McIver was charged by then-acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba, a former personal lawyer to President Trump, with assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering with federal officers, in an indictment with two felony counts and one misdemeanor count. She faces up to 17 years in prison if convicted on all counts, according to her office. Neither Menendez nor Watson Coleman was charged.
The government’s account is specific. The indictment alleges that McIver “slammed her forearm into” a Homeland Security Investigations special agent and forcibly grabbed him as she tried to prevent Baraka’s arrest, and that she later pushed past an ICE deportation officer “while using each of her forearms to forcibly strike” him, NPR reported. “No one is above the law — politicians or otherwise,” Habba said when she announced the charges. The allegations have not been tested at trial.
The August ruling
McIver’s central argument has been that the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which shields lawmakers for legislative acts, protects congressional oversight visits like hers, and that the Justice Department singled her out.
The Third Circuit panel disagreed, 2 to 1. In an opinion by Judge Cindy Chung, a Biden appointee, joined by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, the court allowed the first two counts to proceed, sent the third back to the district court for further review of whether immunity applies, and rejected her vindictive-prosecution claims. Chung called McIver’s actions “unambiguously non-legislative,” NJ Spotlight reported.
Judge Thomas Ambro, a Clinton appointee, dissented. “The duty Congresswoman McIver sought to perform when she visited Delaney Hall on May 9, 2025 strikes at the heart of the Clause’s purpose: to oversee the Executive Branch,” he wrote.
The en banc gamble
En banc rehearing is rarely granted, and the request extends the appeal. McIver’s options, NJ Spotlight noted, also included going to trial or petitioning the Supreme Court.
The full court’s makeup adds intrigue. If rehearing is granted, NJ Spotlight observed, attention will turn to Judge Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense lawyer, whom the Senate confirmed to the Third Circuit last year.
McIver has framed the petition in combative terms. “Members of Congress have a right to do oversight even, and especially, when the administration does not like what they find. I will fight like hell to protect that right,” she said in a statement. “I will continue to oppose these baseless charges and this intimidation, and I will keep doing my job, not without fear, but in spite of it.”
Her lawyer, former U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman, put the stakes in institutional terms. “This case is about whether the Executive Branch can interfere with and try to intimidate members of Congress who are doing the oversight the Constitution requires of them,” he said.
A case with company
McIver is, as her office notes, the only member of Congress under indictment by the current Justice Department over oversight of ICE. But NJ Spotlight placed her case among several prosecutions brought by the administration against the president’s critics, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The case has also become a proxy for a larger fight over access. The administration has moved to make it harder for state officials and members of Congress to inspect detention sites, and Delaney Hall has remained a flashpoint, with detainees staging hunger and labor strikes this year and a federal workplace-safety inspection still open, according to NJ Spotlight.
The rest of the delegation has not let the issue go either. Sen. Cory Booker, in a New Jersey Monthly interview in March, called ICE “reckless and out of control in New Jersey,” singled out Delaney Hall, and said he was “not going to approve another dollar” for the agency.
Back home
McIver represents one of the most Democratic districts in the state, and she has kept campaigning through the appeal. In an interview with NJ Spotlight before the August ruling, she insisted the case had not interfered with her work. “If we have to go to trial, I’m looking forward to it, because at the end of the day the facts are still on my side,” she said. “I showed up there to do my job, and literally the Trump administration hated that and now I’m being prosecuted for it.”
For the Justice Department, the case remains a test of whether it can prosecute a sitting member over a confrontation during an oversight visit. For McIver, every month on appeal is another month she spends in the job, and on the ballot, rather than in a courtroom. Whether the full Third Circuit decides to take up her case may determine which of those she spends 2027 doing.
Featured image: Rep. LaMonica McIver, official portrait, 119th Congress. Photo by Brian Thorpe via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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