Newark Mayor and New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Ras Baraka was arrested Friday outside an US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention facility that he’d vowed to shut down.
Video posted to X at just after 3 p.m. by a News 12 New Jersey reporter showed Baraka, with his hands cuffed behind his back, being led away from the detention center by a Homeland Security Investigations officer.
Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon,” Alina Habba, the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey wrote on X five minutes later.
“He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody,” Habba posted, adding “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
It came after Baraka and several New Jersey Democratic congresspeople — Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rob Menendez and LaMonica McIver — showed up at the Delaney Hall ICE facility, calling for it to be shut down.
“We’re at Delaney Hall, an ICE prison in Newark that opened without permission from the city & in violation of local ordinances,” Coleman wrote in a post on X, along with pictures and videos of the scene.
“We’ve heard stories of what it’s like in other ICE prisons. We’re exercising our oversight authority to see for ourselves,” she wrote.
Habba claimed that Baraka was inside the facility, “was warned, was asked to leave several times,” but refused.
Baraka, “was put under arrest inside the facility, walked out when he was told he was under arrest, and then was cuffed,” she said in an interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum.
HSI “did absolutely everything correct,” said Habba, who was appointed by President Trump in March.
“When you break the law, there’s no grandstanding that will help you. Period, the end,” she said.
Baraka — who is a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for this year’s New Jersey governor’s race — had gone to the ICE facility Tuesday, the same day it was reopened, claiming it did not have the required permits to operate.
At that protest, the Democrat accused the detention center of turning away local fire inspectors, following a judge’s order that allowed city officials to examine the site.
He demanded full fire, safety and health inspections following a previous inspection that reportedly found “violations that put first responders at risk, violations that put detainees at risk and workers that are there at risk.”
Newark fire inspectors had issued three code violations against the facility.
The mayor vowed he would return to Delaney Hall to protest every day until it closed, according to local reports.
“We want them to follow our rules, follow our laws,” Baraka said at the time.
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