In the year since the Justice Department charged her with assaulting immigration agents outside an ICE detention facility in Newark, Representative LaMonica McIver, Democrat of New Jersey, has tried to present an unflappable face.
“This process has not stopped me from doing my job,” she told supporters outside a New Jersey courthouse in October. “It is not going to stop me from doing my job.”
But the reality is that the case against her by the Trump administration — a test of executive power pitted against a first-term member of Congress who faces the possibility of a 17-year prison sentence — has made it very difficult for Ms. McIver, 39, to carry out her responsibilities.
Her life has been consumed by a case, now playing out in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, that most of her colleagues and the public have put in the rearview mirror. Yet its outcome could carry major legal implications.
Ms. McIver, who was charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding” federal officials after she was involved in the chaotic confrontation outside Delaney Hall in May, has refused to consider a plea deal.
Instead, she is seeking to have the case against her thrown out, arguing that the Constitution’s “speech-or-debate clause,” which protects members of Congress from legal liability when they are conducting legislative business, protects her from prosecution.
There is little legal precedent for such a claim. When members of Congress have been charged with crimes in the past, the allegations have generally involved corruption, bribery or sexual harassment. And legislative immunity has often been defined narrowly by the courts.
“She’s at the vanguard,” said Stanley M. Brand, a former general counsel for the House of Representatives, who said the speech-or-debate clause had never before been applied outside the Capitol or committee rooms. “It’s a landmark case, which has the potential to re-energize and invigorate the application of the clause.”
The Justice Department contends that Ms. McIver was the ringleader in a violent effort to impede an arrest, citing video evidence of her tangling with officers. According to the complaint, she “slammed her forearm into the body” of a uniformed agent, then “reached out and tried to restrain” him while attempting to stop law enforcement officers from arresting Mayor Ras J. Baraka of Newark. She also “pushed an ICE officer,” the complaint claimed, using her forearms to “forcibly strike” an agent.
President Trump has described Ms. McIver as “out of control,” and Republican members of Congress have denounced her conduct, trying and failing to censure her and declare that her actions “do not reflect creditably on the House.”
For Ms. McIver, the personal and professional costs of fighting the charges have been high. She spends more than 20 hours a week in meetings with lawyers, or raising money to pay for them. She has laid off campaign staff because she cannot afford to pay them and is relying on more volunteers instead.
Even so, she is months behind on lawyer fees, just recently having paid off a July invoice for $200,000.
“I saw that and almost had a heart attack,” she said in an interview in her drab office in a municipal building in Newark, where natural light was hard to find. Her legal expenses are already expected to top $1 million. House ethics rules dictate that she cannot accept any pro bono legal help.
Last week, her 9-year-old daughter came home from school talking about details of her mother’s situation that, up until then, Ms. McIver had managed to hide.
“She said one of the students at school had mentioned that her mom was going to jail,” Ms. McIver said. “That was a tough thing.”
She said she told her daughter: “Screw what that kid said.”
But after bedtime on recent nights, she and her husband have been discussing that possibility.
“Just recently, I started putting a lot of thought into the worst-case scenario,” Ms. McIver said. “A judge wouldn’t sentence me to go to jail? These are things you can’t really bet your money on these days. It really depends. It’s a shaky situation.”
On Monday, Ms. McIver filed her brief requesting the dismissal of the charges against her, citing the speech-or-debate clause.
In the interview, Ms. McIver appeared determined not to cede any ground to the Trump administration, but she also conceded that the legal battle had placed her in an untenable position.
“It feels like you’re basically on an island alone,” Ms. McIver said. “I’m a new legislator. The Trump administration picked the weakest link to put their all in.”
The case revolves around a 68-second incident that unfolded on May 9, 2025, when Ms. McIver was involved in a chaotic tussle with ICE agents outside an immigration detention center in Newark that she was visiting to conduct congressional oversight.
As she waited to enter the facility with two other House Democrats, Mr. Baraka arrived, and ICE agents tried to arrest him for trespassing.
What happened next was caught on camera, but even so, it is difficult to deconstruct. Government prosecutors allege that the congresswoman struck ICE agents, citing video of a jumbled physical altercation. Ms. McIver’s legal team contends that the agents were the aggressors, pointing to body camera footage that shows law enforcement officials pushing her.
Marc Elias, the powerful Democratic lawyer who has taken a personal interest in Ms. McIver’s case, has called the prosecution “an absolute travesty” and “a misuse of the law enforcement system to target their political enemies.”
In an interview, he said that to see it as anything but a political prosecution was “nostalgia for the way people think the Justice Department used to operate, or should operate” and an attempt to “cling to an era that doesn’t exist anymore.”
The chaotic scene also marked an early confrontation between ICE officials and a peaceful public gathering that presaged much of what was to come.
“I was scared to death,” she said, recalling that day. “The guns, the tactical gear — it was the first time I had experienced something like that. They created a dangerous situation.”
The charges against Mr. Baraka were dropped within days. But a year later, Ms. McIver is still in the thick of a case that has, in some ways, been overshadowed by other confrontations with immigration agents, like the ones that led to the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.
For a while, Ms. McIver felt confident that nothing would come of the charges against her. But in November a Biden-appointed judge rejected her claim that she had been unfairly targeted with a “vindictive or selective” prosecution, and found that her position as a member of Congress did not shield her from the charges. She realized that she was an ideal target for the administration to test the boundaries of executive power.
“I was stunned,” she said of the judge’s ruling against her. “I felt confident because I wasn’t there to do anything other than my job.”
Federal law allows members of Congress to make unannounced visits to immigration detention facilities to conduct oversight, and the Trump administration’s efforts to limit them have been repeatedly rejected by a federal judge as illegal.
Still, though Ms. McIver’s case fascinates legal scholars, the legal vanguard is not a comfortable place to be in the current political environment.
“Anytime you have the full weight of the federal government against you, you have to treat that seriously,” Mr. Elias said. “Anyone who faces a criminal trial is facing the possibility of life-altering penalties. We should not take solace in the fact that juries may protect us from the worst prosecutorial abuses.”
The elevation of Todd Blanche to serve as acting attorney general after Pam Bondi’s ouster was a concerning development for her case, people close to Ms. McIver said. Mr. Blanche has been aggressive in pursuing the charges against her, writing on social media that “assaults on federal law enforcement will not be tolerated.” Body camera footage from the incident also indicates that it was Mr. Blanche who ordered Mr. Baraka’s arrest.
At first, Ms. McIver’s case was lumped together with the indictments of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director; and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York; as high-profile examples of the Justice Department’s targeting of people Mr. Trump regards as political foes. But those two cases have since been dropped after being mishandled by the Trump administration. Ms. McIver has not been so lucky.
In some other cases, the efforts have backfired and helped elevate the individuals that the administration sought to undermine. Senator Alex Padilla, the California Democrat who was shoved to the ground by federal agents and handcuffed last year after trying to question Kristi Noem at a Los Angeles news conference, was rewarded this year with a slot delivering the Spanish-language response to the president’s State of the Union address.
Federal prosecutors also tried, but failed, to indict six Democratic lawmakers after they posted a video reminding active-duty members of the military and intelligence community that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders. In response, one of the lawmakers, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, has sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, emerging from the saga as a stronger potential presidential candidate defined by his willingness to fight back against attacks by the Trump administration.
But for Ms. McIver, a first-term House lawmaker with little clout or pre-existing national profile, there has been no upside. And help from colleagues has been awkward to come by.
Ms. McIver was elected in 2024 as the youngest person to represent New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District. She had served in the local legislature in Newark, and was well known in her community, but she barely knew any of her colleagues in Congress when she was charged.
“We were begging members for support and they were like, ‘Who are you?’” she said. “I’m like, ‘I just got here.’ We were in the middle of meet-and-greets when it happened.”
In the first weeks after the incident, many of her colleagues tried to help by donating some of their campaign money to help pay her legal fees, hosting fund-raisers or sending emails on her behalf. While a small group of members still offer her moral support, she said that the aid has petered out over time.
“It’s become more difficult,” she said. “Other bad things are happening; other members are being attacked. They moved onto the next awful thing, because they have plenty to choose from.”
Mr. Brand called the brief filed on Monday “an amazing tour de force on the whole purpose of the speech and debate clause, which is to protect members against an oppressive executive branch.”
If she wins, Mr. Brand said Ms. McIver’s silver lining may be helping to make new law in this area.
For now, Ms. McIver is preparing for oral arguments in the coming months. Her lawyers have assured her, she said, that “no one would go to jail for something like this.” But a year in, Ms. McIver said she’s not banking on it.
“I would be so relieved,” she said of the possibility that the appeals court might rule in her favor, though she noted that the Justice Department might still try to escalate the case to the Supreme Court.
A dismissal of the charges, she said, “would be like Mount Everest rolling off my shoulder.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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