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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported — since President Trump took office in January, CBS News reports new data it obtained shows ICE agents have arrested more than 100,000 people. Conditions at the ICE-run Krome Detention Center in Miami are so crowded that on Thursday news helicopters filmed about a hundred people held there as they formed the letters ”SOS” and the Spanish word for “free,” ”libre.”
This comes as Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka on Tuesday sued President Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for the state of New Jersey after ICE agents arrested him last month outside the newly opened ICE jail run by GEO Group called Delaney Hall in Newark. Mayor Baraka was there with three Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey for an oversight tour — their responsibility. The complaint also names a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security’s investigations unit as a co-defendant, Ricky Patel.
Trump’s Justice Department is suing the Newark over its sanctuary policies, along with three other New Jersey cities, including Jersey City, where the mayor, Steve Fulop, is also running for governor. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is also running for governor. The primary is Tuesday, June 10th. Mayor Baraka joins us now in our studio for an update.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! We spoke to you soon after your arrest, but we didn’t speak to you after you filed suit. Talk about who the U.S. Attorney Alina Habba is and exactly what happened on that day that you were arrested, Mayor.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Right. Alina Habba is the U.S. attorney. She’s the interim U.S. attorney, used to be Trump’s personal lawyer. She’s the U.S. attorney now, you know, for a few more months. She came into New Jersey threatening the governor, threatening the attorney general, saying she’s going to turn our state red — all of these things that have nothing to do with the U.S. attorney’s job whatsoever.
You know, I went down there for a press event. I’ve been down there since and before that many times, you know, to make sure that they were, in fact, in compliance with our local and state laws, uniform code construction laws, that they, in fact, had a certificate of occupancy. And we’re still in court battling about that, in fact. But, you know, ultimately, they made a decision to arrest me down there unlawfully
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what happened, where the congressmembers were. Ultimately, Congressmember McIver has now been charged.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: But explain why you are they are there, how you had gone from the — was it private property of GEO Group? — over to the Newark side, where you’re mayor.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Right, yeah. Yeah, that’s what happened. I mean, you know, I was allowed into the property by the GEO Group. ICE agents came. Well, they were there for a long time. The bosses came and decided that they wanted me off the property, and, you know, they told me to leave. I left, ultimately. And when I got outside, they made the decision to arrest me anyway.
AMY GOODMAN: Where does Ricky Patel fit into this? And who is he?
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: He’s the special agent in charge of homeland security in that area, investigating.
AMY GOODMAN: This is HSI, Homeland Security Investigations.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s hard to tell the difference between the ICE agents, HSI.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Right, it is. It is. But they’re all part of the same conundrum. But at the end of the day, yeah, he’s the special agent in charge. It would be like me sending my police director downtown in order to arrest somebody for shoplifting. He came. He’s the boss. He probably hadn’t arrested anybody in God knows how long. He came there and arrested me on federal trespass. There’s no such thing as federal trespass. Trespassing is a state charge, first of all, and I was not on federal property, either. So, all this stuff is false in the first place. And I didn’t kick my way in, as you can see. I walked in. And so, they had no grounds.
AMY GOODMAN: You had been there a number of times before.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Yeah, at least a —
AMY GOODMAN: What do you see as your responsibility as mayor in dealing with Delaney Hall, which has gone from being a halfway house to a major ICE jail?
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Well, like any other development project or project in the city, they have to follow city ordinances. They need uniform code construction inspections. They need fire inspections, health inspections. And they need to change the use of the property through a certificate of occupancy. They can’t go into any property without a certificate of occupancy, not even a temporary one, a TCO, that allows us to come in and make sure they’re using the building based on what they say.
When our folks first went down there, they wouldn’t allow them in. I didn’t believe it. I said, “I have to go with you. I want to see if this is real.” And we went down there, and they actually refused entry to inspectors, which never, ever, ever happens. You know, the inspectors have a right to come into your property, especially the health and fire inspector. They have a right to come into a property and inspect it.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Alina Habba, the former personal lawyer for Trump, escalated. When you were charged, you went to court. She didn’t drop the charges. She said she’s taking this to trial.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Yeah, well, that was the intent. You know, they sat there in that hearing. First, you know, it was a preliminary hearing. They didn’t want the preliminary hearing, interesting enough, because they said the charge was too minor. It wasn’t too minor for me to be fingerprinted and mugshotted and interrogated. I mean, so, they went through the whole process. And because they didn’t have any evidence, they dropped it.
AMY GOODMAN: They dropped. So, why are you suing?
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Because they arrested me without any evidence, like the judge said. They arrested me as a preliminary investigation. You investigate first, then make an arrest. You don’t arrest people, then investigate it. I mean, that’s exactly what happened. And they fingerprinted me. They took a mugshot of me. They did it twice: once at one time when I got arrested, and the other time when I was in court. You know, I think it was overkill. Something of that — that small, I should have got a blue summons. They could have mailed that to my house and told me to appear in court for some kind of violation. But they humiliated me. They cuffed me. They dragged me in the car, took me to the cell. They did all of these things that wasn’t warranted. It was completely unwarranted.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the DOJ, the Department of Justice, is suing four cities. You’re a sanctuary city in Newark.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what are you doing about that? And also, you’re running for governor, so you’re in —
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — you would be in charge of all the cities.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Yeah, a lot of distraction there. We are partnering with other cities to mount a collective defense against what’s happening. Other cities have had this issue and have defended themselves successfully. The higher court has already opined on this, said that states and cities do not have to enforce these kind of immigration laws. We do not have to help ICE do this. And we’re not obstructing them. We’re not standing in their way. We’re not stopping them from kidnapping people off the street, for unjustly violating people’s constitutional rights. They’re doing that anyway, despite what we say and do. So, ultimately, this is a frivolous case and a waste of taxpayers’ money.
AMY GOODMAN: So, why are you running for governor? We just have 30 seconds. But the primary is Tuesday. You’ve been endorsed by Working Families Party, Make the Road Action New Jersey, Rutgers AAUP–AFT union, service employees union, among others.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: Yeah, I think it’s an opportunity for us to build a lab of democracy in the state, in the state of New Jersey, to build a broad-based coalition to fight for things that we think are important. And I think now, in this moral moment that we’re in, we have a kind of obligation to do the things that we only talk about, like that we discuss in our private meetings, that — the discussion that you guys were having earlier about a single-payer system, about public option in New Jersey, an opportunity to create a public bank that invests in Black and Brown communities and economically distressed neighborhoods, to lower healthcare costs — right? — to make housing affordable, to establish statewide rent controls.
These are things that need to happen to make people’s lives better, to make sure the Democrats govern for working-class families and not for the wealthy or the super wealthy, to distinguish us from Republicans or everybody else, for that matter, to build a democracy that’s enviable across this country — something I think California was trying to do for a minute, that they’re backing up off of. And so, we have the room to step into that space right now and tell the rest of the country what needs to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Ras Baraka, I want to thank you for being with us, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Democratic candidate for governor. The primary election is this Tuesday, June 10th. And he has sued the acting U.S. attorney, who had him arrested as he tried to inspect the detention jail in his city of Newark.
Next up, we get an update from the Freedom Flotilla boat heading to Gaza, and we’ll speak to a doctor suing University of California, San Francisco, after she was fired talking about Gaza. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Flame” by MAKU Soundsystem in our Democracy Now! studio.
