Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, sued New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor on Tuesday over his arrest on a trespassing charge – which was later dropped – at a federal immigration detention facility.
Baraka, who leads New Jersey’s biggest city, is a candidate in a crowded primary field for the Democratic nomination for governor next Tuesday. The lawsuit against Alina Habba, interim US attorney for New Jersey, coincided with the day early in-person voting began.
The lawsuit seeks damages for “false arrest and malicious prosecution”, and it also accuses Habba of defamation for comments she made about his case. Citing a post on X in which she said Baraka “committed trespass”, the lawsuit says Habba issued a “defamatory statement” and authorized his “false arrest” despite “clear evidence that mayor Baraka had not committed the petty offense of ‘defiant trespass’”.
The suit also names Ricky Patel, Newark’s federal Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agent in charge.
Emails seeking comment were left on Tuesday with Habba’s office and the department where Patel works.
The episode outside the Delaney Hall federal immigration detention center has had dramatic fallout. It began on 9 May when Baraka tried to join three Democratic members of Congress – Rob Menendez, LaMonica McIver and Bonnie Watson Coleman – who went to the facility for an oversight tour, something authorized under federal law. Baraka, an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the detention center, was denied entry.
Video from the event showed him walking from the facility side of the fence to the street side, where other people had been protesting, and then uniformed officials came to arrest him. As they did, people could be heard in the video calling to protect the mayor. The video shows a crowd forming and pushing as officials led off a handcuffed Baraka.
He was initially charged with trespass, but Habba dropped that charge and charged McIver with two counts of assaulting officers stemming from her role in the skirmish at the facility’s gate.
McIver decried the charges and signaled she plans to fight them. A preliminary hearing is scheduled later in June.
Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed facility, opened earlier this year as a federal immigration detention facility. The Florida-based Geo Group, which owns and operates the property, was awarded a 15-year contract valued at $1bn in February. The announcement was part of the president’s plans to sharply increase the number of detention beds nationwide from about 41,000 beds this year.
Baraka sued the Geo Group soon after that deal was announced.
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Then, on 23 May, the Trump justice department filed a suit against Newark and three other New Jersey cities over their so-called sanctuary policies. There is no legal definition for cities’ sanctuary policies, but they generally limit cooperation by local law enforcement with federal immigration officers.
New Jersey’s attorney general has a statewide directive in place prohibiting local police from collaborating in federal civil immigration matters. The policies are aimed at barring cooperation on civil enforcement matters – not at blocking cooperation on criminal matters. They specifically carve out exceptions for when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) supplies police with a judicial criminal warrant. The justice department said, though, the cities won’t notify Ice when they’ve made criminal arrests, according to the suit.
It’s unclear whether Baraka’s role in these fights with the Trump administration is having an effect on his campaign for governor. He’s one of six candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in the 10 June election to succeed the term-limited incumbent Democratic governor, Phil Murphy.
In a video ad in the election’s final weeks, Baraka has embraced a theme his rivals are also pushing: affordability. He says he’ll cut taxes. While some of the images show him standing in front of what appears to be Delaney Hall, he doesn’t mention immigration or the arrest specifically, saying: “I’ll keep Trump out of your homes and out of your lives.”
Trump has endorsed Jack Ciattarelli, one of several Republicans running in the gubernatorial primary. Ciattarelli has said if he’s elected, his first executive order would be to end any sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants.