On Juneteenth, Rep. LaMonica McIver frames liberation as something never “complete” or permanent, pointing to federal detention conditions at Delaney Hall in Newark and to her own prosecution after an oversight visit. McIver says detainees have described abuse
For this Juneteenth, the sea isn’t just a story from scripture. It’s a present tense warning about how quickly liberation can be turned back—about how progress can look permanent right up until the next act of power shows up.
In Newark, New Jersey, that warning has a name: Delaney Hall.
Nearly 161 years after Union troops arrived in Galveston to bring news of emancipation that was long overdue, Rep. LaMonica McIver says she can still see the same lesson repeating itself: people don’t cross raging waters because they’re comfortable. They do it because freedom requires a willingness to risk what’s in front of you.
McIver. a Democrat who represents New Jersey’s 10th congressional district. describes Delaney Hall as the first place she says she felt the full force of federal immigration policy up close after Donald Trump “took power again.” She says the first immigrant detention center opened under his administration was right in the district she represents.
In her account, Delaney Hall is a place of deprivation and fear. She describes it as dark and cramped, with a stench she says is overwhelming. She says detainees plead to see their families again and to speak to a lawyer. and she says there is hardly any food to be found. McIver adds that she has been told what detainees are served is moldy, green, and full of live worms.
She also alleges violence by guards, saying detainees report being beaten and pepper-sprayed. McIver includes one death in her description: she says a 41-year-old Haitian man died in ICE custody just a day after arriving at Delaney last year.
Her depiction is not just about conditions inside a facility. She connects it directly to the people who live around it—“mostly Black and brown families. ” she says. in a community she describes as among the least wealthy districts in the country. where nearly a third of neighbors were born outside the country.
In McIver’s telling. those are precisely the communities she says the administration is targeting. and precisely the ones she says it wants to keep afraid. She writes that masked, badgeless men in SUVs arrive, and she describes neighbors disappearing from their own driveways. She says pepper spray is wielded at point-blank range. The result. she says. is palpable fear strong enough to change daily life—parents skipping shifts at work. staying home from doctors appointments. and stretching a week’s worth of groceries. medicine. and diapers into two or three.
When she learned. she says. about the “atrocities at Delaney Hall. ” McIver says she did what members of Congress are legally allowed to do: she visited. She describes the oversight trip as something that should have been short and peaceful—she notes that members of Congress have “the explicit legal right to visit detention facilities unannounced”—but she says it quickly turned into chaos “manufactured by ICE.”.
McIver says that after an agent at Delaney Hall received orders from then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—whom she says Trump has since tapped to lead the Justice Department—armed and masked ICE agents moved into the crowd and began pushing and shoving so they could arrest Newark mayor Ras Baraka. She says that days later, the administration brought criminal charges against her stemming from that confrontation.
Today, McIver says she is facing up to 17 years in prison for crimes she says she did not commit.
She argues the prosecution isn’t really about what she did that day. She says it is about punishing her for what she believes, what she has said, and for doing her job. She also accuses ICE of telling lies, stating that a federal judge told ICE it should stop.
McIver adds another layer of strain: she says Trump is “no stranger to attacking Black women. ” and she describes the personal cost of her own legal fight. She says it drains financial resources and energy and joy. She writes that nights are hard and that she lies awake thinking about how the ordeal is tormenting the people she loves.
She describes her mother as “worried sick” about death threats. her husband as stretched thin while she is wrapped up in court. and her 10-year-old as terrified of losing her mom. She also writes that she is pregnant with her second child. and she says she worries about what it means for her family—and for the baby she is carrying—that she could be gone for 17 years.
But McIver repeatedly pulls the focus back to the larger picture. She says her prosecution is not only about her. She describes herself in hearings and on the House floor not just as “LaMonica. ” but as an elected representative of her community—one that. she says. has been terrorized by ICE and made worse by this administration.
In her account, trying to criminalize her oversight work is about dominance. She says it is an effort to silence her, drain her resources, and drown her in legal procedure. She calls it “Jim Crow resurrected” in what she describes as unmarked cars, marble halls, trumped-up charges, and legal briefs.
McIver warns that intimidation won’t be limited to her case. She says if they can make an example of her, they can bully more elected leaders—or anyone—into submission, “which is the entire goal” of the political project she describes.
Her argument then turns to what she calls the most powerful recourse the powerless have: democracy itself. She says Black women have never had the luxury of taking democracy for granted, and that she sees the work in protest lines and election lines alike—organizing, voting, showing up.
She frames this Juneteenth as a demand for courage rather than certainty. She writes that for every step forward. she says the country is dragged back a half step. but she insists that the movement can’t stop. “We don’t have to know how we’ll get across the sea before we wade in neck-deep,” she writes. The point. in her telling. is that staying on the shore has never brought raging waters to parted ground for those fighting for freedom.
The facts she lays out are stark and immediate: Delaney Hall. she says. is where she says she encountered abuse. inadequate food. inadequate medical treatment. and reports of pepper-spraying and beatings. She says detainees have pleaded to her. And she says she is now in federal court facing the question of whether the administration can prosecute her for doing her job.
Since her initial oversight visit, McIver says detainees at Delaney Hall have cited inadequate food and medical treatment, neglect, and abuse as reasons for mounting a hunger strike. She says McIver has continued to conduct oversight even as her case remains ongoing.
She will appear in federal court this month, she says, to argue that the administration cannot prosecute her for doing her job.
For McIver, Juneteenth is not a finish line. It’s the reminder that liberation has always required people to keep walking—even when the current turns violent.
Juneteenth LaMonica McIver Delaney Hall ICE detention Newark New Jersey 10th district Ras Baraka Todd Blanche federal court hunger strike