IT’S GOOD TO BE IN THE NOMENKLATURA: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka released after being arrested while protesting ICE detention facility he vowed to shut down.
Newark Mayor and New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Ras Baraka was released Friday night after being collared at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility that opened Tuesday — and which he has vowed to shut down.
Baraka was released around 7:50 p.m. to cheers from the large crowd of protesters and swath of public officials — including socialist Big Apple mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
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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 the GEO Group-owned facility 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.
I’m so old, I can remember this sort of insurrection activity led to much much stiffer sentences than a few hours in the slammer.
Related: The Shady Bunch: Six Words We Won’t Be Hearing from Democrats Over the Next Four Years.
No one is above the law. pic.twitter.com/a1dreULMDw
— MAZE (@mazemoore) May 9, 2025