Last Thursday afternoon, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, stood smiling in a hallway of the Capitol as he deflected reporters’ questions about the week’s most recent outrage. A few hours earlier, in Los Angeles, Alex Padilla, the senior Democratic senator from California, had interrupted a press conference held by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, then was thrown to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents. In a video of the incident, Padilla, in dark slacks and a windbreaker, identifies himself before asking Noem about the Administration’s deployment of the National Guard and federal troops to police protests in L.A. “I saw the same video, a very brief video that I think many people did,” Johnson said. “Everybody can draw their own conclusions.” He went on to say that he would support a motion to censure Padilla, who, he added with a smirk, had acted “inappropriately.”
Shortly after the video went viral, the Trump Administration responded with its usual mendacity. Noem blamed Padilla for not identifying himself, even though the footage refuted her claims. In a subsequent interview, Padilla, who had arrived at the federal building in L.A. that day for a different meeting, said, “From the moment I entered the building, I’m being escorted by a member of the National Guard and an F.B.I. agent. I asked, ‘Well, since we’re waiting, can we go listen in to the press conference?’ They opened the door for me.” The Department of Homeland Security went on to post a statement on X in which it claimed, falsely, that Padilla had “lunged toward Secretary Noem” and “did not comply with officers’ repeated commands,” adding that the Secret Service “thought he was an attacker and officers acted appropriately.”
At the time, the arrest of a U.S. senator in Los Angeles was the latest incident in a pattern of increasingly aggressive actions that the Administration has taken against elected Democrats and their allies. Each instance has been tied to Trump’s immigration crackdown. In late April, the F.B.I. arrested and charged a Wisconsin county judge, Hannah Dugan, for allegedly aiding an undocumented immigrant in evading Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at a local courthouse. (She has pleaded not guilty.) On May 9th, ICE agents arrested the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, and LaMonica McIver, a U.S. congresswoman, outside an immigration jail in New Jersey. Baraka, who was accused of trespassing on private property, was held for five hours before being released; the charges were dropped, and, a few weeks later, Baraka filed a defamation lawsuit against Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer and the interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. (The suit cites a stream of misleading claims that Habba had posted on social media about Baraka’s actions, saying, among other things, that “he has willingly chosen to disregard the law.”) McIver was charged with assaulting a federal officer in the chaos surrounding Baraka’s arrest, and indicted on June 10th. “The charges against me are purely political,” McIver has said. “They mischaracterize and distort my actions.” If convicted, she faces up to eight years in prison. On May 28th, D.H.S. agents barged into the New York City office of the veteran Democratic U.S. congressman Jerrold Nadler in pursuit of alleged rioters who had protested while ICE officers arrested immigrants outside a courtroom. Moments after the agents reached the door, they handcuffed a staffer, claiming that, when they had demanded entry without a warrant, she had physically impeded them. On June 17th, less than a week after Padilla’s arrest, ICE agents tackled and handcuffed Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and a candidate for mayor, as he accompanied a person outside an immigration court. “You’re obstructing,” an agent told him, according to a recording. Lander, as he was being cuffed near an elevator, replied, “I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway.” D.H.S. later charged him with “assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.”
The incidents involving lawmakers all have something in common: in each case, video evidence directly contradicted or undermined the Administration’s account of what happened. The charges against Representative McIver are without question the most serious. Yet she and two other representatives—Rob Menendez and Bonnie Watson Coleman, both New Jersey Democrats—travelled to the facility on May 9th to exercise an uncontroversial prerogative: members of Congress are allowed to visit and inspect immigration-detention facilities, unannounced, as part of their oversight role. The practice has become fairly common in recent years. The facility in Newark, called Delaney Hall, opened the first week of May, a few months after D.H.S. signed a $1.2-billion contract with the private-prison company GEO to operate it. Baraka, who at the time was running for governor, had objected to the contract and raised questions about aspects of the building permit. When he had tried to visit the facility in the past, GEO employees turned him away.
The three members of Congress arrived on May 9th around noon. To enter the facility, visitors pass through an outer gate and into an interior parking lot that leads to the main compound. They had been waiting for about an hour when Menendez noticed a number of armed ICE agents exiting the building into the parking lot. “I’ve never really seen a handful of armed officers at a detention center,” he told me. “These guys were showing up clearly, like, the way you’d expect them to if they were about to go out into the field.” He remembered thinking, “What’s about to go down?”
It was then that Menendez realized Baraka had shown up, but that hardly explained why there would be so many agents. “I honestly thought that there literally was going to be a major, major raid, because I’ve never seen this many armed agents,” he said. According to Baraka’s lawsuit, Representative McIver had invited him to meet with the congressional delegation outside the facility after their tour. But, at 1:50 P.M., a guard stationed at the outer gate invited Baraka inside, claiming that it would “calm the crowd” that had gathered outside to protest. About forty-five minutes later, a senior D.H.S. agent approached Baraka and ordered him to leave. He lingered, but only briefly. By then, the Congress members had seen Baraka inside the gate, and walked over to confer with him. The agent returned and threatened to arrest Baraka, who exited the premises onto public property outside.
What happened next is less clear. Menendez says he overheard part of a phone conversation in which a D.H.S. agent, apparently speaking to a superior, said something about a decision to arrest Baraka. A large group of agents then left the facility. “We were ready to go do the tour,” Menendez told me. “The mayor walked out. The situation was over.” Yet, he continued, “that’s when they decide to open the gate where they knew there were all these people who were on public property protesting.” It was inevitable that the situation would escalate: armed federal agents were converging on a crowd outside the grounds of the facility. The representatives went to join Baraka. Videos show them getting jostled and pushed in the scrum. There’s little question that McIver made physical contact with a federal agent. But the footage hardly demonstrates what she’s been accused of—she appears to be getting shoved herself. “You can’t talk to a congresswoman like that,” McIver can be heard saying at one point. A D.H.S. spokesperson later claimed, without evidence, that the members of Congress were part of a “mob” and were “assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body slamming a female ICE officer.”
Robert Gottheim, Nadler’s chief of staff, was stunned by the government’s inflated descriptions of its confrontations with public officials. “You exercise your rights. They do what they want. Then you figure it out after the fact,” he said. The immigration court in Manhattan is on the fifth floor of the federal building at 201 Varick Street; Nadler’s office is on the sixth floor. On the afternoon of May 28th, ICE officers had shown up on the fifth floor with photos of immigrants who were scheduled to appear in court. As the Administration has intensified its arrest operations at courthouses and at routine check-in appointments at ICE offices, demonstrators and clergy have shown up to document the activity. Two members of Nadler’s staff had gone downstairs to observe and, when tensions flared, invited the activists upstairs to defuse the situation. Officers from the Federal Protective Service, a D.H.S. agency that guards government property and personnel, followed them to Nadler’s office.
The initial video of the encounter, shot on a witness’s phone and obtained by Gothamist, opens with the sounds of Nadler’s staffer sobbing as an officer cuffs her hands behind her back. “She pushed him back,” another officer says. Someone off camera says, “No, she did not. That is not what happened.” Nadler’s office later released additional security footage that shows more of the exchange. Two officers enter the outer vestibule of Nadler’s office, while a third, with a dog, stands by the door. There’s no sound on the video, but Nadler’s staffer appears to have a conversation with the two officers before walking over to an interior door leading into the office that requires a code to open. As soon as she punches it in, one of the officers grabs her.
The government initially threatened to charge the staffer with assaulting a federal officer. Gottheim was in Italy with his family at the time. He received a call from a ranking officer at the Federal Protective Service, who told him that a staffer had committed an assault. Gottheim said, “Where? In our office?” According to Gottheim, the officer then said that he could charge her with disorderly conduct instead. “I said, ‘You’re going to give her disorderly conduct while she was in our own office? I need to get the congressman on the phone.” The staffer, who has not been identified, was eventually released without charges. Publicly, D.H.S. claimed to have been investigating rioters on the premises. There was no mention of the alleged assault. “In the beginning, we were not sure what they were going to do,” Gottheim said. “Then they released the statement. It really angered us. It was a total fabrication.” Nadler later said of the Administration, “They’re behaving like fascists.”
The Administration’s political calculus seems aimed at punishing and intimidating Democrats who challenge the President’s agenda. Earlier this week, following a day of nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump ordered ICE to increase arrests and deportations in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve this very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” he wrote on Truth Social. That D.H.S. personnel are unencumbered in targeting members of Congress marks a further—and unprecedented—escalation. It also capitalizes on the fact that many protections against such retaliation are grounded in norms rather than laws; pushing the boundaries of acceptable political conduct is easier when those lines are inherently blurry. A senior congressional aide told me, “Members themselves have some limited or arguable protections under the Speech and Debate Clause. But a lot of those protections, mostly due to case law over the years, don’t extend to staff and don’t apply when staff or offices are doing immigration casework.” Such outreach generally falls under the category of constituent services, the aide said, “but we have no immunity in any of those situations.” (In a statement, a White House spokesperson said, “It’s alarming Democrats think they can obstruct federal law enforcement, assault ICE agents, or physically push law enforcement officers while charging a cabinet secretary, without consequence – it’s even more alarming that the New Yorker is encouraging this lawless behavior.”)
There are increasingly urgent reasons for congressional oversight of immigration jails, which have always been notorious for their abysmal conditions. Now, with the Administration expanding its enforcement operations in radical new ways, there are fifty-one thousand people in ICE custody nationwide. On Friday, four detainees escaped from Delaney Hall, in the midst of rolling protests inside the facility among immigrants who described a persistent lack of food and sweltering heat. “People were desperate, breaking doors, banging on walls,” the wife of one of the escaped detainees told the Times. (A GEO representative said, “There has been no widespread unrest at the facility.”) Last week, as thousands of people marched in the streets of Los Angeles and New York, in response to immigration raids, five members of Congress, in California and New York, were barred from touring detention facilities housing those who had been arrested in the enforcement sweeps. “It’s a direct violation of federal law,” a House aide told me. Since 2019, annual appropriations bills have included a provision explicitly making funding for immigration jails contingent on the ability of congressional appropriators to check on their investment.
There are three months left in the current fiscal year, and, by some estimates, ICE is already a billion dollars over budget. Last week, members of the House Appropriations Committee issued a report detailing its concerns. “ICE began spending more than its appropriated level shortly after the fiscal year commenced and operations now far exceed available resources,” the report says. The Trump Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed in the House on May 22nd, would increase ICE’s funding for enforcement by seventy-five billion dollars. The actions of ICE and its partner agencies thus far have been extreme, but this would almost certainly supercharge their operations in the year ahead. One of the more surreal aspects of the Administration’s unapologetic aggression toward members of Congress is that Trump is also demanding their support to expand the very power that’s being used against them.“They’re targeting senators at the same time that these senators are being asked to triple the Administration’s enforcement budget,” Andrea Flores, the vice-president of immigration policy at the nonprofit FWD.us, and a former aide to Democrats in both the White House and the Senate, said. “They’re trying to criminalize legally protected congressional activity. It’s terrifying for any legislator trying to do their job right now.” The White House has called for the bill’s passage by July 4th. ♦
