New Jersey Democrats got the headline they wanted by joining a protest at an ICE facility.
New Jersey Democrats got the headline they wanted, even if the treatment they endured to get it was far from ideal.
New Jersey Senator Andy Kim “was pepper-sprayed by ICE agents outside Newark’s Delaney Hall detention center on Memorial Day,” the New Jersey Globe’s David Wildstein reported on Monday. He and much of the Garden State’s Democratic congressional delegation, as well as Governor Mikie Sherrill, were caught up in “chaotic clashes between protesters and federal agents” amid a standoff outside a Newark-based Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility.
CBS News produced a harrowing and illuminating video of the altercation and the agitation that preceded it:
To summarize the report: Democratic lawmakers joined protests against ICE that were already in progress, whereby they demanded access to the facility based on their belief that vague but lurid things were being done to the migrants in federal custody. The protesters — blue-haired and keffiyeh-clad — can be seen impeding and agitating law enforcement.
At this point, the broadcast cuts to a prerecorded package in which Governor Sherrill contends that she was denied access even though reporter Christine Sloan observed that “a congressional delegation got inside the facility.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News, however, that Sherrill’s last-minute effort to access the federal property was “a political stunt on Memorial Day, when visitation is currently suspended due to riots outside the facility.”
Democratic Congressman Robert Menendez Jr., the son of disgraced former Senator Bob Menendez, said the DHS statement was bunk. “There’s nothing that ICE says that you should believe, and anything they say, you should doubt immediately,” he advised.
Inconveniently for Congressman Menendez, the broadcast broke away from the prerecorded package to show scenes of chaos as demonstrators raced to escape the cloud of tear gas deployed by federal law enforcement — the typical remedy for riots.
And these are unlikely to be the last unlawful anti-ICE demonstrations we’ll see this summer. “It’s a concentration camp, and they are disappearing people,” said Hetty Rosenstein, a “longtime social justice advocate,” according to Wildstein. In response to federal law enforcement’s actions, she “called for more protesters to head to Delaney Hall.”