“Almost a Gestapo nation”: When ICE seized the mayor, his city showed up

NEWARK, N.J. — Last Friday, federal immigration police seized Ras Baraka, the mayor of this city, off a public street outside Delaney Hall, a controversial private prison operated by the GEO Corporation, formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. This for-profit, publicly traded, multinational employs 18,000 people at over 50 sites here and abroad.

The chaotic scene, captured on bystander video, shows three Democratic members of Congress, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rep. LaMonica McIver and Rep. Robert Menendez Jr., encircling Baraka outside the GEO perimeter in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent his being taken inside by the armed, masked agents.

That was a rational response in the age of the Trump/Musk junta, which is scooping people off the streets without due process and sending them to places like the now-infamous private prison in El Salvador.

It's a simple test for us all. When you see armed and masked law enforcement coming for someone you care about, do you stand aside? Do you slink away and count on the courts to sort it out? Or do you do what you can to slow it all down?

Multiple news media organizations, including the BBC, led their accounts with quotes from Alina Habba, the acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, as the foundation for their reporting, offering offered credence to the narrative that Baraka had "committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings" to leave Delaney Hall.

The BBC headline, "New Jersey mayor arrested in protest at migrant centre," no doubt pleased the Trump White House, but it downplays what Baraka and the three members of Congress were actually doing there. Even in 2025, for the corporate news media, if there are a sufficient number of faces of color it has to be a protest. It couldn't be that this was a delegation of duly-elected officials doing their jobs.

"I have been in situations that have been heartbreaking personally and professionally. I have never been afraid. I have never been so disheartened and I have never felt so helpless to get the right thing done as I was today," Rep. Coleman told WorkBites/WBAI. She insisted Baraka had done nothing wrong: "He wasn't even on [ICE] property," she added.

When asked how New Jersey's many blended households of U.S. citizens and migrants must feel, Coleman was direct.

"I think they are scared to death and they have every right to be scared to death," she said. "I think this is almost a Gestapo nation right now — that people are going to take you out of your homes, out of your school, out of your jobs, whatever. This is not America."

Believe it or not, this all started out as a story about labor and law and order. It became a protest story when federal immigration officers took the mayor of New Jersey's largest city into custody and manhandled three members of Congress in the process. That was the headline.

These were elected officials attempting to fulfill their oath of office, which requires them to "support and defend" the U.S. Constitution. In the case of Coleman, McIver and Menendez, they were at Delaney Hall to exercise their right to inspect such sites. Remember, they are also required to "defend" the Constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

Friday's visit was only the most recent by Baraka, who has insisted that GEO should have a proper certificate of occupancy from his city, along with the fire inspection that would be required of any congregant care facility slated to house 1,000 people. Without those things, both the entire GEO workforce and the private prison population are at risk.

GEO and ICE don't have a fire department. And as Newark tragically learned with the July 2023 maritime fire that killed two city firefighters, when you can't hold entities like GEO or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey accountable, people die and it's ordinary citizens and their city that pay the price.

“The GEO Group and ICE exhibit a nationwide pattern of discrimination, disregard for due process and attacks on the foundations of liberty, justice and democracy," Baraka said in a statement in the days before his arrest:

Here in Newark, they also ignored court direction to apply for a Certificate of Occupancy (CO) at Delaney Hall, and other deliberate acts of non-compliance that put detainees, as well as employees, at additional, unnecessary risk. As a city of immigrants known for caring for its own, this adds insult to injury. The city will continue to demand that the GEO Group provides full transparency of operations, that they submit a CO application to ensure compliance all around, and complete ongoing inspections for safety of all involved. Because in Newark, we uphold our laws and statutes with the same rigor that we uphold the rights of our people.

GEO was a major campaign donor to Donald Trump, and started to receive federal immigration detention contracts early in his first term, after Attorney General Jeff Sessions ended an Obama-era ban on the Department of Justice contracting with for-profit private prisons. GEO was subsequently awarded a $1 billion, 15-year contract to operate the 1,000 bed immigration detention facility.

The state of New Jersey is currently defending a law it passed in 2021 prohibiting companies like GEO from setting up private immigration detention centers and barring local or county governments from leasing out their jail cells for that purpose. In 2023, a federal judge struck down the prohibition on private immigration lockups, according to the New Jersey Monitor.

On Friday, federal officials held the mayor for several hours at their Frelinghuysen Avenue location. The crowd of Baraka's supporters outside the facility grew exponentially larger as twilight faded into night.

It was a surreal, dystopian scene, not far from the dysfunctional air traffic control tower at Newark's Liberty International Airport. The same federal government that is having hair-raising difficulty with basic functions like air traffic control, is now looking to spend billions to double down on rounding up immigrants.

As the dozens of protesters swelled to several hundred on Friday night, the chants calling for Baraka's release grew louder and louder, echoing throughout this industrial corridor of Newark.

Amina Baraka, the mayor's 82-year-old mother, looked on with a mixture of pride and trepidation. While her biography includes being a poet, author, community organizer and performing artist, she is also a central figure — along with her late husband, the poet, playwright and novelist Amiri Baraka — in Newark's fractious and tumultuous history.

* * *

On July 12, 1967, Newark police pulled over John W. Smith, an African-American cab driver, for an alleged traffic violation. Police contended that Smith cursed at them, and then assaulted them when they tried to take him into custody. They got him into a squad car, but according to the officers Smith continued to resist when they reached the precinct. Passersby who witnessed this altercation began to heckle the police, demanding they take the handcuffs off Smith.

Large crowds formed outside the precinct house where Smith was held. Community leaders demanded to see him and when they were granted access, they discovered he needed immediate medical attention. Smith was sent to the hospital for treatment for a skull injury and broken ribs. He was released late the following day, but the damage had been done. Rumors spread throughout the city that Smith had been fatally beaten.

Over the next 24 hours, Newark police tried to keep a lid on a highly volatile situation. Cab drivers mobilized to protest the treatment of their colleague, community members protested police brutality, and tensions on the street ran high. Police were pelted with debris and looting started to break out. That launched five days of violent unrest which led to 26 deaths, 23 of them from gunshot wounds.

The tragic details are laid out in an official account compiled by the governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder. This document, known as the Lilley Report after its chairman, then-AT&T President Robert D. Lilley, has slipped into undeserved obscurity. Over months of investigation, the panel took sworn testimony from more than 100 witnesses, ranging from the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police to Amiri Baraka, the current mayor's father, whose activism had made him a frequent target for local police.

After speaking with scores of Newark store owners and residents, the commission concluded that members of both the police and the National Guard, motivated by racial prejudice, had used “excessive and unjustified force” against Newark residents, and had specifically targeted Black-owned businesses for destruction. “These raids resulted in personal suffering to innocent small businessmen and property owners who have a stake in law and order and who had not participated in any unlawful act. It embittered the Negro community as a whole when the disorders had begun to ebb,” the report concluded.

According to the commission, National Guard troops and New Jersey State Police had fired some 13,000 rounds in all. No total was available for the Newark police, who reported killing 10 people, seven “justifiably” and three “by accident.”

* * *

On this spring night in 2025, the Newark Police and a large crowd of protesters were on the same side of history — and the same side of a chain-link fence topped with barbed razor wire. Inside the ICE/DHS compound perimeter, armed and masked federal officers were clearly outnumbered and hunkered down.

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Baraka, who is running for governor of New Jersey and may have just become the leading candidate in the June 10 Democratic primary, addressed the crowd after his release as night fell.

"We have a right to be here. We struggled on these streets," he began. "I never thought I would be incarcerated for something I believe is my democratic right — to speak out against what I think was happening there, a violation of city and state laws and a lack of transparency. This thing that's happening in America is wrong. If you're not Blackfeet or Cherokee or Lenni Lenape, then somebody in your family was undocumented at some point."

Baraka referenced the idealized version of democracy "we all learn about in the fifth grade" and mentioned the background of Black Americans like him, whose ancestors arrived here enslaved and, he said, "were the first undocumented."

"We put up a statue that said, 'Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor masses.' We advertised it to the world," Baraka continued. "So the world has come here fleeing climate change, fleeing authoritarianism, to find that democracy in this country. … At some point we have to stop letting these people cause division between us."

On this night at least, Newark felt united.