The Congresswoman Criminalized for Visiting ICE Detainees

Earlier in the year, as part of a new directive to increase immigration-related arrests, “special agents in charge” at F.B.I. offices across the country were encouraged to investigate and charge citizens and public officials if they “obstructed” immigration agents. According to an official in the Department of Justice, the order extended to judges and immigration lawyers whose rulings or legal advocacy, including on behalf of clients, ran counter to the Administration’s goals. “You’d never seen that before, because it was so extreme,” the official said. By the end of the year, the department had filed more than five hundred assault charges against people accused of interfering with federal law enforcement.

The prosecution of McIver was the first in a pattern of escalating attacks by the Trump Administration against Democratic officeholders. Nine days after she was charged, federal agents handcuffed a Democratic staffer in the office of the New York representative Jerrold Nadler, partially on the grounds that, after her colleagues documented their activity, she’d been “confrontational.” Two weeks later, Alex Padilla, a senator from California, was thrown to the ground by federal agents after walking into a Department of Homeland Security press conference in Los Angeles. “It’s all been very intentional,” Padilla told me. “Donald Trump came in with a list of political enemies that he wanted to punish. The list keeps growing.” Brad Lander, then the New York City comptroller, was arrested in June for obstructing immigration agents while accompanying an immigrant to court in lower Manhattan. In October, six people, including a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Illinois, were indicted for “hindering and impeding” ICE officers during a protest outside Chicago. At the start of December, ICE agents fired pepper spray at Adelita Grijalva, a newly sworn-in Democratic congresswoman, who was protesting an immigration raid in Tucson.

Many House Democrats have taken out personal-liability insurance to hedge against the prospect of being targeted by the President. “We’re freaking out,” one Democrat told me. “You do not know what’s coming around the next corner.” The Administration has claimed that McIver is “aligned” with Antifa. She was “out of control” at Delaney Hall, Trump said. “The days of woke are over.” Press releases issued by D.H.S. stated that she’d “stormed” the facility and “broken in”; on television, a department spokesperson accused McIver of “body-slamming” an agent. “No one else in Congress is facing what she’s facing,” Lateefah Simon, a Democratic representative from Oakland, California, said. “Typically, we would say, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to scare her.’ They’re actively litigating this case.” At one point, a federal judge ordered Justice Department lawyers to instruct Administration officials to stop lying publicly about the incident. “It’s not local ICE. It’s from headquarters in D.C.,” the government attorney replied. “We don’t have the authority.”

“I live a stone’s throw away from that big house on the corner with all the broken windows.”

Cartoon by Matthew Diffee

McIver’s case is expected to go to trial this year. By December, she had already racked up close to a million dollars in legal fees. Owing to House rules, the expenses have come out of her campaign funds, meaning that, in the months before her 2026 reëlection campaign, the money she’s raising will go almost exclusively toward her defense. “About five per cent of me regrets going that day,” she said. “Do I want to be hemmed up like this? My mom is worried to death. My husband’s stressed out. My nine-year-old is, like, ‘What the hell?’ ” But the government’s case, she went on, was meant “to slow me down and drain me of joy, and that’s why I’m so bent on it.”

On a blustery evening in October, I met McIver at her district office, in Newark. The government had shut down a week earlier, but a hum of activity remained. Staffers worked the phones from cubicles festooned with Halloween decorations. McIver, who is thirty-nine, with long dark hair and a ready smile, is personable and unguarded. She led me to a sparsely furnished conference room and offered me coffee and a snack. “I’m a mom,” she said. “Need to make sure everyone is fed.”

In May, during the week and a half between McIver’s visit to Delaney Hall and the D.O.J.’s indictment, Habba had proposed giving McIver probation in exchange for an apology. “I’m, like, ‘No, no, no, no,’ ” she told me. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Habba, who was in sporadic contact with McIver’s lawyers, then seemed to suggest that she might have McIver arrested—to choreograph a perp walk in front of news cameras. “They were not giving us any communication,” McIver said. “My husband was, like, ‘Don’t go anywhere by yourself.’ ”