On the Friday before Mother’s Day, LaMonica McIver, a first-term Democratic congresswoman from New Jersey, spent the morning handing out roses in the maternity ward of a hospital in Newark. Her next stop, a visit to Delaney Hall, a federal immigration jail in her district, promised to be a more sombre affair, but she was “on a high note,” McIver told me. “We thought it would be a smooth day.”McIver arrived at Delaney Hall just before one o’clock. She was joining two other New Jersey Democrats—Bonnie Watson Coleman and Robert Menendez, Jr.—to tour the facility. Members of Congress are allowed by law to make unannounced visits to detention centers as part of their oversight responsibilities; the three lawmakers planned to look around inside, then hold a press conference. As they were waiting to enter, McIver needled Menendez about his plans for Mother’s Day. “What did you get your wife?” she asked him, and acted scandalized when he said he hadn’t yet bought anything. “Oh, my God,” McIver said. “You have less than forty-eight hours!”The members knew the rules of touring immigration facilities: their staff couldn’t join them, and cellphones weren’t allowed inside. A few months earlier, when they had visited another New Jersey immigration jail, in Elizabeth, a guard wouldn’t admit them. Watson Coleman, who is eighty and in her sixth term, produced a copy of the federal statute that authorized their visit. Twenty minutes later, the warden and a representative from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed them around. At Delaney Hall, McIver recalled, “I just thought we would go in and have a little delay.”Delaney Hall, which is run by a private prison company called the GEO Group, was the first immigrant-detention center to open during Donald Trump’s second term. Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, a Democrat, claimed that the company had bypassed routine municipal permits and certifications in its rush to secure the federal contract, which was worth roughly a billion dollars over fifteen years. An Essex County court was adjudicating the dispute; the local news surrounding the case had prompted the representatives to make inquiries. “The Administration didn’t tell us this place was open and operating, so we didn’t have any information,” McIver said. “The only thing we could really do is show up and go there and see what was going on.” She had told Baraka to meet them afterward for the press conference, which would be held outside the facility’s perimeter fence.What happened during the next two hours is the subject of a pending criminal case. A group of ICE agents came out through the front gate and began arresting Baraka for trespassing. McIver and Watson Coleman tried to stand between Baraka and the agents. “You’re touching a federal official,” McIver warned them. “Don’t touch us.” The agents ignored her and pressed in. There was shoving and jostling. The government later claimed that McIver, in trying to shield Baraka, “grabbed” and “slammed” one of the agents.Baraka was eventually driven off in handcuffs and held for five hours before being released. Ten days later, Alina Habba, the acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, announced on X that the charges against him were being dropped. But, she wrote, “the dismissal against the mayor is not the end of this matter.” The second half of her statement addressed McIver. She was being charged with three felony counts of assaulting federal agents. If convicted, she faces seventeen years in prison.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.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.’ ”When Habba announced the charges, McIver’s lawyers searched federal court records to examine the legal filing, but they couldn’t find one; it came later that night. “First Twitter, then the court filing,” McIver said. In the months since, the President’s taunts on social media have brought Fox News coverage, death threats, and a motion by House Republicans to censure McIver on the chamber floor. “It’s just honestly been super stressful,” she told me. One Republican representative told her that he found the crusade against her “crazy,” but she couldn’t share his name. “That would be the end of it for him,” she said.McIver, the oldest of four children, grew up in public housing in the Central Ward of Newark. “We didn’t necessarily live in the projects, but we did see things that could be kind of disturbing,” she said. When she was a child, her mother struggled with substance abuse, and McIver lost several friends to shootings. Politics became an unlikely lifeline, for which she credits her fifth-grade teacher, Ras Baraka. For two decades, Baraka, the son of the poet Amiri Baraka, was a teacher and a high-school principal who moonlighted as a candidate for elective office. When McIver was in elementary school, Baraka ran for a seat on the Newark city council. His students passed out flyers and helped register voters. For McIver, the campaign’s atmosphere of resolve and sociability was intoxicating. It was also an unintended lesson in perseverance. “He probably went about fifteen or sixteen years of losing,” she told me.McIver, who holds a master’s degree in education, was the first member of her family to attend college. She planned to be a teacher, until she learned that certification would require sixteen weeks of unpaid student teaching. “My mom was in rehab,” she said. “As a working student, that was not a situation for me.” By the time Baraka started rising through the ranks of city government, McIver was working in human resources for Newark’s public-school district. In 2012, she and a friend from one of Baraka’s city-council campaigns founded a small nonprofit to mentor girls in Newark.McIver was thirty-two, and the mother of a toddler, when she decided to run for a council seat, in 2018. What immediately struck her was how old everyone in city government seemed. She made it something of a personal mission to, as she put it, “attract younger people—and when I say ‘young people’ I mean, like, under forty.” Within four years, she’d been chosen as the council president. By then, Baraka was starting his third term as mayor. He and McIver were now colleagues, sometimes with competing interests. “You don’t have to figure out where she stands on a position,” Baraka told me. “People knew that you can’t just say anything or treat her any kind of way. She’s going to respond.”In 2024, Donald Payne, Jr., a U.S. congressman from New Jersey’s Tenth District, died suddenly, of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-five. He had been in the seat since 2012; his father had occupied it for twenty-three years before him. McIver beat ten other Democrats in the primary, then ran in a special election that was held in September, 2024, less than two months before the regularly scheduled election, in which she would have to run again. “I originally was, like, ‘Why are we having a special? Let’s just wait until November,’ ” she told me. But Democrats were trying to narrow the Republicans’ House majority. “They needed bodies,” she said.McIver calls the four months she served in Congress that year her “orientation.” She inherited Payne’s role on the Homeland Security Committee, where she received an education in the chamber’s intractability: constant partisan warfare and zero possibility of legislating, especially during an all-consuming Presidential race. “It’s kind of shocking that it’s that bad,” she said. “Can’t we just do one good thing for the people we represent? Can we just have a conversation?”McIver, outside Delaney Hall and flanked by fellow Congress members Bonnie Watson Coleman and Robert Menendez, Jr., demands the release of Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark.Photograph by Dakota SantiagoMcIver had sought a seat on the transportation committee—it was one of the least politicized, and her district included both a major train station and an international airport—but, since she held a reliably Democratic seat, Party leaders gave the slot to a “frontline” member facing a tighter race. Immigration, meanwhile, was at the center of Trump’s campaign, and within weeks of McIver’s swearing in one of her new colleagues on the Homeland Security Committee, Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican, caused a scandal by tweeting that Haitian migrants were “wild” and “slapstick gangsters” known for “eating pets.” McIver told me that Higgins, who would later lead the effort to censure her, was “really, really crazy. This man opens his mouth and I’m literally taken back to Jim Crow days.”When Trump won, McIver told me, “I didn’t predict it would be this bad. I just didn’t think it would be so unhinged and rogue.” Trump had been in office for less than a week when ICE raided Ocean Seafood Depot, a wholesale fish market in Newark, arresting three people. The scale of the operation paled in comparison with the sweeping actions to come in cities including Chicago and Los Angeles, but it underscored for McIver, whose top priority as a campaigner had been the cost of living in Newark, that there’d be no outrunning Trump’s signature issue. “I didn’t come to Congress with a strong background on immigration,” she told me. “I came to Congress literally to do the job and work for people and protect them. It just so happens that, at the moment of me doing that, it happens to be around immigration.”Delaney Hall is situated in a desolate corner of Newark, wedged between I-95 and the Passaic River. When I visited the site in October, accompanied by Nedia Morsy, the state director of Make the Road New Jersey, an immigrant-advocacy organization, the street out front, which is on a popular trucking route through the city, was thick with traffic. A half-dozen semis were parked on the shoulder, their drivers sleeping between shifts. In a small parking lot outside the perimeter fence, a dozen people sat on concrete slabs, waiting to visit detainees. The odor of burning garbage wafted from a nearby incineration plant. I could see the Essex County Correctional Facility, a much larger prison down the block. “It’s all here,” Morsy told me. “Environmental racism and immigration jails.”When ICE announced its contract with the GEO Group, last February, the facility, which in the past had served as a halfway house, had been unoccupied for months. On March 28th, according to the city’s subsequent lawsuit, local officials began to notice that, though an occ