‘Gestapo Nation’ - Inside the ICE Arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is met with hundreds of supporters after being released from ICE custody Friday night. Photos/Bob Hennelly
By Bob Hennelly
On Friday, federal immigration police seized Newark Mayor Ras Baraka off of 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 Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, 80, Rep. LaMonica McIver, 39 and Rep. Robert Menendez Jr., 39 encircling Mayor Baraka outside the GEO perimeter in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent his being taken inside by the armed masked agents.
That's a heroic and rational response in the age of the Trump/Musk fully functional junta that's scooping people off the streets without due process and sending them to places like the private prison in El Salvador.
It's a simple test for us all. When you see armed masked law enforcement, á la death squad, 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 acting US Attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba, as the foundation for their reporting that offered credence to the false narrative that Mayor 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 as it got traction even on MSNBC—but it downplays what Mayor Baraka and the three members of Congress were actually doing there. No doubt, 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 the jobs they were elected to do.
U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman.
"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. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) told WorkBites/WBAI. Watson insisted Baraka had done nothing wrong. "He wasn't even on their property," she added.
When asked how New Jersey's blended citizen/migrant households must feel, Watson was direct.
"I think they are scared to death and they have every right to be scared to death—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," Rep. Watson Colman said.
Why Mayor Baraka and Members of Congress Where Really There
Believe it or not, at its core this all started out as a labor and law & order story. It became a protest story when federal immigration officers took the mayor of New Jersey's largest city into custody and manhandled three sitting members of Congress in the process. That was the headline.
This is all about a local mayor and federal elected officials attempting to fulfill their oath of office to "support and defend" the U.S. Constitution. In the case of the three members of Congress, who were at Delaney Hall to exercise their right to inspect such sites, they are also required to "defend" that Constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
Protesters gather outside the gates of the Frelinghuysen Avenue facility in Newark, NJ on Friday, May 9.
Friday's visit was only the most recent by Mayor Baraka who insists that GEO has to have a proper Certificate of Occupancy and the fire inspection that would be required of any congregant care facility that's slated to house 1,000 people. To not do so, puts the entire GEO workforce and the private prison population at risk.
GEO and ICE don't have a fire department. And as Newark tragically learned with the July 2023 maritime fire that killed Newark Firefighters Wayne Brooks and Augie Acabou, when you can't hold entities like GEO or the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey accountable to do the right thing, people die and it's the people and the City of Newark 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. 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," Mayor Baraka said in a statement in the days before his arrest. "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, a major campaign donor to President Donald Trump, started getting federal immigration detention contracts during his first term after then Attorney General Jeff Session 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 as well as permitting 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 his supporters grew exponentially 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 federal government, that's having trouble with basic functions like air traffic control, is now looking to spend billions to double down on rounding up immigrants.
Historical Context
As dozens of protestors became several hundred on Friday night, the chants for Baraka's release grew louder and louder echoing throughout the industrial corridor.
Amina Baraka, 82, the mayor's mother looked on with a look of both pride and trepidation. While her biography includes being a poet, author, community organizer, and performing artist, she's also a central figure, along with her late husband the poet Amiri Baraka, in Newark's fractious and tumultuous history.
Amina Baraka, 82.
On July 12, 1967, Newark police pulled over John W. Smith, an African-American cab driver, for what started out as an alleged traffic violation. Police contended Smith cursed at them when they encountered him and that when the police went to take Smith into custody he assaulted them. According to the police, they got Smith into their squad car but when they got to the precinct they maintained Smith continued to resist. This time, passersby who witnessed the altercation heckled the police, demanding that 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. By 7 p.m. the next day, Smith was released to his lawyer but the damage was done. Word on the street was that Smith had been fatally beaten.
Over the next 24 hours, the Newark Police Department tried to keep a lid on a very dynamic situation. Cab drivers were mobilized to protest the treatment of their colleague, community members were protesting police brutality, and street conditions were deteriorating. Police were being pelted by debris and looting started to break out.
Out of the 26 fatalities during the five days of unrest, 23 (including a number of innocent bystanders) were 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 poet and playwright, and Mayor Baraka's father, whose activism had made him a frequent target for the 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” on Newark residents, and had specifically targeted African-American-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,” concluded the Commission.
The Lilley report estimated that the National Guard and New Jersey State police fired some 13,000 rounds in all. No total was available for the local police, who reported killing people, seven “justifiably” and three “by accident.”
On this Spring night in 2025, the Newark Police and the massive crowd of protestors were aligned on the same side of history and the same side of the chain linked fence topped with barbed razor wire. Inside the ICE/DHS compound perimeter the Trump/Musk junta was certainly outnumbered and hunkered down with their only their weapons and masks to protect them.
Mayor Baraka, who is running for Governor in the June 10th primary, addressed the crowd after his release as night fell.
"We have a right to be here. We struggled on these streets...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," Baraka said. "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 documented at some point."
Mayor Baraka referenced the idealized version of democracy "we all learn about in the fifth grade" and referenced Black Americans whose ancestors came as slaves and "were the first" wave of "undocumented".
"We put up a statue that said give me your tired, your hungry, your poor masses. We advertised it to the world. 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, Newark was united.