Arrest boosts Newark mayor as he runs for governor

Public polling has been sparse ahead of the June 10 primary, with no candidate breaking out of the pack. North Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Navy veteran who’s led the field in local party endorsements, hit 17% in this month’s Rutgers-Eagleton poll; Fulop trailed just outside the margin of error, at 12%.

Baraka came in at 9% in that poll, neck and neck with New Jersey Education Association president Sean Spiller, Gottheimer, and former state Senate President Steve Sweeney, the only candidate with a base outside North Jersey.

“We’ve reached a red line in this country: the first arrest of an elected official,” said Antoinette Miles, the leader of the Working Families Party’s New Jersey branch, which supports Baraka. “This race has been talked about in terms of who’s gonna be a fighter, and Ras has proved that he will fight.”

No candidate has commanded the spotlight like Baraka, who’d been confronting the Trump administration over its deportation strategy as soon as the first ICE raids began in his city this winter. In late February, he said that the Delaney Hall site could not be used unless the federal government met “city property-use requirements, inspections, and permits.” In April, the city sued to stop work on the site and allow inspections.

By then, Baraka had already run a TV ad about his Delaney Hall campaigning: “Only one candidate has the courage to stand up to Trump.” The Friday site visit with Reps. LaMonica McIver, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Robert Menendez, organized to let congressional Democrats provide some oversight of the facility, went calmly until agents moved to arrest the mayor for trespassing.

Videos taken by reporters, immigration rights activists, and ICE show the ensuing chaos. McIver and Watson Coleman stand in front of the mayor to protect him. When an ICE agent approaches with handcuffs, McIver pushes his arm away. And when Baraka is pulled inside the gate for processing, McIver and Menendez follow to the entrance; agents push both of them, McIver pushes back.

“If they can treat three members of Congress like that, just imagine how they can treat people on the street each and every day,” McIver told reporters after the scuffle.

After Baraka was released, Sherrill and other gubernatorial rivals condemned ICE’s conduct. She had been critical of Delaney Hall’s reopening, writing on X in March that it would not make New Jersey safer, and was being done to “reward Trump’s campaign donors and open a for-profit prison with a history of violent abuse.”

But Sherrill was still competing against Baraka in a tight primary. On Monday night, he needled Sherrill and Gottheimer for not supporting a Watson Coleman bill that would have banned private prisons.

“I’ll tell you what’s not effective: Voting for HR 3401, to give Trump $4 billion to build a border wall, which, all due respect, the congresswoman did,” said Baraka.

“To suggest that I have been supporting Trump’s border wall, when I was fighting against it, as [Trump] was taking military construction money to support it, is a fallacy,” Sherrill shot back. “And I’ve been against private prison construction for years now.” She’d proven her fight by “leading the caucus in impeaching him the first time.”

Jack Ciattarelli, who nearly won the 2021 race for governor and has led in polls for this year’s GOP nomination, said over the weekend that Baraka should have been focused on problems at Newark’s airport, not “shilling for illegal Immigrants at an ICE detention center with a cheap publicity stunt.” On the day of the Democratic candidate forum, President Donald Trump endorsed Ciattarelli.

State GOP chairman Bob Hugin agreed with Ciattarelli that the arrest was a “stunt,” and a reckless one. “He’s running for Governor, and this stunt shows exactly what kind of leader he’d be: one who puts political theater ahead of public safety and the rule of law.”

Other Republicans took the opportunity to mock Democrats, using the sort of rhetoric Baraka’s party had used to condemn Trump and Jan. 6 rioters. “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW,” US Attorney Alina Habba wrote on X. Deputy OMB director Rob Bishop joked that the scene at Delaney Hall was “worse than 9/11” — a riff on the Democrats (like Joe Biden) who had called the 2021 Capitol riot as a worse attack on democracy than the 2001 terrorist attack.

Democratic strategists have a sense of what sort of candidate can win in New Jersey. Trump’s surge with Latino voters last year gave Republicans their best electoral performance in years, and Ciattarelli’s near-miss loss four years ago reminded them not to take the state for granted. Sherrill, Fulop, and Gottheimer have overlapping agendas, but each is trying to run as a suburban liberal who’ll build homes and cut taxes.

Baraka is not running like that. He’s an “equity”-minded progressive who’s promised to close racial economic and health gaps — a message that the party has gotten nervous about, post-2020. “I’m asking and demanding that the Democratic Party move away from its tone-deaf policies, from the policies that alienate Black and brown people in this state, that alienate working people,” he said at an event last month in Sherrill’s district.

The theory there, shared by the progressive groups that endorsed Baraka, is that Democrats have an inspiration problem — that they lost ground with non-white voters because they weren’t delivering enough for them. His consistent critique of Sherrill et al (she gets more attention because of her poll lead and county party endorsements) is that their moderation won’t inspire voters, especially Black voters, and that they say “fight” but don’t lace up their gloves.

No approach to Trump has spared New Jersey Democrats from confrontation. Outgoing Gov. Phil Murphy has been conciliatory with the new president, meeting with him last year after he survived an assassination attempt. One of his rewards: Habba investigating him over the state’s Immigration Trust Directive that limits local law enforcement from working with ICE. But Baraka’s dogged opposition to the Delaney Hall site contrasts well with Gottheimer’s AI fakery, and Democrats may want to reward it.

That would set up an even starker anti-Trump contrast than the one Democrats are getting in Virginia, home of the year’s other gubernatorial election, where nominee Abigail Spanberger is running as the avatar of fired federal workers.

If Baraka wins and faces Ciattarelli, voters would choose between an Italian American Republican and a Black Democrat who removed Newark’s Christopher Columbus statue as a symbol of “barbarism, enslavement, and oppression.” Whoever wins the nomination, immigration policy, which had not been at the center of the primary, looms as a far larger issue. That’s fine with progressives, and it’s doubly fine with the GOP.