Pregnant, Indicted, and Not Backing Down: McIver Returns to Delaney Hall (EXCLUSIVE)
The Trump administration charged her with a felony for showing up. She showed up again to fight for migrant rights and close an infamous for-profit detention center in New Jersey.
Martín Soto was walking home after buying diapers for his four-year-old when ICE picked him up. He is married to a pregnant U.S. citizen. A court had authorized his release. None of it mattered. He ended up in Delaney Hall — and when he started organizing a hunger strike inside, federal agents dragged him into a white van while he banged on the window and shouted. His family still doesn’t know where he is.
Jean Wilson Brutus was Haitian. He arrived at Delaney Hall and was dead within 24 hours. ICE waited a week to say anything publicly.
A pregnant woman currently inside the facility is in excruciating pain. She has no access to an OB-GYN.
Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., has been documenting conditions like these since last May. She spoke to Migrant Insider this week as a coordinated hunger and labor strike by roughly 300 detainees enters its second week — and as the Trump administration pursues felony charges against her for showing up.
“The facility is unfit to be open,” McIver said, “and what we’re seeing play out today is over a year-long stretch of this treatment of over 800 people who are detained there.”
What’s Happening Inside
Delaney Hall is a former county facility in Newark, reopened in 2025 under a contract between ICE and GEO Group — one of the country’s largest private prison operators — with roughly 1,000 beds. From the day ICE began housing detainees there, elected officials and immigrant advocates have been raising alarms. GEO and ICE have swatted those alarms away, describing critics as “sanctuary city and open borders politicians” running a “politicized campaign.”
What the detainees describe in letters bearing nearly 300 signatures is something else entirely: overcrowding, filthy bathrooms, abusive guards, worms and rotten food, threats of deportation wielded as leverage to pressure people into so-called self-deportation.
McIver has sat across from more than 100 detainees inside — face to face, table to table. Seniors in high school with valid Temporary Protected Status protections. People on approved student or work visas. Individuals detained at immigration court while waiting for their hearings.
“Food that they’re receiving, when they receive it, is spoiled,” she told Migrant Insider. “They’re also not getting access to medical care, so we have a ton of detainees there who have chronic diseases who do not have access to their medicine.”
On May 22, detainees launched a coordinated hunger and labor strike, refusing both meals and facility work assignments in protest of conditions and due process violations. Their demand, relayed through advocates and signed letters, is not cleaner bathrooms or better food. It is freedom.
DHS has publicly stated there is no hunger strike occurring at Delaney Hall.
The Men They Targeted
When detainees began organizing, Delaney Hall and federal authorities responded — not with food or medicine, but with transfers.
Martín Soto became one of the most visible faces of the strike. After he began organizing inside, advocates and family say he was subjected to prolonged interrogations and threats before being abruptly removed from the facility. Protesters outside — who had been warned a white van was coming for him — blocked it. Witnesses say they saw Soto dragged into the vehicle while he shouted and struck the window from the inside. As of this writing, his family does not know where he was taken.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., told local media that at least 13 detainees were transferred out of Delaney Hall shortly after the strike began — retaliation, he said, for their participation. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., who visited the facility, reported that detainees who speak out about conditions or join the hunger strike are “being transferred and having their hearings delayed because they’re speaking about how horribly this facility treats them,” and that four detainees had been hospitalized.
The detainee letters describe the pattern in plain terms: complain, organize, or refuse food, and you risk transfer to a more remote jail, loss of visitation, or other punishments. People who speak to congressional delegations are warned they could lose visitation or have their hearings pushed back.
McIver was aware of the retaliation dynamic — and deliberately refused to name who organized the strike when asked.
“I don’t want to put any detainees on any type of public forum to have them be retaliated against,” she said. “That’s really a dangerous situation for them.”
Then there is Jean Wilson Brutus, whose name should not be forgotten. The Haitian national arrived at Delaney Hall in December 2025 and was dead within 24 hours. ICE did not acknowledge his death publicly for a week. The hunger strikers cite his case explicitly in their demands for the release of medically vulnerable detainees — a reminder, they say, of what “adequate care” looks like at this facility.
The Protesters in the Street
Outside the gates, the response has grown louder by the day.
Family members, immigrant rights organizations, and community members have organized daily protests, overnight vigils, and direct action — at times forming human chains and blocking vans in attempts to stop the transfer of hunger strike organizers. Federal agents have responded with tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls, and baton charges into crowds. Multiple people have been arrested and injured.
Among the protesters: a girl no older than 10, holding a megaphone outside Delaney Hall, demanding her father’s release.
McIver’s message to those in the street is direct — and comes from someone who knows what it means to have ICE come for you when you show up.
“My number one message to protesters is, one, to stay safe and be peaceful,” she said. “ICE, you know, they are so rogue and so dangerous that they need no reason to kill people and hurt them.”
She invoked Minnesota, where ICE operations turned fatal. “We don’t want to agitate the situation where it has people dying in the street like we saw in Minnesota.”
The Congresswoman Under Indictment
McIver has been to Delaney Hall before. That’s the problem, as far as the Trump administration is concerned.
On May 9, 2025, she joined fellow New Jersey Democrats Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez for an unannounced oversight visit. Congressional appropriations law explicitly bars DHS from blocking such visits. ICE and facility staff stalled their access anyway. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka attempted to join the delegation in his own city — and was arrested.
In the chaos, Acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba announced McIver was being charged under 18 U.S.C. § 111(a)(1) — assaulting, resisting, impeding, and interfering with federal officers. If convicted on all counts, she faces up to roughly 17 years in prison. She has pleaded not guilty. She is currently pregnant with her second child.
Her legal team argues everything she did was protected under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause — that demanding access, confronting ICE, and advocating for detainees is exactly what congressional oversight looks like. In November 2025, U.S. District Judge Jamel Semper denied her motion to dismiss all charges, allowing at least two counts to proceed to trial.
On the one-year anniversary of the Delaney Hall confrontation, McIver introduced the “No Delay for Immigration Oversight Act” with Watson Coleman and Menendez — legislation that would permanently codify Congress’s right to immediate, unimpeded access to ICE detention facilities and require the termination of federal contracts with any private operator that blocks a visit.
‘Cut the Shit Out’
Asked what she would say sitting across from DHS Secretary Mullen, McIver didn’t reach for diplomatic language.
“I would tell him that the things that are happening there are wrong, are wrong, and, you know, they need to cut, cut the shit out,” she said. “The facility needs to close. I would reiterate to him about the abuses that are taking place in this facility, and the way that they are responding, including him, who hasn’t even been on the job for more than 100 days, is irresponsible, it’s ineffective, it’s unprofessional.”
She drew a direct line from former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — famously a vessel for Stephen Miller’s agenda — to the current secretary.
“He was picked because he was the great guy that would take Trump’s orders at every beck and call,” McIver said. “Each secretary, whether it’s Noem or him at this point, they are enacting the president’s agenda. That’s all that they’re doing.”
McIver has not softened her position over the past year. If anything, the hunger strike and the people in the street outside Delaney Hall have confirmed what she has been saying since May 2025.
“I have said from the beginning last May that this facility should not be operating. It should be closed, it should not be open,” she said. “And honestly, it should be abolished. Nothing has changed from my tone of last May.”
Martín Soto is somewhere in the federal detention system, location unknown. Jean Wilson Brutus is dead. The pregnant woman on the inside is still waiting for a doctor.
Migrant Insider runs on support by readers like you. To get all the posts from the most-independent news outlet in Washington, D.C., in your inbox, click below:
A court ordered Martín Soto released. ICE took him anyway. His family doesn’t know where he is. A man died inside within 24 hours. DHS says there’s no hunger strike. 300 detainees signed their names to say otherwise. Someone is lying.
It's a catastrophe, they, ICE have to be stopped as they are not in the public interest and well-being, trump went over the top with his psychosis and rage, attempting to ruin the public safety to destroy safe guardrails for democracy, into a banana republic. He has to be impeached, and people will have to wait to vote him out. Keep taking him to court, whoever is with him has to be destroyed in the meantime, we can do it, I say!