ICE Arrests Democratic Mayor Trying to Check on Detention Facility

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Friday after gaining entry to Delaney Hall, which ICE opened as a detention facility this week against the city’s wishes.

Baraka and other city officials repeatedly tried to visit the facility this week to serve a representative of its operating company, Geo Group, with summonses over code violations, including refusing to grant access to the facility and failing to have an evacuation plan in place. They were denied entry.

On Friday, three Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey—Representatives Rob Menendez, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and LaMonica McIver—were admitted to tour the facility, and brought Baraka with them. After the mayor gained entry past the gate, the representatives tried to include Baraka in conversations. At least one of them was shoved by agents, and Baraka was subsequently arrested.

The acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey and Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Alina Habba, announced the arrest on X, saying that Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon.”

Baraka is currently running in the Democratic primary for governor of New Jersey, and in April, the city of Newark filed a lawsuit against the opening of Delaney Hall, seeking to allow the facility to be inspected. Currently, a federal judge is considering whether to block the opening of the facility, and it’s unclear whether anyone is being held there right now.

Coleman said that she and her colleagues, as well as Baraka, were assaulted by guards.

“What we experienced was the weaponization, is the abuse of power.… They know who we are … they manhandled us and arrested the mayor,” Coleman said, adding that “if they can treat members of Congress like that, imagine how they treat people on the streets.”

It’s the first arrest of a sitting U.S. mayor by the Trump administration over immigration. Last month, the FBI arrested a judge in Milwaukee for allegedly “obstructing an immigration operation.”

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration remains delusionally committed to its abuse of executive power, doubling down on threats to Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk after a federal judge ordered her release on Friday.

In March, Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student on a Fulbright scholarship, was disappeared from the Boston area by masked, plainclothes ICE agents after she wrote an op-ed that called for Tufts to acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Palestine and to divest from Israel. Her release—after six weeks in ICE detention—is a direct rebuke of the Trump administration’s actions, as was the release of Palestinian student activist Mohsen Mahdawi last month.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt was tasked with answering for the Trump administration’s legal loss.

“Does the administration have any response to the news today that a federal judge has ordered the immediate release of Rümeysa Öztürk from detention?” a reporter asked Leavitt on Friday afternoon. “Particularly his comments that the government submitted no evidence other than an op-ed that Öztürk wrote last year?”

Leavitt defaulted to one of her go-to answers: It’s the judges who are crazy.

“I think our overall feeling—we’ve made quite clear lower level judges should not be dictating the foreign policy of the United States, and we absolutely believe that the president and the Department of Homeland Security are well within their legal rights to deport illegal immigrants,” Leavitt replied. “As for visa revocations, the secretary of state has the right to do that as well. It is a privilege not a right to come to this country on a visa.”

This is one of many examples of the Trump administration only considering the courts valid when they agree with the rulings they make. Green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who missed the birth of his child while being detained in Louisiana, and Georgetown student Badar Khan Suri, who is now held in a Texas detention center, are still in custody.

Senate Republicans are defending their Democratic colleague, John Fetterman, after a series of reports called into question his mental fitness to remain in office.

Senators Tom Cotton, Chuck Grassley, and fellow Pennsylvanian Dave McCormick all defended Fetterman in a series of posts on X Thursday, rallying behind the Democrat who has alienated his staff and his constituents by hawkishly supporting Israel in its massacre of Gazans and taking a softer line with President Trump.

Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres, who has also alienated much of the left with his stance on Israel, accused Fetterman’s critics of attacking him for his “unapologetic pro-Israel politics.”

Reports from New York magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer over the past week exposed how Fetterman frequently loses his temper and patience and has become disengaged from his duties as a senator, missing meetings and votes. Fetterman also reportedly avoids colleagues and spends many hours alone in his Washington, D.C., office. New York reported that Fetterman even misses regular medical check-ups, drives erratically, and has diminished spatial awareness.

Despite these worrying reports, Republicans may be trying to rally around Fetterman because they smell blood in the water. Politico reports that a recent internal poll shows Fetterman losing support from Democratic voters in his own home area of Pittsburgh. While Fetterman has defended Trump in the past few months, he still is a relatively reliable Democratic vote in the Senate, and the GOP could see an opportunity to replace him in 2028 with one of their own.

Republicans could also be trying to convince Fetterman not to resign from the Senate. The New York profile mentioned tension between Fetterman and his wife, Gisele, a formerly undocumented immigrant from Brazil, over his turn toward Trump and his vehement support for Israel—and it’s conceivable that Fetterman chooses to resign, citing health or family reasons.

A replacement senator appointed by Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro would result in a more solid Democratic vote and hurt Republican chances to retake the Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2028. Whatever the reason for the sudden show of support, Republicans probably have an ulterior motive.

The White House doesn’t want you looking too closely at Donald Trump’s business deals in the Middle East.

On Wednesday, the president said that he was considering renaming the Persian Gulf (which is thousands of miles away from U.S. shores) the “Arabian Gulf,” just days after his family announced billions of dollars in forthcoming real estate deals in the region. (As a side note, Iran has warned of “wrath” for Trump’s geopolitical meddling.)

But on Friday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to brush that under the rug, scolding the press for questioning whether Trump had something personal to gain out of the pitch or his upcoming trip to the Middle East. Instead, she implored Americans to believe that Trump—a renowned crook and court-determined fraudster—is completely selfless in his pursuit of power.

“I think it’s frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit,” Leavitt said. “He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service, not just once but twice.”

“The American public reelected him back to this White House because they trust he acts in the best interests of this country and putting the American public first,” Leavitt continued. “This is a president who has actually lost money for being president.”

But that’s a lie. The Trump family has made plenty of money thanks to Trump’s return to power. Scott Galloway, an NYU Business School professor and podcaster, told MSNBC Thursday that within the first three months of Trump’s second term, his family had become “$3 billion wealthier.” Forbes estimated in March that, in the preceding 12 months, Trump had effectively doubled his fortune, bringing it from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion.

“So that’s a billion dollars a month,” Galloway said, describing the current administration as a “kleptocracy that would make Putin blush.”

The Trump family’s Middle East real estate plans include a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar (as part of a $5.5 billion development project), a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai, and a $2 billion cryptocurrency investment by an Abu Dhabi firm in one of Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, the World Liberty Financial Coin.

The family also revealed in December that they would be expanding their presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing Trump Tower Jeddah. The price tag for the building has not been made public, but one of the developers on the project, Dar Global, compared it to another $530 million Trump Tower in the city, reported Reuters.

The Trumps have held deep financial ties to the region for years. After Trump’s first term, Saudi Arabia invested $2 billion in a firm belonging to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

Trump is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia next week, where it’s anticipated that he’ll make the “Arabian Gulf” rumor official, according to two officials who spoke with the Associated Press.

As a reminder, it’s actually unconstitutional for presidents to profit from or receive compensation from foreign governments. The White House has contested that the deals are not a conflict of interest since the president’s assets are managed by his eldest sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. But Trump’s pockets will undoubtedly be lined by the deal—even if he has to wait a handful of years before he’s out of office to see the cashflow. In the meantime, he’ll receive myriad personal benefits from his relationships in the Middle East for arranging the deal.

A two-minute-long takedown of his trade policies on MSNBC sent the president into a rage on Friday.

“Donald Trump is backed into a corner,” said MSNBC business host Stephanie Ruhle. “His grand plans of ‘tariffs, tariffs, tariffs,’ aren’t working. You’re seeing day in and day out more business leaders—whether it’s Warren Buffett, or Jamie Dimon, or Ken Griffin—on big global stages saying, ‘This is going to crush us economically.’ And then you’ve got congressmen, senators from every state, saying to this White House, ‘Our small businesses are strangling, are dying here.’ I’m not saying Donald Trump has changed what he thinks in his heart, but he’s backed into a corner and he needs to get off this crazy tariff train, and he knows it.”

“So what did we see with England.… You’ve got a P.M. there who is a close ally of Donald Trump, and they’re saying, ‘Let’s put on a show, let’s create a theater, and let’s say we’ve got a deal.’ Yes, there aren’t any details to it, there is still a 10 percent tariff, which is why Jay Powell is not cutting rates, cuz 10 percent is more than triple what it was, so it’s still going to be painful, especially for small business,” Ruhle continued. “But what’s most important is the language around China. A week ago, China was like, ‘We’re not showing up unless you lower the tariffs,’ and [they] didn’t. Forty-eight hours ago Donald Trump said, ‘We’re not gonna lower the tariffs.’ Yesterday he said, ‘Yeah, maybe.’ And today things are softening even more.… Donald Trump is looking for some sort of exit here.”

“Look at the cargo ships coming into Seattle, the Port of Los Angeles; pick the port. We’re getting fewer and fewer ships with less and less cargo. And unless he turns this around, three weeks from now you walk into a store and we’re going to have a Covid-like supply chain crisis, and Trump is looking for an exit.”

Ruhle brilliantly exposed the president’s waffling on tariffs, introducing them with strongman language and massive guarantees while the reality is far more uncompelling. He introduced a trade deal with the U.K. on Thursday that wasn’t even finished. By Friday, he walked back his tariffs on China before even negotiating, announcing a steep 65 percent drop in tariffs is on the table (making it a still outrageous rate of 80 percent tariffs on the country).

Ruhle’s analysis clearly bothered the president, who took to Truth Social to express his disgust.

“I just watched an exhausted, highly neurotic Stephanie Ruhle spew LIES about Tariffs, as do many others, in order not to give me the Victory that they all see coming. Few people know Stephanie Ruhle, but I do, and she doesn’t have what it takes,” he wrote, personally attacking the MSNBC host. “Our Deal with the United Kingdom yesterday was AMAZING for both Countries and, in addition to everything else, British Airways just ordered $10 Billion Dollars worth of new Boeing planes. We’re going to make a fortune with Tariffs, only smart people understand that, and Stephanie was never known as a ‘High IQ’ person. MSDNC has become the Voice of the Democrat Party, and they should be treated as a Political Advocate with all of the Taxes and Penalties therefrom. Their Ratings are terrible, but Brian Roberts and his crew should be forced to TELL THE TRUTH. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Trump chooses not to engage with any of Ruhle’s arguments, instead choosing to focus on her demeanor and her workplace.