Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Democrat, said he believes federal prosecutors tried to humiliate him by forcing him to give fingerprints and take a second mugshot during his May 15 processing. His arrest and trespassing charges stemmed from his attendance at a press conference outside an immigration detention center alongside members of Congress.
According to The Guardian, Baraka made those claims as part of a procedural hearing in magistrate judge André Espinosa’s courtroom that covered scheduling for discovery in the case which lasted approximately 15 minutes.
There was some apparent confusion over whether Baraka had already been fingerprinted and processed. After the judge closed the proceedings, he stated that Baraka still needed to be processed by the U.S. Marshals Service—a directive that puzzled Baraka, who responded that he had already completed processing following his arrest.
Judge Espinosa said that “agents” processed Baraka, but not the marshals, which Baraka accepted by saying “Let’s go,” and motioning that he would go willingly with the marshals.
Later, after the hearing, Baraka delivered an explanation to his supporters outside the building as to why it took him so long to come out of the building.
“They’re trying their best to humiliate and degrade me as much as they possibly can,” the mayor said. “I feel like what we did was completely correct. We did not violate any laws. We stood up for the constitution of this country, the constitution of the state of New Jersey.”
According to Rahul Agarwal, one of Baraka’s attorneys, the defense will argue to dismiss the charges because it is a “selective prosecution” and Baraka was arrested by federal agents on private property, before adding that the mayor was the only one arrested during the protest.
For context, Baraka has been outspoken against Donald Trump’s immigration policy and the opening of an ICE detention facility in Newark. Given those facts, many expressed their views that the arrest and subsequent charges against Baraka are forms of political retribution for his principled stances.
In a conversation with The Nation, Baraka positioned his actions not as a protest, but merely the attendance of a press conference while expressing his disdain for The GEO Group
The GEO Group is a private prison company that owns Delaney Hall, the site where Baraka was arrested, and has a 15-year, $60 million a year contract with ICE, the subject of a legal dispute in New Jersey related to ICE’s outsourcing of its practice of mass detention to private prison groups like GEO.
“We were not protesting,” Baraka told the outlet. “I came down there to attend a press conference. The dispute is with GEO. It always has been with GEO. I do not think people are seeing what’s happening here clearly enough. We are moving fast into authoritarianism.”
The mayor continued, “We can’t acquiesce to that. I think this is an opportunity for states to become labs of democracy to try everything that we have not tried before. We need to figure out a way to build a democracy outside these folks and their push to dismember democracy in this country.”
Baraka concluded, “The reality is we’ve been fighting for a long time to, as Dr. King said, to make America live up to what is written on paper. That’s really what this is about. And there are people who want to renege on that promise because it doesn’t benefit them individually. There are many of us in this country who disagree with that, who believe that everybody who resides here, who comes here, should have an opportunity to participate in the greatest idea in the history of the world.”
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