As both sides wait for District Judge Jamel Semper’s decision on whether criminal charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) can proceed, the Department of Justice said today that, at Semper’s directive, the Department of Homeland Security has removed an additional series of social media posts disparaging McIver.
Ever since McIver got in a scuffle with federal immigration officials at the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center in May, DHS and other top officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have repeatedly made public statements and social media posts that implicitly or explicitly criticize McIver, falsely accusing her of “storming” Delaney Hall and citing her as an example of the dangers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents face.
The posts prompted a lengthy back-and-forth between McIver’s legal team and DOJ. McIver filed a motion to prohibit the government from making “extrajudicial statements” about her; DHS, at DOJ’s request, took down the five posts McIver’s filing referenced; and McIver’s attorneys said that wasn’t enough, referencing a number of other posts that remained publicly available, including one that had been posted after the original removals.
During oral arguments last week, Semper said more definitively that the government needs to “redouble their efforts” to delete the anti-McIver posts, noting that some of them run “counter to the facts” of the case and threaten McIver’s right to a fair defense.
In one filing yesterday, DOJ said that it reached out to Homeland Security Investigations immediately after oral arguments, but a week went by with no action: “The Government followed up with HSI-Newark multiple times over the next week for status updates, and was informed that HSI-Newark had still been unsuccessful in having DHS remove the posts,” the filing said.
A second filing later in the day, however, affirmed that DHS had been successful in removing eight posts, which the New Jersey Globe has confirmed are no longer available online. (DOJ said it was unable to compel the removal of another post referenced in McIver’s filing – because the post in question was posted by this reporter, not DHS, and was included by McIver’s attorneys as additional context for the dispute.)
But once again, DOJ’s efforts appear to have been limited to the specific posts McIver has drawn attention to, and DHS has not proactively found and deleted other similar posts. For example, one post from ICE that accuses McIver of having “attacked ICE officers at the facility Saturday during the Congressional delegation’s unannounced ‘oversight’ visit” is still available on X.
