The Justice Department is putting a Congresswoman on trial for witnessing ICE arrest a man.
Inside Delaney Hall, in Newark, a woman I will call Rosa is on the phone with her six-year-old daughter in Honduras. The line is bad. The connection drops. She redials. A recorded voice tells her the number is no longer in service. She does not know if her daughter is safe. She does not know, exactly, where her daughter is. She knows her own wrists ache where the cuffs were. She knows she has been processed into a system that the men who built it call orderly and the women inside it call a long hallway with no windows.
Last Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled, two to one, that two of three federal charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver, a Democrat from Newark, may proceed to trial. The charges accuse her of forcibly assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating and interfering with federal officers on May 9, 2025, when she was at Delaney Hall for an unannounced congressional oversight inspection while a protest against the Trump administration’s deportation operation was raging outside. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka entered the facility. Officers moved to arrest him. Prosecutors say McIver “placed herself in front of Baraka and wrapped her arms around him to prevent his arrest.” She is alleged to have slammed her forearm into one officer, struck a second with both forearms, and grabbed a third. McIver denies all of it. The video of the incident is chaotic. The politics are obvious.
That is the legal story. The other story is Rosa’s.
She is one of the women whose bodies are the reason members of Congress conduct oversight of immigration detention in the first place. Inside Delaney Hall, the federal immigration facility in McIver’s district where families have described the distress of children calling their parents, parents not knowing if their children are still inside, the conditions the Torah at Sinai commands us to love: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus 19:33-34. The Catholic bishops of Mexico and the United States wrote together, in 2003, that “we the bishops of Mexico and the United States seek to awaken our peoples to the mysterious presence of the crucified and risen Lord in the person of the migrant.” Pope Francis at Lampedusa in 2013 named what happens when we fail to see that presence: “the globalization of indifference.”
I think of the forearm McIver is alleged to have slammed into an officer’s chest. I think of the arms she is alleged to have wrapped around Ras Baraka. I think of the wrists of the women inside Delaney Hall measured for processing numbers, the wrists of the children who do not know where their parents are. The forearm and the wrist are the same instrument, in different rooms of the same building, doing different things — one resisting, one being measured — and the nation’s moral arithmetic depends on which room we are willing to look into.
Matthew 25 has the verse every immigration column eventually arrives at. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The judgment scene at the end of Matthew’s gospel makes no distinction between the corporal work of mercy done for the migrant and the work done for Christ. The hands that wrapped around Baraka, the hands that held a congressional member inside an ICE facility with a warrant for her inspection, the hands of every member of Congress who has walked into a detention facility and watched what the men in this administration are doing — those are the hands the verse is about. To criminalize them is to criminalize Matthew 25.
And the criminalization has a name and a record. On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, the Third Circuit gave two counts a runway to trial. The third count — the one the panel itself said “encompasses a range of alleged conduct over a broad time frame, both inside and outside the facility” — is the narrow opening. It is the count McIver’s lawyers will pull on. The 2-1 split tells you the constitutional question divided the court sharply. The Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution, written to protect members of Congress from prosecution for the legislative work oversight is, is now in front of a jury that will be asked to interpret what Congress’s own counsel already told the court is at stake.
But the legal question is downstream of the human one. The question is not whether McIver’s forearm struck an officer on May 9, 2025. The question is what kind of country prosecutes a member of Congress for being in an ICE facility in her own district while mothers like Rosa were processed inside it.
I have to say, here, the things I have to say.
The architecture that built Delaney Hall was not built in 2025. It was not built by one administration. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act — signed by a Democratic president — vastly expanded the grounds for deportation, created expedited removal, restricted judicial review, established the three- and ten-year bars, and authorized Section 287(g), the federal-state enforcement agreements that turned local police into immigration agents. The IIRIRA is the spine of the system that put Rosa in a hallway with no windows. It was bipartisan. The expansion of detention capacity under President Obama grew the immigrant detention population to historic highs. The Trump administration’s family-separation policy in 2018 — more than five thousand children separated from their parents — was the most visible face of a system both parties had built and both parties have continued to maintain. President Biden ended the most visible family separations and kept the rest of the machine running. He kept Title 42 expulsions in place for nearly two years after the public-health rationale had collapsed, expelling asylum seekers without process at the northern and southern borders. He expanded the use of expedited removal. He did not close Delaney Hall.
This is the bipartisan architecture of detention. And in that architecture the Catholic Church in the United States has been, in places, a quiet participant. Catholic Charities and the USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Services have long administered contracts with the federal government to resettle refugees and to provide some services to the detained. Some of those contracts pay the bills of Catholic agencies that, in the same parishes, host families who have been torn apart by the deportation machine the agencies are also paid to administer. The Church has spoken clearly in its social teaching — Strangers No Longer, Fratelli Tutti, the Lampedusa homily — but its institutional voice has not always matched its institutional footprint. Bishops have invoked “law and order” in defense of enforcement. Catholic publications have run op-eds endorsing “secure the border” language that the bishops’ own 2003 pastoral letter explicitly subordinates to the higher duty of welcoming the stranger. The preferential option for the poor, in Catholic Social Teaching, is not a menu item. It is the order of love. When the Church orders the love wrong, the Church is in the room with the rest of us.
The defenders of Rep. McIver are right that what is happening to her is wrong. Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey called the prosecution “Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice to target members of Congress simply for doing their jobs” — “a brazen and unlawful abuse of power, and a direct attack on congressional oversight.” Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat of Massachusetts, said Trump “wants to make an example out of @RepLaMonica” and that he wants Congress members to “fall in line & not conduct oversight of detention centers.” McIver herself said the decision “chills that authority and emboldens the Trump administration to continue persecuting our most vulnerable communities.”
They are right. And they have been late.
Where were these voices when the same administration — a year and a half earlier, in 2018 — separated more than five thousand children from their parents at the southern border? Where were they when the Obama administration deported more than two and a half million people, the largest peacetime deportation operation in the country’s history? Where were they when Title 42 expelled asylum seekers without process at the northern and southern borders, under both Trump and Biden? Where were they when the Supreme Court let the third-country asylum rule stand, when the remain-in-Mexico policy was reinstated, when the expedited-removal expansion continued? I am naming the work I have to name. The defense of McIver is real. It is also a defense that has not always shown up at the door of the family whose six-year-old daughter is not answering the phone.
I do not say this to score a point. I say it because the column cannot be one of those rare moments where the standard suddenly arrives from somewhere new and applies only to the present case. The column is asking whether a member of Congress can be prosecuted for witnessing what ICE does in her district. The honest answer is that the question only became visible because the witness happened to be a member of Congress. The question has been there, every day, for every mother who tried to see her daughter, every father who tried to get his son out of detention, every volunteer who has tried to accompany a family into a federal building and been turned away at the door. We do not ask the body of a Honduran six-year-old whether her mother was a member of Congress when the cuffs went on. We do not ask the body of the woman in the hallway with no windows whether her visitor had a congressional pin on her lapel.
There is a verse from Hebrews that the liturgy puts in front of us more than once a year. “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them.” The writer of Hebrews does not say remember the people you saw on the news. The writer says remember as though you were in the cell. The writer says the visit is not a courtesy. The visit is solidarity. The visit is the only way the body of Christ does not get reduced to a number in a database.
What the Third Circuit did on Wednesday is give the prosecution a runway. The runway leads to a courtroom in Newark where McIver will sit beside her lawyers and the people inside Delaney Hall will continue to sit in the hallways. The two rooms are connected by the building that holds them. They are also connected by the question of which bodies the country has agreed to see and which bodies the country has agreed not to see.
The door of return is open. Not the procedural door — the kind opened by a motion to dismiss or a notice of appeal. The door opened by the body. The door opened when a country that has criminalized the act of witnessing what it does to immigrant families remembers that the families were here first, and that the witness was sent to see them, and that the verse at the end of Matthew’s gospel has been there for two thousand years waiting for the country to read it.
I will not fold, Rep. McIver said. Neither will the mothers I am writing about. Neither will the daughter in Honduras who has not yet gotten the call back. Neither will the priests and deacons and sisters and lay ministers who have walked into Delaney Hall and every facility like it and refused to stop going.
The door is open. Walk through it.