Newark Mayor Ras Baraka Finds Out

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 16, 2025

 

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is running for governor — not that his fellow New Jerseyans are aware of his ambitions. The latest survey of the Garden State’s Democratic primary voters found him huddled up in the rear of a crowded pack of gubernatorial aspirants. Baraka needed to stir up some publicity for himself. At the beginning of May, he thought he had found a cause that would do just that: a federal courthouse’s detention center in which the Trump administration was warehousing illegal migrants eligible for deportation.

 

For several days, activists, progressive lawmakers, and the mayor made spectacles of themselves outside that facility. Baraka “vowed to return each day until city officials were allowed inside to reinspect the facility,” the New York Times reported on May 6. “We want them to follow our rules, follow our laws,” he said after city officials targeted the detention facility’s private owners with citations for building-code violations. But protesting the facility was not enough. Baraka vowed that he would gain access to the premises so he could scan for additional threats to health and fire safety. “They’re keeping us out through the gates and the fences and all this other kind of stuff,” Baraka insisted. “But we’re going to come down here every day, and we’re going to get in one way or the other.”

 

And get in he did. On May 9, Baraka and three Democratic members of Congress gained access to the premises, but the mayor was not allowed to go where his colleagues could go. “Congressmen are different, congresswomen are different,” one Homeland Security Investigations agent told the mayor in an exchange captured on video. The arguments continued until Baraka’s compatriots returned. Administration officials insist that Baraka ignored warnings to remove himself from the facility’s property or face trespassing charges. Baraka and his supporters claim that the mayor had already vacated the facility when he was set upon by federal agents. A scuffle ensued as law enforcement attempted to impose the consequences on Baraka that they had warned him he would face if he failed to heed their demands. Baraka was handcuffed and taken away to a DHS field office.

 

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” the mayor insisted. Federal officials and the prison’s owners disagree, arguing that the mayor had “ignored established processes for requesting entry.” For a time, it looked like everyone got what they wanted from the stunt. The mayor secured the publicity he sought and a dubious claim to martyrdom. The administration and its allies got to make an example of this scenery-chewing display of resistance-style theatrics. Everyone wins.

 

Baraka’s victory turned out to be a pyrrhic one. Following his unexpected encounter with the consequences of his actions, the mayor has dropped his pre-arrest swagger.

 

Baraka complained that federal prosecutors set out to “humiliate and degrade” him by processing him after his arrest — standard fare, including taking fingerprints and mug shots. It was the second time he was processed, likely attributable to what the Associated Press identifies as a judge’s “confusion” over whether Baraka needed to go through the intake process with the U.S. Marshals Service.

 

The mayor insists he was “targeted” personally by federal agents. “I was the only person arrested,” he told reporters. “I was the only person, you know, they put in a cell,” he continued, adding that “the whole process” is designed to put him “through this humiliation for these people.” Indeed, Baraka’s social media feed is glutted with videos that purport to show prison officials inviting him onto the secure premises and evidence that federal officials sparked the “aggression” that resulted in his arrest.

 

The episode is a perfect illustration of a particular sort of activist agitation. What begins with maximalist bravado, self-righteousness, and messianic self-confidence dissolves into the language of grievance and victimhood the very second that the premeditated provocations produce their intended results.

 

With the flip of a switch, Baraka transformed from crusader into casualty — and only to emotionally manipulate the Democratic primary electorate into giving him a sympathy vote. “Baraka’s path to victory involves consolidating his party’s liberal base and leveraging his support in Newark, the state’s largest city, where he was first elected mayor in 2014,” NBC News reported. “And his arrest could help him do just that.”

 

Maybe, but probably not. “Forty-four percent support the recent arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for trespassing at an immigration detention facility in Newark,” a recent Emerson College poll of New Jersey voters found. Just 38 percent disagree. In addition, a near-majority of Garden State voters (46 percent) believe “recent deportations of undocumented immigrants by the Trump administration have made their community more safe.” Just under one-quarter of respondents said the opposite.

 

It’s unclear what Baraka has gotten out of this stunt, save for an arrest record. The rest of us, however, should be grateful for the mayor’s experiment. We now have data indicating that voters are not nearly as friendly toward the mock civil disobedience that jazzes progressive activists as the resistance left seems to believe. If that realization results in fewer episodes like these, the mayor will have done his country a service — albeit unwittingly.