Former GOP Lawmakers Cry Foul About Felony Assault Charges Against Democrat Politician

Former GOP Lawmakers Cry Foul About Felony Assault Charges Against Democrat Politician

Jeff Charles  

     

AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis

Democrats pounced after the Justice Department announced felony charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), claiming that it was motivated by politics. But, apparently, it is not only Democrats who are upset about the charges.

Rep. McIver is facing two counts of assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers during a May 9 fracas outside the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. Protesters demonstrating against the Trump administration’s immigration policies clashed with police officers outside the building.

The criminal complaint alleges that the lawmaker was part of a human shield trying to prevent the authorities from getting to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was also part of the protest. McIver allegedly “slammed her forearm” into one of the officers, according to the complaint, which also claims she “reached out and tried to restrain” the officer by “forcibly grabbing him.”

In a statement provided to USA Today, 11 former GOP members of Congress condemned the charges against McIver.

"The constitutional duties of Members of Congress include not only passing legislation but also oversight of executive branch implementation of those laws. That is an essential dimension of American checks and balances," the group said in a joint statement exclusively provided to USA TODAY. "Rep. Mclver was present at the ICE facility as part of her official congressional duties. We believe this extreme response to the events of that day is unwarranted.”

Former Rep.Claudine Schneider (R-RI) said, “This behavior by the Trump administration is outrageous” and that “Every member of Congress, both past and present, should be speaking up.”

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The statement further claimed the Trump administration is using the DOJ to silence them.

Each charge against McIver carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a potential fine.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) recently filed a motion to expel McIver over her conduct.

Video footage that circulated on social media shortly after the confrontation appears to show McIver pushing an officer with her forearms during the chaos. However, from where I sit, it did not seem that her intention was to harm the officer. If this were to happen to me, I wouldn’t even bother pressing charges.

However, a popular saying comes to mind when considering this situation: Turnabout is fair play.

If the average citizen were to do something like this, we would almost certainly face charges. This is especially true if the individual committed a similar act while wearing a MAGA hat under the Biden administration.

Democrats can’t cry foul when they supported the incarceration and solitary confinement of people who simply strolled around the US Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Former President Joe Biden’s Justice Department had absolutely no qualms with throwing people into cages for nonviolent behavior.

This is one of several reasons why Democrats should never have weaponized the government against people for purely political purposes. They had to know that, at some point, Republicans would control the executive branch. The White House is simply playing by the rules that Democrats established. Moreover, one could more easily make the case that McIver did commit assault — a charge that did not apply to the J6ers.

Is this the way things should be? Of course not. But Democrats started this nonsense. They are only complaining because it is happening to one of their own.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/jeff-charles/2025/05/27/former-gop-lawmakers-claim-charges-against-lamonica-mciver-are-extreme-n2657676?utm_source=thdailypmvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

 

Crime Rates of Illegal Migrants Underreported

Despite media claims, illegal immigrants commit crimes at disproportionately high rates—yet nearly 42% of voters now believe the opposite.

By John R. Lott, Jr.

Democrats actively oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, despite the administration’s focus on those with criminal histories.

To support their opposition, Democrats frequently claim, almost as an article of faith, that illegal immigrants are less prone to commit crime. “The crime rate among immigrants is far lower than the crime rate among native-born Americans,” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler asserted confidently. “So the whole issue is wrong.”

“Immigrants commit crimes in this country at a rate lower than natural-born citizens,” added Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. “So, if you want a safe town or a safe neighborhood, you are better off if you have immigrants.”
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Speaking on the Senate floor last year, Murphy added, “Whether you choose to want to believe the facts or not, that is not my decision, it’s your decision, but…but it is the truth.”

This tenet is incessantly parroted by the legacy news media. Sample headline, this one from ABC News: “No, migrants are not driving a surge in violent crime as Trump claims.” ABC asserted that crime in this country is declining despite an influx of illegal immigrants.

This barrage has achieved its intended goal: A McLaughlin & Associates survey commissioned by the Crime Prevention Research Center on April 29, 2025, reveals that 41.6% of voters believe illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens, compared to 33.3% who think otherwise.

Like most issues, U.S. public opinion on this question has a demographic and partisan component. Only men, Republicans, conservatives, whites, and those aged 41 to 55 believe illegal immigrants commit more crimes. The majority of young voters (18-29), Democrats, liberals, and African Americans most strongly assert that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes.Report Ad

But is this “the truth”? Are these “the facts”?

The data suggests that the answer is pretty clearly “no.”

These claims usually conflate legal and illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants tend to follow the law, but illegal immigrants are a different story.

As to the claim that crime is falling despite a flood of illegals, it depends on whether one looks at just crimes reported to police (the FBI data) or total crime as measured by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Total crime rose markedly in 2021, 2022, and 2023 (the last year it was available). This surge coincided with a massive flood of illegals. The increases shown for total crime during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any other three-year period, more than doubling the previous record.Report Ad

One big problem is that the government databases are a mess in identifying illegal aliens. You can see this in terms of errors in the NICS background checks that are supposed to stop non-citizens with criminal records from buying guns.

There is more direct data linking illegals to crime. Just last year, the Biden administration admitted that 9% of the so-called “non-detained” illegals who were released into the U.S. had criminal backgrounds (662,566 out of 7.4 million released). The problem is that these were overwhelmingly those who had voluntarily turned themselves in at the border, presumably the ones we should be least concerned about. It doesn’t count the 2 million “gotaways” we detected crossing the border but failed to apprehend during the Biden administration, nor the unknown millions we never saw coming across the borders. All this also depends on us believing that the Biden administration didn’t undercount these criminal backgrounds. And many countries, such as Venezuela, won’t provide information on the criminal backgrounds of their citizens.

Last December, a similar estimate for New York City indicated that about 7% of the illegals living there were criminals.

A prior Maricopa County Attorney’s Office study revealed that illegal immigrants committed 21.8% of felonies sentenced in Maricopa County Superior Court, over twice their proportion of Arizona’s population. Mexican nationals alone accounted for 13% of inmates in the state prison system.Report Ad

Earlier work that the Crime Prevention Research Center did for the Arizona County Prosecutor’s Association also found that illegals made up a disproportionate share of the Arizona prison population and that legal immigrants were more law-abiding than the general population. Illegal immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, are more likely to be classified as dangerous, and are 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens.

Critics like the Washington Post cite academic studies asserting illegal immigrants are relatively law-abiding. There are numerous problems with these studies. None of them account for changes in police, arrest, or conviction rates, or imprisonment in explaining crime rates. They look at states like California but ignore the impact of cutting crime rates from laws such as California’s 1994 three-strikes law during the period studied.

They ignore a key issue: Criminals often target those similar to themselves. Illegal immigrants, therefore, are more likely to commit crimes against other illegal immigrants. These crimes often go unreported—for fear of deportation—and as the local population of illegal immigrants grows, underreporting almost certainly increases. While these studies acknowledge that illegal immigrants who are victims hesitate to report crimes, they neglect to adjust their empirical analyses for this factor, particularly when relying on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data. Notably, the FBI data captures only about 40% of all violent crimes and 30% of all property crimes reported in the National Crime Victimization Survey.

The media’s relentless narrative that illegal immigrants don’t commit crimes has shaped Americans’ perceptions. And these numbers, as bad as they are, likely undercount the number of criminal illegals. Even if some believe undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates, ignoring ICE detainers for convicted undocumented immigrants to prevent their deportation raises doubts about whether they really care about the criminal rate of these illegal immigrants.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/25/crime-rates-of-illegal-migrants-underreported/

Courts are infected with ‘injunctivitis’ — and tempting Trump’s defiance

Courts are infected with ‘injunctivitis’ — and tempting Trump’s defiance

By 

Glenn H. Reynolds

President Trump speaks during the 157th National Memorial Day Observance at Arlington National Cemetery on May 26, 2025.AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Federal judges are working overtime to defy President Trump. 

How much thought have they given to what happens if he defies them in turn?

So far, Trump has been obeying the court orders coming from mostly leftist federal district judges, even when those orders are deeply questionable.  

Law professor Jonathan Turley calls it “injunctivitis,” while Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule says that district courts’ nationwide restraining orders “are basically an automatic judicial veto on all new policy.”

“Whatever form of government that is, let’s please not call it ‘democracy,’ ” Vermeule notes.

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A new standing order in Maryland automatically blocks the deportation of any illegal alien whenever their lawyer files a petition — before a judge even reviews it. 

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District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts blocked Trump’s funding ban on Harvard almost the moment papers were filed. “Did she even read it, or was the rubber stamp already loaded?” one observer asked.

Clearly, a significant portion of the federal judiciary is hostile to Trump’s policies and is happy to thwart them in any way it can. 

Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho last week denounced his colleagues for acting like short-order cooks for the left. 

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“We should admit that this is special treatment being afforded to certain favored litigants . . . and we should stop pretending that Lady Justice is blindfolded,” Ho wrote.

It all raises a question: What if Trump simply ignores these rulings?

He wouldn’t be the first president to do so.

In the famous case of Marbury vs. Madison, President Thomas Jefferson announced in advance that he wouldn’t comply with a Supreme Court decision favoring Marbury — leading to some fancy legal footwork by Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote an opinion that carefully avoided forcing Jefferson’s hand. 

President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the Cherokee tribe in Worcester vs. Georgia, reportedly remarking “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

Abraham Lincoln essentially disregarded the court’s Dred Scott ruling, arguing that an unelected body couldn’t legitimately make policy for an entire nation based on a single case. 

As he observed in his first inaugural address, “if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”

One can only imagine what Honest Abe would have said about district court judges. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, like Jefferson before him, announced in advance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in a 1942 case involving Nazi saboteurs that he would not obey an order in their favor.

But in recent decades, presidential defiance of a Supreme Court opinion has become almost unthinkable. 

The high court’s prestige has been far greater than it was earlier in US history, and no president has enjoyed the political whip hand held by FDR. 

The press, too, has generally been very supportive of the Supreme Court — especially when Republicans hold the presidency.

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But what about now? 

The judiciary’s prestige has been badly damaged, in part because of Democrats’ attacks after rulings on abortion, affirmative action and gun control went against their preferences.

And the power of the press has much declined: Despite the legacy media’s unrelenting anti-Trump negativity, the number of Americans who think the country is “on the right track” is at a near-record high, according to RealClearPolitics. 

If the media can’t move that needle, how much can it hurt Trump over a disputed legal question — especially when large majorities of the public support the president on spending cuts and deportations, the issues drawing the fiercest judicial opposition?

In the past, defying the courts would have looked like an abandonment of the rule of law. But given the courts’ behavior, that’s not the argument it used to be.

Leftists have spent the past several decades attacking and breaking down institutions. Now that they need the public to venerate those institutions, they don’t have much to work with.

Will the Supreme Court impose some order on the lower courts — or will we find out how far a president can go in ignoring the judiciary? 

And if it’s the latter, is that so bad?

The Framers set up a system of separated branches in which, as Lincoln noted, power and responsibility were compartmentalized.

The judiciary’s claim to be the final authority on all constitutional questions is comparatively new, and poorly founded. As Vermeule says, such a system isn’t anything like democracy — and is nothing like what the Framers envisioned.

Previously, the balance worked because the judiciary had self-control and understood the dangers of overreach.

Now, like so many of our institutions, it’s been addled and corrupted by Trump-hatred — and one way or another, a corrective is in order.

https://nypost.com/2025/05/26/opinion/courts-infected-by-injunctivitis-tempt-trumps-defiance/