“The reality is they're wearing these masks because they're saying they're under attack, but they're the ones doing the attacking.”
When Newark Mayor Ras Baraka visited a New Jersey ICE facility a week ago to inspect it for violations, he did not expect to go from being a visitor to becoming a detainee, but in Trump’s America, nothing is off the table.
“I was there lawfully. I was invited to every place I've been in. I didn't bust my way in, force my way in, push past people to get in. I was allowed entry,” Baraka tells Mehdi and Zeteo subscribers during a live stream on YouTube and Substack. Despite his arrest, however, Baraka says the job is still not done.
“They won't allow inspectors in; they allowed us in once after the court told them to. We did a kind of beginning inspection and found a couple of violations, not horrific ones, but violations. So, we had to go back.”
The detention facility Baraka was arrested in is privately run as many in the US are, a policy that Baraka is vehemently against. “I don't think that any prison should be for profit anyway. I think we have laws against cruel and unusual punishment. I think we need to have oversight. We need to make sure that people aren't making money off of cheap labor,” he says.
“This is the kind of authoritarianism that we see happening, it's a very slippery slope… We have a court proceeding. The courts have to settle disputes, not ICE.”
Baraka also took questions from subscribers, who wanted to know what they can do as citizens to stand up to fascism, the identities of the ICE agents who arrested him, and much more.
Watch the full discussion above to hear the details of Baraka’s arrest and the call that triggered this episode, and listen as Mehdi questions the governor on the Democrats’ role in paving the way for Trump’s deportation mania.
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