Representative La Monica McGovern pleaded not guilty to federal charges of impeding ICE agents, facing up to 17 years in prison under Title 18 U.S. Code Section 111A1 for the Delancey Center incident. While she blames DHS escalation and contrasts her stance with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka's remorse, allies like AOC deflect responsibility onto officials such as Tom Homan. The discussion highlights a critical state versus federal jurisdiction conflict, suggesting McGovern's gamble against supreme court-backed deportation powers risks severe incarceration for alleged interference. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Plea Not Guilty in New Jersey00:07:37
Breaking in real time because you know, I told you I speak Italian, which is why I love saying this woman's name La Monica, La Monica MacGyver.
She is pleading not guilty.
Don't forget, remember, she was indicted.
She was indicted just the other day by Alina Habba, by the grand jury, however.
She is now coming forward and saying she was not guilty in that situation we saw out in New Jersey.
Yes.
The situation in New Jersey, you know what I'm talking about.
La Monica, La Monica with the big red shirt.
One of you guys was like, Oh, yeah, the red coats are coming.
That cracked me up.
It really, really did.
Let me see if I can find this for you because La Monica really did not want anyone in her way.
Now, did she?
Nope.
No, no, no, Yeah.
It's worth seeing, right?
So, LaMonica MacGyver just out moments ago pleading not guilty, not guilty to Alina Hava's charges that suggested she was, and she was interfering with law enforcement.
Here is her tweet that she put out.
She just left the courthouse, ladies and gentlemen.
I just left court and pleaded not guilty because I am not guilty.
We will fight this.
Trump's administration won't intimidate me or stop me from doing my job.
To all those who stand up to this administration, do not back down.
The facts are on our side.
I look forward to our next time in court.
Wow, La Monica.
So, you know, she actually faces up to 17 years in prison for the impediment of law enforcement, and not just the impediment of law enforcement, but the actual obstruction and assault of law enforcement.
So she's being accused, guys, of assaulting a law enforcement officer of those ICE agents that she was insulting.
And so That's kind of bad.
And again, it comes with 17 years.
Now, she's blaming ICE.
Don't forget, she was on a network recently, CNN, saying that this is ICE's fault, not hers.
No blame here for her, even though you saw the videotape.
And according to the Department of Homeland Security, they have more where that came from and more that suggests she actually did get rather physical there with those ICE officers.
But here she is saying not her fault.
I think the charges are absurd.
It's ridiculous.
Um, I was there to do my job along with my other colleagues.
We have done this before.
This is our obligation to do.
It's in our job description, uh, to have oversight over a facility.
And the entire situation was escalated by ICE.
Uh, they caused the confrontation.
Um, Homeland came and, you know, caused this chaos that we see.
It was a very tense situation, but it could have been, you know, easily not, it could have easily not happened.
Yeah, it could have easily not happened if you had actually just decided to call up and make an appointment, right?
I mean, that's what normally would be done, but for whatever reason, there were some grandstanding efforts going on there in New Jersey to prove that you guys, you're not gonna fall for Trump no matter what.
So now, consequently, she is being charged with violating.
Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 111A1.
Alina is charging her 111A1 for assaulting, impeding, and interfering with law enforcement.
This is a big deal.
As I said, it carries 17 years in prison.
And, you know, anytime you look at this video, I'm not really sure how she's going to explain this away, other than she's just frustrated, right?
Because she figures that somehow she should have been able to bust in on the place.
And Alina Haba.
And the people that were running the detention center there were saying, no, no, no.
You actually have to follow some kind of decorum.
Here she is saying earlier that she was going, intending to plead not guilty, as she just did today with Jen Psaki on her MSNBC show.
Well, Haba said you had declined every opportunity to come to a resolution.
You said they wanted you to admit to something you didn't do.
What did they want you to admit to?
I mean, there was a lot.
We've had a week of back and forth with them.
And I will say that I did not waver.
There to do my job, and she wanted me to admit to doing things, all of these different lists of things that she said that I did.
Like what?
I mean, from things of impeding, you know, there were some other things in there that she put in there, but I can't remember exactly what it was, but she wanted me to admit to these things, sign an agreement to them, and I'm not doing that, you know, because it's not true.
I mean, there was a lot of back and forth and just tenseness, you know, all week from her and from her office.
And so at the end of the day, once again, showed up to do my job, and I don't need to apologize for doing that.
That is what the people of New Jersey expect me to do, the 744,000, almost close to 800,000 people I represent.
And why should we apologize about doing our job when ICE and Homeland Security created that environment and that atmosphere that we saw out there that day?
Hmm.
I would just say this is unbelievable.
Again, I want to make sure we have the right lower thirds for you on the screen.
Breaking right now, ladies and gentlemen, the representative from New Jersey, Representative La Monica.
La Monica MacGyver has pleaded, is pleading not guilty, not guilty to charges that she was interfering with law enforcement that day, maybe about six weeks ago, there in New Jersey at the Delancey Center, there in New Jersey, where in Newark, New Jersey, where remember the mayor of Newark,
New Jersey was arrested at that time.
Because he was in the eyes of law enforcement interfering and impeding with law enforcement, trying to do their job, blocking the entrance there.
And Monica took it a step further.
He actually went and sat down with Alina Haba.
She said he actually expressed some remorse for what was going on.
And as a result, he was not charged.
This one, on the other hand, La Manica decided that she was going to fight this.
Again, she's a new congresswoman.
So, a freshman congresswoman.
She's junior.
She is looking for her 20 minutes of fame.
And perhaps she's thinking this is what's going to get it.
But I would say she's making a gamble here because I'm not saying she's going to get 17 years, but she might get something.
She might get six months.
She might get something.
I mean, this DOJ is not messing around.
AOC has already come out with her threats saying, Don't you go near my people.
She actually did this, though, when the Newark, New Jersey mayor was arrested.
She has not, interestingly, come to La Monica's defense.
Constitution Kicks In00:05:51
Now, I wonder why.
I wonder why.
We'll see if she does anything more.
But, you know, I think she got some bad advice from AOC.
Maybe AOC has got some sharp elbows saying, La Monica, get out of my way.
I mean, that's hard to do because La Monica.
You know, she's got more than sharp elbows going around, right?
You know, she can just stampede her way through there.
I mean, so AOC was already saying, don't go near my people.
Don't you dare.
What's she going to do now?
Because, hey, this is coming to a head.
The indictment has come forward.
La Monica's saying she's not guilty.
I think we all saw the tape, and there's more where that came from.
Here's AOC.
If anyone's breaking the law in this situation, it's not members of Congress, it's the Department of Homeland Security.
It's people like Tom Homan and Secretary Christy None.
You lay a finger on them, we are going to have a problem.
Well, we may have a problem then.
What can I say?
We may have a problem because, again, the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration and they get this via the Constitution.
They have a supremacy clause in the Constitution that basically makes it quite evident that they control that.
They also have a naturalization clause in the Constitution.
There's also the Commerce clause in the Constitution.
And we've talked about this before.
Here I am in Live Free or Die, New Hampshire.
We are a very small state here.
And in Live Free or Die, New Hampshire, where I was born and raised, I'm actually at the house that I came home to as a baby.
Can you imagine?
My parents have had this that long and they didn't even expect me.
I came a little early, surprisingly.
So the house wasn't even done.
It's been renovated a lot since then.
This is the piano.
The piano behind me is actually a new one.
I grew up playing something else.
You guys have asked me before, but I digress.
The point being, even in little, little New Hampshire, live free or die New Hampshire, you know what?
We balance the budget every single year.
You know what else they do?
They have no sales tax, they have no income tax.
Imagine that.
And somehow we have really good schools and everything functions really well.
And so even in a state like this, you have a lot of Democrats that do not want higher taxes, right?
So that's kind of the live free or die thing, like, is kind of like bred into you, I would say.
Certainly was to me as a kid.
And so I believe in small government and want government to be kept on a short lease.
But when it comes to immigration, you're talking about the borders.
I mean, that is why the federal government has the power it has.
So, if there's one power the federal government has, I will reiterate it is the power to control who is in this country.
And so, these lawmakers that don't believe that that exists for the federal government, well, they're going to have a rude awakening, okay?
And La Monica may be one of the first casualties in all of this.
Because she's standing up in the face of the federal government.
She thinks that she can go and push her weight.
Well, Papa said you had.
I think the charges are absurd.
You know, it's ridiculous.
I was there to do that.
Forgive me.
I thought we had the actual video of her pushing her weight around, but that was incorrect.
But you know what I mean.
She's literally like pushing her weight around and she thinks that she can call the shots.
And that's not how it works, not in a federalist system like we have.
Okay, we are the United States of America.
Yes, every state has a certain amount of autonomy.
But when it comes to who's here and in the country, that's where you don't have any more say anymore, La Monica.
That's where the Constitution kicks in.
And that's why you see over and over the Supreme Court making the decision to go with the Trump administration.
For example, right?
The big news that just came maybe about 36 hours ago from the Supreme Court being that all those people that they wanted to deport.
If their country won't take them, if they've been convicted of a crime, guess what?
They can deport them to Timbuktu, literally Timbuktu, anywhere they want.
South Sudan, okay.
The Supreme Court actually voted that the lower courts were trying to interfere with the president's jurisdiction, right?
Because he has that jurisdiction over foreign affairs and over the border, for goodness sakes.
It's not that hard.
So I'm not sure where they're trying to take this unless she wants New Jersey to be a little island all on its own.
I mean, maybe the socialist guy can.
I'll tell you, I'll take Manhattan, right?
I'll take Manhattan.
Isn't that a song?
You can take Manhattan.
I think all of Manhattan's going to say, you can have it.
We're out of here.
Right?
And that's why you see those REITs, real estate investments, going down in Manhattan today.
You see already people all over saying, what are we going to do?
Because we now have a communist in charge.
Listen, La Monica, you're part of the federal government.
You need to be part of enforcing federal law.
Sure, you can look out for the people in the detention center since that's so important to you.
ICE agents had arrested people that have been convicted of crimes, put them in the detention center, and she wants to fight for them.
Okay, fine.
You know what?
You go and do that, but you make an appointment.
And you can't actually try and muscle your way, quite literally, through the crowd and put ICE officers' lives in danger in the process.
This is really setting up what I would call a classic state versus Fed argument.
And don't take my word for it.
Go read a constitutional law book.
You're going to lose that one all day long in court, La Monica.
And I just hope that you don't wind up in federal prison for 17 years for your own sake.
That would be quite a sword to fall on.
Again, I haven't seen AOC coming to your rescue, so maybe you got some bad advice.