A New Jersey senator who was pepper-sprayed by ICE officers last week now says he’s worried that tensions between protesters and ICE agents in his home state could escalate into further violent clashes in the next few days or weeks.
Sen. Andy Kim was seen on video this past week receiving aid from a volunteer after being caught in the middle of a confrontation between protesters and ICE agents at a detention center in Newark, New Jersey. The senator washed out his eyes after being hit with a cloud of chemicals emitted from “pepper balls”, non-lethal ammunition fired by ICE and other federal agents in an attempt to disperse crowds outside of the Delaney Hall detention center. Confrontations between armed ICE agents and unarmed protesters occurred Monday night and Tuesday evening, according to local media.
Conditions at the Delaney Hall facility have become a point of contention between federal officials headed up by Trump’s new DHS secretary, Marwayne Mullin, and New Jersey officials who say that detainees are being held in poor conditions with insufficient access to medical personnel. Mullin and other Trump officials have denied this, while claiming that the facility houses violent criminals.
Some detainees at the facility have reportedly begun a hunger strike, prompting the numbers of demonstrators regularly camped outside the facility to grow.
“I’ve gotten so little sleep this past week. I mean, this has been one of the most difficult weeks of my entire life. And again, it’s not about me. It’s just, I am so worried about my state. I’ve not seen my state with this level of precariousness through my entire time in elected office,” Kim said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
He added that he was “hugely concerned” that further violence between protesters and ICE agents, which Democrats have blamed on the federal government for refusing entry to elected officials conducting oversight visits, and firing pepper balls and tear gas at crowds, could erupt and lead to the kind of violent clashes between Americans and ICE agents that led to the fatal shootings of two protesters by ICE and DHS agents in Minneapolis.
New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherill, newly-elected, also attended Monday’s protest in Newark. Kim described to reporters afterwards that he tried to separate protesters and ICE agents by putting himself in the middle of the two groups when ICE agents suddenly opened fire on demonstrators, including him, without warning.
“That’s when they started to shoot at us with pepper balls as well as using the pepper spray,” said Kim, who added that ICE agents were tackling people in the street.
The public backlash to the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good contributed to the White House ordering DHS to pull back a surge of enforcement operations in the city and the president admitting that agents were acting too “tough” in the course of their duties during an NBC News interview. Mullin’s predecessor who oversaw the operation, Kristi Noem, would also be kicked out of her position amid the president’s sinking poll numbers on immigration issues and other issues for which she was facing scrutiny at the time.
Minneapolis was targeted by the White House as the president’s team tried to sell Americans on the seriousness with which it was taking the issue of illegal immigration. But chaos quickly overtook city streets as agents were harassed and taunted by city residents who resented their presence and the aims of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, and roving bands of activists sought to alert people to the presence of ICE teams.
Democrats refused to vote to authorize further funding for ICE’s enforcement and removal operations earlier this year after the killings in Minneapolis. The resulting DHS shutdown dragged on for months until Republicans gave up on negotiations entirely and resolved to authorize further funding using a party-line reconciliation package that could bypass the traditional Senate filibuster rules, buoyed at least for a time by the temporary funding boost ICE received in 2025 as part of the previous reconciliation package: The “Big, Beautiful Bill”.
But even that seemingly slam-dunk vote for Republicans in both chambers has now come into question as to whether it can pass thanks to the White House’s insistence that it included other key legislative priorities; first, funding for the planned White House ballroom which was later stripped from the bill by the Senate parliamentarian, then, funding for a $1.776 billion “slush fund” to give payouts to people prosecuted by the Justice Department under Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
Senate Republicans balked on both issues but have firmly rejected the latter one out of hand, with former Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell deriding it as an “utterly stupid” ask from the White House.
The dispute led to the reconciliation fight being shelved for the Memorial Day holiday, and the two chambers will now have to rush to complete it before the August recess.
