May. 31, 2026, 5:44 PM EDT

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill on Sunday defended her decision to deploy state police to quell violent unrest outside an ICE detention facility, where House Democratic lawmakers — who were finally allowed inside — described conditions as unsanitary and unsafe.

“The conditions of confinement we witnessed firsthand and discussed with approximately two dozen detainees at the Delaney Hall detention shock the conscience,”House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement after Sunday’s congressional oversight visit to the federal detention center. “Immigration enforcement in this country should be fair, just and humane. The Trump administration is doing the exact opposite. At Delaney Hall, we learned of unsanitary living conditions, lack of adequate medical care and unhealthy food. This is not America.”

The Department of Homeland Security responded directly to Jeffries in a statement posted to social media, saying, “This is a detention center — we do not provide luxury accommodations. What we do provide are basic necessities like beds, clean water, comprehensive healthcare, and 3 meals a day until they go HOME.”

Sherrill, who along with New Jersey lawmakers were denied access to the facility earlier this monthsaid deploying state police Saturday was “absolutely necessary” because “ICE engagement creates an incredibly dangerous situation. It make the situation worse and I refuse to back down in fighting the Trump administration and the threats they’ve made.”

She later told MS NOW’s “Politics Nation” Sunday that after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers beat protesters with batons, “The situation became more and more dangerous and then ICE was surging personnel in.”

Sunday was peaceful after police the night before deployed tear gas and explosive devices to break up the crowd. Officers pushed back both protestors and members of the press more than half a mile from the Delaney Hall building, citing safety concerns. Still, dozens of demonstrators returned Sunday with signs, drums and chants urging for the closure of the immigration center, which Sherrill has said she supports.

Monica Aguilar, who joined the protesters as a representative of the nonprofit organization New Jersey Action 21, told MS NOW in an interview outside the detention facility that detainees inside described unacceptable conditions.

“Whenever they get a hamburger, for example, the meat inside the bread is frozen,” she said, adding that the food “has green mold in it or worms” and the water is not clear.

Demonstrations outside of Newark’s Delaney Hall Saturday night saw state and local police confront masked individuals aggressively protesting alleged detainee mistreatment, including unsanitary conditions and inadequate food medical care. DHS officials have denied reports of the conditions, which sparked a prolonged hunger strike by detainees.

Sherrill also called on the Department of Homeland Security to restore full family visitations at the facility, provide appropriate medical care for detainees and stop pressuring them to sign deportation documents. Family visitation resumed Sunday in a limited capacity.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was arrested last year during a visit to the facility, imposed an evening curfew in the area shortly after the incident.

Despite being a journalist exercising his freedom of the press, MS NOW’s Ali Velshi was seen being forced to leave the scene by police before the curfew was enacted.

In an interview with Baraka on Sunday, Velshi asked why the media was not allowed near the facility for news coverage at the time.

“There was no curfew. We were not in violation of anything whatsoever,” Velshi told Baraka. “I have First Amendment rights in this nation.”

“I’m not arguing with you about your ability and right to stay there and do that. They should have allowed you to do that,” Baraka said.

May. 31, 2026, 3:28 PM EDT

A top Democrat on Sunday expressed “concerns” about Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner in the wake of reports that he exchanged sexually explicit texts with multiple women, which his wife said she flagged to his campaign.

Asked about the controversy on ABC News, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said, “Yeah I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer and that’s what campaigns are for.”

The oyster farmer and Marnie Corps veteran’s wife, Amy Gertner, informed a senior campaign aide last summer that he had exchanged sexual messages with several women, according to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Gertner acknowledged in a lengthy video released on social media Saturday evening that she had informed her husband’s campaign about his activity. “I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said.

That person, former state Rep. Genevieve McDonald, who left the Platner campaign last fall, said she was warned by the Senate candidate’s campaign that she would be accused of sabotage if she cooperated with news outlets reporting on Platner’s sexually explicit texts, according to Maine’s Bangor Daily News. The Daily News said the warning came in the form of a message from political media strategist Morris Katz, who helped get Zohran Mamdani elected mayor of New York City.

Asked for comment about the allegations, the Platner campaign issued a statement — not from the candidate or a spokesperson for his campaign — but from his wife. Gertner’s statement adhered closely to the message she shared in her video.

Booker, a leading Democrat and potential 2028 presidential candidate, explained his position on Platner, saying, “So much is riding on Democrats taking control of the Senate … It’s time we take back the Senate and that’s what I’m focused on.”

Levar Stoney, the former mayor of Richmond, Virginia, said in a post on X: “I can’t help but think that if this candidate were a person of color or a woman, my party would be asking them to consider stepping aside immediately. A Nazi tattoo! Now this. I want Democrats to take back the Senate — but not like this.”

Rhonda Elaine Foxx, a former campaign aide to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, criticized Platner for leaving it to his wife to address the matter rather than doing it himself. “This is horrific,” she wrote on social media. “Asking her do this is TRASH.”

Platner, who has been engulfed in controversy for months — including over a Nazi-style tattoo he had on his body for many years — became the presumptive Senate Democratic nominee to face Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in November after Maine Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race in late April.

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., appearing on MS NOW’s “Alex Witt Reports” dismissed the issue as one to be resolved privately between Platner and his wife. And he pointed to President Donald Trump’s multiple controversies, which he said are “enabled by Susan Collins.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told CBS News that Platner has “made mistakes,” but defined the Maine Senate race as “between somebody who has spent his life protecting us versus somebody who seems to be protecting Donald Trump’s corruption.”

Gertner defended her marriage to Platner and said that she and her husband have been working through their issues in counseling. “We work on our mental health every day,” she said.

She called the news reports about her husband’s extramarital sexting “extra shitty” and said she’s “really angry” and “disappointed” by the media coverage about that rather than focusing on Platner’s policy plans. She added that she and her husband “love each other deeply.”

Another congressional Democrat, Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, said last week that Platner’s tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, which he later covered up, and past comments are reason enough not to support his candidacy.

“I’ve been clear about Graham Platner. I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying,” Auchincloss told BLN last week.

Kate Bedingfield, former Biden White House communications director, said on BLN Sunday, “I think there’s a lot about Graham Platner frankly that is unpalatable.” She noted “he was not my choice,” but said it’s up to the voters of Maine to decide whether they want him.

Other Democrats defended Platner after his latest controversy surfaced in news reports. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said in a statement on social media that he was proud of Platner for “having the character to stand up against the war in Iran, against genocide, and against an unfair & lopsided economy.”

Asked about the sexting revelations on Sunday, Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., told BLN, “I will work with whoever the people of Maine elect, but I hope that they elect somebody that is going to stand up to this president, work with me to be able to fight back against all these dangers.”

While Mills dropped out of the Democratic primary race, she does not appear to have taken the step to have her name removed from the ballot.  That means her name will likely still be on the ballot alongside Platner’s in the June 9 primary, which Platner has been widely expected to win.

The second Monday in July is a notable date to watch. According to Maine law5 p.m. on that day is the deadline for a candidate to withdraw for reasons other than “catastrophic” illness, condition, injury or death. If a primary winner withdrew by that time, it would be to the state’s Democratic political committee to nominate a new candidate by the fourth Monday in July.

Hunter Woodall contributed to this report.

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

May. 31, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByJohn Pfaff

The FBI released a preliminary “First Look” at 2025 crime data this month, which showed significant drops over the year before. Compared to 2024, in 2025, homicides fell close to 20%, total violent crime fell almost 10% and property crime fell over 10%. These results are unequivocally good news, and they make clear that the steady decline in violent crime that began in late 2021 and early 2022 has continued — even into 2026. By and large, the increase in violence that came in the wake of Covid-19 has been more than eliminated, and many cities have seen some of the lowest rates of violence, particularly homicide, in generations.

And the news is actually better than that. The Major Cities Chiefs Association (whose data on big cities tends to track the national trends pretty closely) just released year-to-date data comparing Q1 of 2025 to Q1 of 2026, which showed more big drops. Homicides were down almost 20%, and robberies were down over 20%. Jeff Asher, who runs the Real Time Crime Index, predictedthat in 2026, we could see the lowest recorded homicide rates ever, certainly the lowest in recent memory.

The FBI under President Donald Trump, however, could not let the crime data stand on its own. The bureau found it necessary to include the overwrought self-aggrandizing commentary that characterizes announcements from this administration. The FBI’s news release quotes beleaguered FBI Director Kash Patel, who said, “Over the last 14 months we made major transformations at the FBI, and these results show those changes are working. This FBI will continue to stack these wins for the American people under President Trump and always Back the Blue every step of the way.” Patel’s emphasis on the FBI in particular, and on “backing the blue” more generally, misstates the likely causes of this decline.

To start, the FBI, no matter its director or the presidential administration, has never been a major driver of crime trends.  Structurally, it cannot be. The United States has about  750,000 state- and local-sworn police officers and sheriffs’ deputies. The FBI? It has about 13,500 field agentsi.e., less than 2% of all law enforcement. And the FBI has limited jurisdiction. The feds don’t move the needle much when it comes to local spending, either. Federal grants to local and state law enforcement are about $3 billion to $4 billionagainst state and local spending on police that comes to about $135 billion. So, again, about 2% to 3% of the total. (And most of those grants come from the Justice and Homeland Security departments, not the FBI.)

The FBI has never been large enough to exert a significant effect on crime rates, and under Trump and Patel, it has become smaller still and less focused on crime. Indeed, some of the major “transformations” at the FBI during Trump’s second term have included reducing the workforce by approximately 6%and diverting many of the remaining officers away from investigating things like gun crime to support White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s violent campaign against generally nonviolent immigrants. Not only has that campaign not made us safer, it may beunderminingefforts to reduce crime.

Making matters worse, Trump has pushed what little money the feds provide local governments away fromsuccessful programs. He has already cut close to $1 billion in grants that fund local programs such as police investigations into sexual violence, child abuse on tribal lands and others for violence interruption programs in cities. This is entirely unsurprising. Those who embrace “tough on crime” rhetoric the way Trump does never seem interested in public safety; rather, they favor using the police to impose social control over disliked groups. The termination of those grants certainly undercuts any claims that the feds deserve credit for a decline in crime. That decline has come despite such policies.

On top of overselling the importance of the feds to the current declines in crime, Patel’s claim that the FBI will “always Back the Blue, every step of the way” oversells the impact of policing of any sort on the decline in crime. Trying to explain any sort of major shift in trends is a risky endeavor, especially in its early days when data is still coming in. But one of the most compelling theories I have seen about the spike in lethal violence during Covid and the sudden rapid decline that followed came from John K. Roman, who linked it to government employmentjust not police employment.

Roman’s theory, which has numbers to support it, is that local trends in homicide track trends in local, nonpolice government employment: teachers, drug and mental health counselors and all other government employees who, on a daily basis, interact with people at risk of committing violence. As Covid eviscerated local budgets, those people were far more likely than police to find their jobs cut or suspended, and homicides rose with the cuts. As post-Covid budgets recovered (with some federal support, but often more or less on their own) those jobs came back, and homicides fell along with their return.

That is not to say police are irrelevant. But there was little change in police employment over this time. There were, however, substantial changes in nonpolice employment — and changes that track the changes in violence. And strengthening Roman’s argument is extensive evidence that all sorts of nonpolice interventions, including those that would have been reduced or eliminated by Covid-era budget cuts, can have significantly lowercrime.

Crime continuing to fall since the 2020-2021 Covid spike in violence is a remarkable reversal that has gotten a fraction of the attention it deserves and a fraction of the attention the media has paid to the spike itself. But Patel’s FBI has exaggerated its role in that decline and wrongly credited the tough-on-crime-, “back the Blue”-style policing that Trump supports. It’s not surprising that Trump’s administration would take credit for a decline it didn’t cause and likely undermined, but it’s important that the rest of us push back against that narrative and reject the ineffective policies the administration wants us to applaud.