FIRST ON FOX: Analilia Mejia, the Democrat hoping to take over newly elected New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s now absent House seat, recently likened the Trump administration’s federal immigration efforts to that of segregationists in the South during the 1960s.  

After securing the Democratic Party nomination in a crowded field to take over Sherrill’s 11th Congressional District seat, activist Analilia Mejia began holding interviews to share her platform. Among the crowded field of Democrats, she was said to be the only one to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” and call for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to be abolished.

During an interview Mejia conducted with The American Prospect after securing her nomination, she defended calls to abolish ICE and said that the “murders in Minnesota,” referring to the deaths of anti-ICE agitators Renee Good and Alex Pretti, “feel very similar to that moment in our nation’s history, when in the middle of evening news, the American people couldn’t turn away from what was happening in the South, they couldn’t turn away from fire hoses turned on children.”

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Mejia was alluding to the 1963 Birmingham “Children’s Crusade” when kids walked out of school to support desegregation but were met with brutality from local officials who turned a high-powered fire hose onto kids who had walked out of school to protest segregation.

This statue honoring the Birmingham Children’s Crusade sits across from the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP)

Fox News Digital reached out to campaign representatives for Mejia but did not hear back in time for publication.  

“Anyone who has studied American history understands, every time across our nation’s history, we keep having these cycles of when regular, everyday Americans grab those words of freedom and try to pull them to cover as many of us as possible,” Mejia explained further, in a separate interview she conducted after securing her nomination, with Democracy NOW. 

“We then have kind of a reaction in this nation, whether it was after Reconstruction or after the civil rights movement or after the election of Barack Obama. It’s almost as if we have this snap back, this clap back to expansive freedom.”

Comparing ICE to racists is nothing new for the Democratic Party. 

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, for example, compared them to slave patrols, while in January the NAACP posted a split-image comparing ICE agents to the KKK. The KKK comparison also recently reared its head during California’s gubernatorial debate and just a few days ago, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass, complained “ICE can’t be reformed anymore than the KKK could.”

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Analilia Mejia secured the Democratic Party nomination in a special election to find out who will take over newly-elected New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s vacant House seat.  (Heather Khalifa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Mejia, longtime labor organizer who served as a 2020 national political director for Bernie Sanders and also as deputy director of the Labor Department’s women’s bureau under former President Joe Biden, upset the more moderate former congressman, Tom Malinowski, in the Democratic Primary for New Jersey’s 11th district last week. She is now preparing to battle it out against her Republican opponent in the April 16 special general election, local New Jersey Mayor Joe Hathaway. 

“You can’t turn away from this madness and you can’t unsee this injustice and they want leaders who say you’re not crazy, what you’re seeing is real,” Mejia told The American Prospect when asked about her stance to abolish ICE position. “People get it, voters are not dumb.”

In another interview, after Mejia secured her 11th District nomination, she also spoke about her platform, including her position on ICE and immigration, with longtime New York news anchor Bill Ritter. 

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“You sound a little like the person who just became the Mayor of New York,” Ritter remarked to Mejia during their discussion.

Zohran Mamdani delivers a victory speech at a mayoral election night watch party, Nov. 4, 2025, in New York City.  (Yuki Iwamura/AP)