INTERVIEW: Mayor Ras Baraka Talks NJ Mayoral Race, Trump, ICE; Lawsuit After Arrest + More
The Breakfast Club
The Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartPodcasts
4.4 • 14.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today on the Breakfast Club, Mayor Ras Baraka Talks NJ Mayoral Race, Trump, ICE; Lawsuit After Arrest. Listen For More!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:20.8 | Guaranteed Human. Hold up. Every day I wake up. Wake your ass up. The breakfast club. Are you all finished or y'all's done? Morning, everybody. It's DJ Envy. Just hilarious. Shalameen Nagar. We are the Breakfast Club. Lonel Roses here. And we got a special guest in the building. |
| 0:23.0 | Elections are today, ladies and gentlemen. |
| 0:41.5 | And we have Mayor Ross Baraka back in the building. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? How are you feeling? I'm good, brother. I'm good. Good to be here. You never tired of this? This is what? Your fourth term? I'm always tired. So let me ask you as, you know, three terms in, what could be done different in Newark, New Jersey? |
| 0:42.7 | A lot, man. |
| 0:44.4 | There's a lot of stuff that we still have to finish. |
| 0:51.1 | I mean, obviously, we still need to create the 24-hour nightlife, you know, and there's a lot of things that has to happen. |
| 0:54.8 | We're building a walking bridge like the High Line in Newark to connect the East Ward to the downtown area that will trigger a bunch of development downtown, thousands |
| 1:00.7 | of units of housing, retail, commercial, so that's exactly what we need, you know, to make |
| 1:06.0 | happen. There's more affordable housing that we have to build. We're trying to build at least |
| 1:10.0 | 2,000 more units, affordable housing, some transitional housing as well. Then lastly, we're going to attack this food desert stuff that Newark has in various communities. We're building five. And we were doing this a long time before these folks for New York did it, but you know, I got money than us. So five, you know, we call it mutual aid grocery stores where you pay based on, you know, |
| 1:32.7 | income. |
| 1:34.0 | But they're run by nonprofits. |
| 1:35.8 | And we're doing some public-private ones as well. |
| 1:39.2 | So, you know, that, you know, continue to reduce violence and crime, continue to raise people's quality of life, invest in black and brown businesses. So we're going to continue to do those things. How do you, like, you know, measure your success throughout the terms? Like, what was success for you first time, second time, third time? Like, what are you measuring against? Your goals, what the objectives were in the beginning. I mean, most people who run, they run because they think they should, they could do better, or they want to do this or that, but specific goals. Like our specific goals, when we first came, it was to reduce violence. We had 113, 114, 114, 114, homicides, right? It was to begin to build affordable housing in the city, balance our budget. |
| 2:18.5 | I mean, the budget was in bad shape, so there was very specific things that we needed to do |
| 2:22.8 | and turn the economy towards black and brown folks, and we began to do that. |
| 2:28.5 | So violence in the city hasn't been as low as it is since 1953. |
| 2:33.4 | So we started, you know, my first year when we got |
| 2:36.5 | there, we were down gradually, but not significantly. But then, you know, we began to get the |
| 2:42.3 | hang of it and it began to reduce year by year by year. I was going to ask, you know, a lot of |
| 2:47.1 | people say sometimes that long-term leadership is not too great, right? Because it gets people comfortable. |
... |
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