Bill sponsor Assemblywoman Ellen Park said the legislation is “about the future of New Jersey.” (Photo by Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)
A group of Assembly lawmakers advanced a trio of bills Monday afternoon intended to protect New Jersey immigrants from federal immigration enforcement.
The broadest bill the Assembly Judiciary Committee approved would codify the 2018 Immigrant Trust Directive, an order from the Attorney General’s Office that restricts when state, county, and local law enforcement can aid federal immigration authorities. Immigrant advocates have urged lawmakers to codify the directive, noting that it could be withdrawn unilaterally by a future attorney general.
“This is about the future of New Jersey, not just America,” said Assemblywoman Ellen Park, a Bergen County Democrat whose voice broke as she cast her vote in support.
All three bills passed in a party-line vote, with the committee’s two Republicans voting no.
The bills were introduced last week, in the waning days of the current legislative session. The next session begins on Jan. 13.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson cited the story of an undocumented man accused of killing a mother and her 11-year-old daughter in a drunken driving crash in Lakewood last year. The Trump administration has used the story before to target New Jersey’s practice of restricting when local law enforcement can aid federal immigration agents.
“This tragedy is far from the only example of illegal aliens killing innocent bystanders. The New Jersey legislature should focus on protecting law-abiding citizens, not the criminal aliens who kill them,” Jackson said.
The hearing for the much-anticipated legislation was moved to a larger room in the Trenton Statehouse to accommodate the hundreds of people in attendance. Some people watched from two separate rooms, and legislative staff had to print more slips because of the number of people who wanted to testify.
Immigrant advocates and local activists who spoke during the three-hour hearing said New Jersey’s immigrant communities are plagued with fear because of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation effort. The legislation would make New Jerseyans feel safer, they said, because it would allow them to report crimes to police without fearing they themselves would end up charged with immigration-related crimes.
“When your child’s classmate is struggling with their friend who has a missing parent, when people are too scared to report a crime or seek assistance, when a teacher finds empty seats in their classroom, or when grocery stores and restaurants find that foot traffic has gone down, when health care professionals see fewer people coming in for preventative care — all of those are impacts on all of us,” said Ami Kachalia of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.
The bill’s provisions would:
- Prohibit law enforcement officers from engaging in “racially influenced policing,” including stopping someone based on their actual or suspected citizenship status and asking someone’s immigration status unless relevant to an investigation.
- Bar state, county, and local police from assisting in federal civil immigration enforcement.
- Require law enforcement agencies to create procedures to address certain visa certification requests from potential victims of crime or human trafficking, and post those procedures on their websites.
- Mandate that prosecutors inform criminal defendants of immigration consequences.
- Require law enforcement agencies to annually report their interactions with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to be published on the state Attorney General Office’s website.
Amy Torres, head of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, noted that the directive has been in place for nearly a decade. Under the directive, people have felt free to report their landlords for not turning on the heat, report their employers for wage theft, or come forward as the victims of crime without fearing they would get arrested by federal immigration agents.
Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond Santiago said that since the shift in immigration enforcement over the past year, there has been less cooperation from victims and witnesses over fear of retaliation. Years of increased trust from some communities has “evaporated” because of ICE activity in neighborhoods, Santiago said.
Francesca Chabla, an immigration attorney with immigrant advocacy group Make the Road New Jersey, said she’s received countless calls from clients who are unsure whether they should enroll their children for free and reduced lunch programs out of fear that they could be targeted. Many residents don’t know who to trust, she said.
Chabla said the package of bills would provide clarity not only for residents, but for immigration attorneys who can “confidently tell the community members that they can safely access health care, schools, and food pantries” without fear of losing their due process rights.
States like California, Illinois, and Washington have passed similar legislation, Kachalia noted.
One of the other bills advanced Monday would require the attorney general to develop policies for so-called sensitive locations that would be barred from assisting or participating in federal civil law enforcement, and it would prohibit enforcement on their premises. The locations include health care facilities, public schools, and domestic violence shelters, among other places.
The third bill would bar government entities and health care facilities from requesting or collecting certain information from residents unless “strictly necessary” to assess eligibility for the requested public service. The information would include a person’s immigration status, place of birth, social security number, and individual taxpayer identification number.
For more than a year, Park and some of her Democratic colleagues have pushed for passage of a separate bill, called the Immigrant Trust Act, that includes provisions from the three bills advanced Monday. The older bill has languished, and Park said it was easier to get support by breaking the bill into three parts. She sponsored two of the three bills advanced Monday.
“I think if we were to put this all in one bill, it would’ve been too much to kind of comprehend and digest … so I think it was just better formatted for three pieces of legislation,” she said.
The Republicans on the committee — Assemblywoman Vicky Flynn (R-Monmouth) and Assemblyman Bob Auth (R-Bergen) — questioned whether the bills would withstand legal scrutiny. Auth read aloud a description of the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause, which bars states from regulating the federal government’s actions.
Auth asked a housing attorney who said she represents tenants who are scared of reporting bad landlords what the “genesis of that fear is.”
“What is it? What’s causing the fear? If you’re here as a citizen, you go to court, you get equal justice, right? If you’re here as a resident alien and you go to court, you get equal justice, right? So what is the problem?” Auth asked her.
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