Prior to leaving office, Gov. Phil Murphy had a chance to sign a three-bill package aimed at curbing the unfettered power of ICE to run immigration raids across the state. There was a bill to restrict state agencies from sharing information with ICE; another that would have codified the current Immigration Trust Directive — a policy forbidding local police involvement with civil enforcement cases — and a third piece of legislation that created safe zones in schools, churches and hospitals. Murphy vetoed the first two and signed the third. Now, just a few weeks later, ICE is running rampant across the state and the mayors of our two largest cities are pleading for help.
In the midst of public daylight raids in their cities, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Jersey City Mayor James Solomon are advocating for lawmakers to repass the bills and send them to Gov. Mikie Sherrill for a signature. During her young administration, Sherrill has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy in general and ICE and the Department of Homeland Security specifically, going as far as to call for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to lose her job in the wake of the killings in Minneapolis. Asking her to sign two relatively minor bills aimed at curbing major rights violations doesn’t seem like too heavy a lift.
Despite already passing the bills in the Legislature, there are some in the Democratic Party worried that signing them into law might provoke Trump and ICE further. My response to that would be: So what? They’ve been steadily ramping up the frequency and severity of their operations for months; the powers that be in the administration aren’t going to suddenly have a change of heart. Showing legislative restraint on your side isn’t going to lead to curbing overreach on theirs. If you sit on your hands, the administration isn’t going to reciprocate; they’re going to keep going further. If there’s one thing we’ve learned for sure over the course of the last year, it’s that ICE doesn’t know how to de-escalate.
