A judicial panel on Wednesday heard the case of a judge booted off the bench for erupting at students and their parents during truancy hearings in Bound Brook. (Photo by Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)
A municipal court judge suspended for threatening truant students with deportation told a judicial disciplinary committee Wednesday that he meant well and had issued “empty threats” he couldn’t carry out only to scare the children into attending school.
Britt J. Simon was booted off the bench last February for erupting at three students and their parents during truancy hearings in Bound Brook. In three separate cases in August 2024 and January 2025, he grilled the students and their parents about their immigration status and, in one case, warned a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador that he would personally alert immigration enforcement officers to pick her up if she missed another day of school.
Wednesday, Simon told members of the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct that he had never received training in truancy cases and merely parroted the tough talk he’d seen other judges use during truancy hearings. He conceded he intentionally made the hearings “unpleasant,” but that his goal was noble — to get the children to go to school.
“Sometimes, compassion isn’t pretty,” Simon said during his hearing at the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton.
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After five hours of testimony and as dusk approached, the committee’s chair told attorneys the hearing will be continued to a later date that has yet to be scheduled.
Maureen G. Bauman, the committee’s disciplinary counsel, had urged the panel to bar Simon permanently from the bench.
“Judge Simon does not have the proper temperament to be a judge,” Bauman said. “The words he used to children — who were not even parties to the proceedings — were egregious and totally improper, regardless of respondent’s intent. Respondent lacks the character, proper temperament, and judgment required of a jurist.”
Under New Jersey law, parents or guardians of habitually late or absent students can be charged with disorderly conduct, the lowest level offense. In cases of chronic truancy and absenteeism, judges can fine parents, direct school districts to address barriers to attendance like transportation, mandate interventions like home instruction, or even declare students juvenile delinquents, but state education officials recommend supportive rather than punitive approaches to reducing truancy.
Bauman, who noted that Simon also failed to ensure a municipal prosecutor was present at the truancy hearings, played recordings of the proceedings in court Wednesday.
In one, Simon told the 14-year-old on Jan. 28, 2025, just a week after President Donald Trump began his second term, “there’s a new sheriff in town.”
“You’re illegal, you’re getting deported. You know a great place to find people to deport is? The courts,” he said to the girl and her mother.
He told a 16-year-old boy from El Salvador, “You’re spitting in the face of this country.”
When the boy informed Simon he planned to enlist in the military after school, the judge responded that he was “incapable” of graduating and the military “doesn’t want garbage.” He then threatened to have child-protective workers remove him from his home and investigate his mother.
“You, all by yourself, are going to be responsible for all of the horrible things that happen to your family. You!” he barked at the boy. “Otherwise, you get your tail into school every single day. I don’t care if your limb is hanging off you, OK, and you lose a leg. OK? You hop. Are we clear?”
Respondent lacks the character, proper temperament, and judgment required of a jurist.
– Maureen G. Bauman, disciplinary counsel
Simon conceded in court Wednesday that he was “uncomfortable” enough with how he handled those truancy hearings that he reached out to Judge Gerard J. Shamey, the municipal presiding judge in Somerset, Hunterdon, and Warren counties, for guidance on how to handle truancy cases better.
Shamey testified Wednesday that he advised Simon not to “improvise,” citing a script judges should follow to alert people in the country illegally of the consequences a guilty plea could have on their continued U.S. residency.
The case comes as immigration agents around the country have increasingly targeted courthouses for enforcement, arresting undocumented people in court hallways when they appear in immigration and other routine proceedings.
In New Jersey, Chief Justice Stuart Rabner issued a directive in 2019 barring judges from requesting or retaining people’s immigration statuses except “when needed to fulfill a legitimate court purpose.”
Simon was appointed a part-time municipal court judge in 2023 in Bridgewater and became a full-time judge in Bound Brook in January 2024, according to court testimony. He previously was an attorney who worked in mergers and acquisitions in Manhattan before starting his own firm in 2008, where he focused on municipal practice, he testified.
He told committee members that his comments to truant students and their mothers were not meant to signal any political position he has on immigration enforcement.
“Everybody has their own view. You might have a view about immigration far to one side or to the other side. That’s above my pay grade, and candidly, I think it’s above my ability to actually process,” he said.
Wednesday’s hearing also gave a rare peek into the interplay between politics and the courts in a state where dozens of state legislators are attorneys.
Simon told the committee he thought he got called before Judge Kevin Shanahan, the assignment judge for Somerset, Hunterdon, and Warren counties, last February because he’d goofed when sentencing a client of Sen. Nicholas Scutari (D-Union). Scutari is a personal injury attorney and one of New Jersey’s most powerful lawmakers as Senate president.
In that case, Simon testified, he mistakenly sentenced the client — a repeat DWI offender — as a first-time offender and did not suspend his driver’s license as the law requires. The state Motor Vehicle Commission flagged that penalty as “an illegal sentence,” Simon said. He thought his meeting with Shanahan was to receive guidance in how to resentence Scutari’s client, and was “thrown back” when Shanahan instead took the meeting in a different direction and suspended him for the truancy cases, he said.
“I’ve always operated under the principle that if you’re going to tell me to fix something, I’m going to fix it,” Simon said. “Judges make mistakes.”
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