A new directive setting forth rules for when New
Jersey law enforcement agencies should cooperate with federal
immigration officials is expected to be issued by early December.
The
current directive, issued in 2007, and recent increases in enforcement
actions by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency were
the subject of a critical report issued Tuesday by groups who say
current practices are costly, vague and need to end now.
“ICE
holds are requests that at best are based on a hunch. At their worst,
they’re a smoke screen for racial profiling. Either way, they carry no
legal weight,” said Amol Sinha, executive director of the American Civil
Liberties Union of New Jersey.
“When local jurisdictions have been sued, they
have lost. And we the taxpayers have been the ones on the hook,” Sinha
said. “To hold people, ICE needs legally binding warrants signed by a
judge. That’s not what ICE is sending out.”
Attorney
General Gurbir Grewal said he agrees “wholeheartedly” with the report’s
assessment of the 2007 directive. He said a new directive will be
issued in two to three weeks.
The change follows through on a Gov. Phil Murphy campaign promise to see New Jersey become a "sanctuary state."
The change follows through on a Gov. Phil Murphy campaign promise to see New Jersey become a "sanctuary state."
“A 2007 immigration directive can’t reflect the immigration realities of 2018,” Grewal said.
“We’ll
be issuing a new revised directive to give our county prosecutors and
state law enforcement better guidance on what their role is and isn’t
when it comes to the enforcement of federal civil immigration law,” he
said.
Grewal said he wouldn’t preview what will be the new directive.
Advocacy groups that supported the new report,
which was written by New Jersey Policy Perspective, said the new
directive should rescind the 2007 one, require police not to cooperate
with immigration detainers and end programs in which some agencies are
deputized to help enforce immigration law.
“We
hope that there should be a clear line between local law enforcement and
immigration enforcement,” said Chia-Chia Wang, organizing and advocacy
director for the American Friends Service Committee in Newark.
The NJPP report says the number of ICE detainers
in New Jersey increased by 87.5 percent between 2016 and 2017, compared
to 40 percent nationally. It said New Jersey voluntarily honored 63
percent of those detainer requests, compared with 54 percent nationally.
The
report said that because ICE doesn’t pay for those detentions, New
Jersey taxpayers do. If the detentions lasted the legally allowed 48
hours, the cost would be around $12 million. NJPP says the detentions
last longer than that in more than 90 percent of cases – averaging 24
days, translating to a cost of $139 million since 2003.
Johanna
Calle, director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said
New Jersey has the nation’s third-largest percentage of foreign-born
residents and the nation’s fifth-largest percentage of undocumented
immigrants.
“Our populations are directly
impacted by how our state decides to interact with an agency that we
have known now for a long time continues to act without honoring the
Constitution and the civil rights of people,” Calle said.
“A new directive that reigns in how and when local
law enforcement interacts with ICE has the potential to make New Jersey
safer for all by restoring trust and cooperation with law enforcement
in immigrant communities,” said Erika Nava, the NJPP policy analyst who
wrote the report.
The report and pending
directive come on the heels of ICE recently criticizing New Jersey, and
in particular Middlesex County, for not honoring an immigration detainer
it had requested in December for an undocumented immigrant who has since been charged with three murders in Missouri.
Middlesex
County declined because its policy is to honor detainer requests if the
inmate has previously been convicted of a first- or second-degree
offense or was the subject of a final order of deportation signed by a
federal judge.
During the 51 days Mexican
national Luis Perez was held before his February release, ICE didn’t
obtain an order of deportation from a federal judge.
“Obviously that’s an awful tragedy. It is unfair to isolate this case
and generalize it to the whole population,” Nava said. “… I just think
it’s unfair to just generalize and try to correlate crime with
ethnicity. I think that’s racist, and it’s unfair to do so.”
1 comment:
Can Governor Murphy, Middlesex County taxpayers or New Jersey taxpayers be held liable for releasing a repeat, criminal illegal aliens free who murdered three American citizens in Missouri?
Post a Comment