For a full month now, the streets around the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, have belonged to the mob. Federal officers have been savagely bitten and pelted with objects. New Jersey State Police pulled in behind riot lines. Arrests have piled up, and the city has implemented a nightly curfew in the area near the facility. Unfortunately, the willingness of state and local officials to challenge the rioters fluctuates daily as the political winds continue to blow.
Plenty of people are pointing fingers. Almost no one is asking the obvious question: How did New Jersey get here?
The honest answer is that this did not come out of nowhere. For years, New Jersey has built one of the most sweeping sanctuary regimes in the country. The Immigrant Trust Directive told our own police officers, corrections officers, and prosecutors that they could not assist federal immigration authorities. In the spring, Trenton went a step further and codified that directive into law, along with measures restricting information sharing (the exact sort of madness that created the conditions of the 9/11 attacks) and an anti-masking policy (which makes it easier for the mob to doxx law enforcement and their families).
New Jersey is now, in practice and on paper, a sanctuary state. It’s going as poorly as anyone paying attention could have predicted.
When a state spends a decade telling its own officers that helping enforce federal immigration law is something to be ashamed of, people listen. The message that ICE is the villain and that federal law is optional does not remain inside the halls of the State House. It ends up on a bullhorn outside Delaney Hall and eventually manifests in a bottle thrown at a federal agent who pledged to protect and serve his fellow Americans. Worse still, recent arrests suggest the people throwing bottles and hurling vile racist insults at officers are largely “riot tourists,” coming to New Jersey from other states to cause trouble.
We are capable of honest debate in this country. Reasonable people disagree about levels, about process, about the right balance of mercy and order when it comes to immigration. But there is a difference between debate and what we are watching in Newark. The men and women working inside Delaney Hall are carrying out lawful orders. The people detained are not there at random; they are there because they broke the law, full stop. Some of those detained have been convicted of serious crimes ranging from drug trafficking and burglary to sexual assault and murder. Treating Delaney Hall’s staff as an occupying force, as too many New Jersey leaders now do, is how you turn a detention center into a riot zone.
Many insist this is about conditions inside the facility, not immigration policy at all. They point to unsourced, nonspecific accounts of poor food and inadequate medical care and uncorroborated tales of a hunger strike. Those claims nevertheless deserve a serious answer, and the Department of Homeland Security and the facility operator have firmly disproven them. But the way to settle a fight over conditions is through good faith engagement, oversight, and the courts, not by assaulting the officers standing at the gate. That so many reached for the latter is itself a symptom of a state that has spent years vilifying officers and teaching its residents that federal enforcement is illegitimate and dehumanizing.
The America First Policy Institute has been clear about where we stand. We believe in a secure border, immigration laws that are enforced, and a justice system that means what it says. We believe sanctuary policies make communities less safe, not more, by shielding criminal immigrants from accountability and by pitting state and local government against the federal officers sworn to uphold the law. And we believe that anyone who assaults a law enforcement officer, for any cause, should be prosecuted.
Sanctuary statehood was sold to New Jerseyans as compassion. What it has actually delivered is confrontation. By spending years casting federal enforcement as illegitimate, our leaders manufactured the very standoff now playing out in Newark, then acted surprised when it arrived. That is not compassion. It is a failure of governance, and the people of Newark are paying for it.
It should not be lost on anyone that Newark has one of New Jersey’s highest poverty rates. Imagine what could be accomplished if the federal representatives and protesters outside Delaney Hall stopped performing and turned their attention to helping the city around them.
HOUSE DEMOCRATS HEAD TO NEW JERSEY FOR FORUM ON DELANEY HALL DETENTION FACILITY
The way out is clearly not more of the same. It is not another bill expanding the rules that brought us here. The way out is to remember a principle this state used to take for granted: The law applies to everyone, and the officers who enforce it deserve our backing, not our scorn. Restore order in Newark. Prosecute those who attacked federal agents. And end the sanctuary policies that lit the match in the first place.
New Jersey is better than what is happening at Delaney Hall. But we will not get back to better by pretending the riots have nothing to do with the choices our leaders made. They have everything to do with them.
Michael John Donohue is the America First Policy Institute’s New Jersey chairman and a retired New Jersey Superior Court judge who served in the criminal division. Matthew Rooney is the AFPI New Jersey executive director, a practicing attorney, and a radio host.