NJ Activists Brace to Fight Trump Immigration Agenda After Setbacks Under Biden

One month after Donald Trump was reelected president following a campaign where he promised mass deportations, The Guardian published an investigation revealing how outgoing President Joe Biden is laying the groundwork for potential expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity. The report shows that during Biden’s final year in office, ICE has been working to extend contracts with private prison companies to expand detention in 14 locations across the United States.

Immigrant rights organizers in New Jersey were already anticipating such an expansion. New Jersey serves as a unique gauge of the immigrant rights movement more broadly due to its large immigrant population and its advances and reversals of legislation against ICE detention in recent years. Additionally, the state is being viewed by the federal government as a potential hub for ICE expansion. In June 2024, news began circulating that ICE was eyeing Newark as the site of a new jail to hold immigrants. In November, following the election, the ACLU revealed that through the Freedom of Information Act they had found that ICE’s capacity for detention in New Jersey could expand by 600 beds spanning two facilities in the cities of Elizabeth and Trenton. (Beds are the unit most facilities use to measure their capacity for detention.)

This is a setback for the state where years earlier, a diverse mix of activists from socially progressive suburbs and cities with large immigrant communities united around the demand to “Abolish ICE” during the first Trump administration. The organizing carried over into Biden’s term and in 2021 the activists won a state law which “[p]rohibits State and local entities and private detention facilities from entering into agreement to detain noncitizens.” The passage of the law led to the closure of three county-run ICE detention facilities throughout New Jersey.

The recent prospects for ICE expansion in New Jersey are the result of a federal judge’s ruling in 2023, which partially reversed the hard-won ban on private ICE detention contracts. At the time, the judge behind the ruling described the state law as “a dagger aimed at the heart of the federal government’s immigration enforcement mission and operations,” a testament to the national significance of the activity in New Jersey. The Biden administration publicly backed efforts by private prison company CoreCivic to reverse the ban. As a result of the ruling, the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC), the state’s last standing ICE jail, which is run by CoreCivic, remains open.

Like immigrant rights activists throughout the country, New Jersey organizers are concerned about the Trump administration’s upcoming attacks, but having seen gains advance and then reverse under the Biden administration, many feel their fight remains consistent regardless of who holds the presidency.

One of the groups at the forefront of fighting for immigrant rights in the state is the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice (NJAIJ), a coalition of more than 50 organizations. The coalition’s executive director, Amy Torres, told Truthout that Trump’s election has not changed the fundamental nature of their work.

“The truth is we’ve been doing the same work we’ve done all along, fighting for state and local policies that affirm immigrants belong in New Jersey, that they have a right to be here, and that they have their fair share of resources as a result,” Torres said.

Immigrant Rights Organizing Surged Under Trump

Many of New Jersey’s most dedicated immigrant rights activists were organizing long before Trump’s 2016 campaign brought the issue to national attention with extreme xenophobic rhetoric and policies. Kathy O’Leary, a member of the progressive Catholic organization Pax Christi, began organizing in solidarity with immigrants under the George W. Bush administration. She explained that much of the local organizing activity is shaped by which party holds the presidency.

“Those who oppose immigration have been very successful at changing the narrative even despite the facts on the ground.”

“Organizing in a blue state under various administrations, it’s easier to get traction when there’s a Republican administration in D.C.,” O’Leary said. According to her, much of New Jersey’s wealthier, suburban population pays less attention to attacks on oppressed communities when Democratic presidents are behind them.

Capitalizing on that surge in activity under the first Trump administration, immigrant rights organizers in New Jersey and New York formed the coalition Abolish ICE NY-NJ with a goal of ending immigrant detention in both states. Tania Mattos, a member of the coalition from Queens, spoke about the success of the campaign.

“We were able to make a lot of gains in closing county contracts with ICE and also making it something believable … that immigration detention should not exist,” Mattos told Truthout. The Abolish ICE NY-NJ coalition was at the forefront of getting New Jersey to ban private ICE contracts.

Shortly after the coalition formed in 2019, the brutal police killing of George Floyd in 2020 reignited a mass movement against racist policing. This created more space for many immigrant rights activists to rally opposition to the carceral system. Brett Robertson, a member of the North Jersey chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as well as the DSA’s Abolition Working Group, believes the 2020 uprising played a consequential role in advancing the fight against ICE detention.

“There is on some level an understanding that we live in a very oppressive carceral state,” Robertson said.

Fighting in the Face of Setbacks

By the time New Jersey activists won the state law, the surge in opposition to immigrant detention under Trump had begun to die down. Even after the ban was passed, EDC stayed open because CoreCivic had renewed a contract with the facility before the passage of the ban. Despite this, some organizers who had stayed active through Biden’s first year in office began to focus on issues other than immigrant detention. Robertson believes this was a mistake and played a role in how easily the federal government was able to challenge the state law against ICE contracts.

“Largely I attribute it to a victim of [the movement’s] successes,” Robertson said. “I was never of the mind that like the job was done. I feel like a lot of people thought that.”

As Todd Miller reported in The Nation, border security contracts issued to private companies reached record levels under Biden. Additionally, ICE and Customs and Border Protection contracts with the private industry reached a value of $23.5 billion under Biden’s first three years in office, surpassing that spent on similar contracts during Trump’s entire first term. According to the ACLU, the average amount of people in ICE detention increased while Biden was president from an average of 15,444 people in detention each day in January 2021, to an average of 30,003 people in detention each day by July 2023.

O’Leary believes that the Democratic Party has played a role in the loss of momentum by promising to fight for immigrant rights so activists will vote for them, but doing little to deliver on those promises once they’re elected.

“The Democrats have been using immigration, and the potential of immigration reform as this carrot. They are the party of the carrot and the Republicans are the party of the stick,” O’Leary said. “The Democrats don’t want to solve this issue either. They want to keep talking about it.”

New Jersey is not the only “blue state” to see its advances erode during the Biden administration. A California ban on private prison detention was stopped by a federal appeals court in 2022, and Washington state legislation to guarantee more “state oversight” of a private detention center was also blocked by a federal judge earlier this year.

Public anti-immigrant sentiment also appears to be rising across the country, driven in part by political fearmongering. According to a Rutgers-Eagleton poll of New Jersey voters, 9 in 10 of voters polled said they support greater border security measures, and a plurality of 49 percent of those polled expressed support for mass deportations. In New York, Democrats including Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams are already promising to aid Trump in his attacks on immigrants.

Mattos said these setbacks show the importance of building support for immigrants at the grassroots. “It strengthens our belief that true change comes from communities and people, neighborhoods and people on the ground, and really we’re gonna have to push again and really organize together to show the real consequences,” Mattos said.

Torres of the NJAIJ expressed similar sentiments. “Those who oppose immigration have been very successful at changing the narrative even despite the facts on the ground,” Torres said. “I think once they see some of these policies play out under the Trump administration, hopefully people realize and understand what that policy is actually going to look like in practice.”

Currently, NJAIJ is lobbying the state government to codify the Immigrant Trust Act, which would protect individuals from unnecessary collection or disclosure of their immigration status. In New York, organizers like Mattos are pushing for their state to pass the Dignity Not Detention Act, which they hope can put an end to state-run immigrant detention.

O’Leary hopes that with Trump returning to office some of the people who tuned out for the past four years will once again become active.

“However, many days we have before the inauguration will give us an idea of where this is heading and whether or not the grassroots wake up,” O’Leary said. “[The grassroots] were told to not organize, to not criticize Biden, and anytime you criticized Biden you were told ‘Well if you criticize Biden you’re gonna get Trump.’ Well now we’ve got Trump.”