New Jersey must immediately cancel all contracts with ICE

In January 2021, the New Jersey Assembly and Senate released A5207/S3361, which would prohibit “the State, local government agencies, and private detention facilities operating in this State from entering into, renewing, or extending immigration detention agreements.” This bill represents a clear recognition that collaborating in Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) detention is fundamentally immoral, and that it is inappropriate for any New Jersey governmental agency or entity to participate in and/or profit from such institutionalized cruelty. We see the restrictions in this bill as a necessary, but insufficient approach to ending New Jersey’s complicity in ICE detention. Contracts with ICE are a moral abomination, with existing contracts lasting up to a decade, and justice delayed is justice denied. Other states have recognized this, with the Maryland state Assembly having just passed a bill stipulating the immediate termination of ICE contracts. We call for the New Jersey Assembly and Senate to dispense with half measures: amend the bill to terminate existing contracts immediately, and end ICE in our state.

The immediate end of contracts between ICE and New Jersey government entities is only one step towards the need to abolish ICE. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), including the North New Jersey chapter, have been consistently dedicated to this struggle. In 2019, the national DSA adopted a resolution demanding the “abolition of ICE and an end to the persecution, jailing and deportation of immigrants” as part of a broader commitment to “make defense of immigrant and refugee rights a top national priority of the organization.” In 2021, the North New Jersey chapter of DSA has elected to make the abolition of ICE a priority campaign, building on years of our members’ involvement in immigrant justice activism.

The ongoing cruelty of ICE detention underscores the need for immediate action. In February of 2019, the Department of Homeland Security’s own Inspector General released a report recognizing the horrific conditions inside Essex County’s ICE detention center. While the Inspector General’s documentation of slimy lunch meats, moldy bathrooms, abusive strip searches, and mesh cages inside glass enclosures that ICE calls “outdoor recreation” was not new information to the many immigration activists who have long called for the closure of New Jersey’s ICE detention centers, the report was yet another indictment on the failure to take desperately needed action to close the four ICE facilities in Bergen, Essex, Hudson, and Union Counties.

As the New York City metro area became one of the hardest hit areas in the world during the first-wave of COVID-19, and New Jersey held the distinction of having the highest prison death rate from COVID-19 in the United States, it became even more urgent to close these jails. As the public was told to wear masks, practice social distancing, and ventilate indoor spaces, these health measures were simply impossible to follow for people being held by ICE in crowded and windowless prisons. Dozens of people in detention at multiple facilities engaged in hunger strikes to bring attention to these deadly conditions with ICE retaliating against hunger strikers on the inside and local police departments striking back against protesters on the outside. If ever there was a time to “free them all,” it is now.

New Jersey needs state action because our local officials have failed to uphold democratic accountability. Hudson County’s commissioner (then freeholder) board and executive lied to the public when it renewed its ICE contract in 2018, assuring that the two-year extension was with the specific goal of an “exit.” Instead, at a notorious November 2020 meeting that ran twelve hours and featured over one hundred community members speaking in complete unanimity against further extension of the ICE contract, the commissioners voted 6-3 for a shocking ten-year extension, against the clear will of the community. Similarly, Elberon Development Group, owner of the private Elizabeth Detention Center, vowed in the summer of 2020 to end its lease to the carceral-profiteer firm CoreCivic, before promptly retreating from public view with no follow-up whatsoever, as CoreCivic assures its shareholders they will remain in Elizabeth profiting from caging humans for years to come. These shameful failures demand state intervention.

We can’t admit that it’s right to shut down future ICE jails, but then let existing ICE contracts continue for years and years more. The North New Jersey DSA demands that our state’s legislators pass A5207/S3361 with an amendment to close existing facilities now, and end ICE in New Jersey once and for all. Join us by signing our petition here: bit.ly/amend_end_ICE