NJ Democrats demand end to immigration policy of separating families at the border

New Jersey Democrats lashed out on Tuesday against the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” approach to immigration enforcement, which has led to the separation of more than 2,000 children from parents at the southwestern border, adding their voices to a national bipartisan outcry.

The state’s attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, demanded an end to a policy that he said undermines community trust and law enforcement efforts. Gov. Phil Murphy signed an executive order whose goal, he said, is “to prevent state resources from being used to help federal authorities separate families.”

“New Jersey will not be a party to this utterly inhumane policy,” Murphy said at a news conference in Trenton on Tuesday.

And in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon, Sen. Bob Menendez said it was time for the Senate to “have its conscience pricked,” and that President Donald Trump is lying about what is happening at the border. He played a recording, first posted by ProPublica, of detained children crying after being removed from their parents at the border.

“They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but the audio released yesterday by ProPublica is worth a million tears,” Menendez said. “How do you submit the cries of innocent children to the Congressional Record? I don’t know how you do that, but you can hear it.”

The criticism came two days after seven Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey and New York met with immigration detainees at a federal center in Elizabeth, some of whom had been separated from their children after crossing the southwestern border. The lawmakers introduced legislation Tuesday aimed at ending the separations. 

More: ‘What I saw … is inhumane:’ NJ Democrats meet with detainees separated from children

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The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced last month, calls for migrants who cross into the United States to be prosecuted and held in criminal custody. Any children who traveled with them are sent to shelters before they are released to relatives. From May 5 to June 9, 2,342 children were separated from their families at the border, Department of Homeland Security officials said Tuesday.

The practice of separating children from their migrant parents has sparked a backlash among both Democrats and Republicans.

The Trump administration has defended the policy, saying that some migrants who have been stopped at the border are not entering the country with their own children.

Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security secretary, fielded questions during the daily White House briefing on Monday. She said it is up to Congress to fix the immigration system, and that the administration is just enforcing existing law.

“It is the exclusive product of loopholes in our federal immigration laws that prevent illegal immigrant minors and family members from being detained and removed to their home countries,’’ she said. “In other words, these loopholes create a functionally open border. … We have repeatedly called on Congress to close these loopholes.” 

Grewal, the New Jersey attorney general, joined Democratic attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia in signing a letter to Sessions and Nielsen on Tuesday opposing the policy.

“What’s happening on the border is having a direct impact on what’s happening in New Jersey,” Grewal said in a statement. “As a career prosecutor, I’ve seen that law enforcement works best when it has the trust of local communities, and the heartlessness of the administration’s family separation policy is undermining the trust we’ve worked so hard to build. That makes it less likely crime victims and witnesses will come forward to work with law enforcement, and that, in turn, makes our communities less safe.”

Murphy said he didn’t know what practical effect, if any, his executive order would have on the privately run Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility, which houses some adults who were separated from children at the U.S.-Mexico border, or on county jails in Bergen, Essex and Hudson counties that also house immigration detainees.

Nonetheless, Murphy offered a full-throated condemnation of the policy on Tuesday.

“That these detainment practices are being conducted in Elizabeth, New Jersey, within mere miles of the Statue of Liberty, is beyond abhorrent,” he said.

Read Murphy’s executive order:

A spokeswoman for the state Treasury Department later said the main impact of the order would be to ensure that New Jersey National Guard troops and equipment are not used at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump signed a proclamation in April deploying National Guard troops to the border to help cut down on unauthorized border crossings.

The spokeswoman, Jennifer Sciortino, did not say whether any New Jersey personnel or equipment are currently deployed at the border. Several other states have withheld resources to protest the Trump administration’s practice of separating families.

Before Murphy signed the order, Johanna Calle, director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said she hoped it would bar state agencies from sharing information with federal officials about residents’ immigration status. That would prevent a repeat of what happened in Washington State, where a state agency regularly provided federal immigration authorities with residents’ photos and driver’s license applications.

Calle later said her organization was trying to understand the implications of the measure, but even an order with a narrower effect “shows that the governor stands by immigrant families.”

“Immigrant families are being targeted left and right, so the fact that you have a governor that’s willing to take a step like this is good for us,” she said.

House bill will be a ‘litmus test’ for Republicans

On Sunday — Father’s Day — U.S. Reps. Bill Pascrell Jr. of Paterson, Frank Pallone of Long Branch and Albio Sires of West New York and four Democratic colleagues from New York met with five men at the Elizabeth detention facility. Some of the detainees said they had entered the country by crossing the southwestern border, and that their children or younger siblings had been taken from them. 

The representatives introduced a bill on Tuesday calling for a halt to the separations. It would be a companion bill to one introduced in the Senate known as the Keep Families Together Act, which would limit the separation of families at or near ports of entry.

“What I saw in Elizabeth on Father’s Day broke my heart,” Pascrell said in a statement on Tuesday. “Trump can tweet all night long blaming everybody under the sun. But this is a deliberate choice. This administration is purposely ripping families apart to divide this country and to build Trump’s stupid wall.” 

He said the House bill would end the practice of separating families and would be a litmus test for the Republican caucus.

“If you support families, if you support humanity, if you support the words on the Statue of Liberty, you will support it,” he said. 

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In a media call on Tuesday about the care of minors in shelters, officials from the Department of Homeland Security said 2,235 families were detained at the border between May 5 and June 9, with 2,206 adults being referred for prosecution. They said 2,342 children were separated from their families during that time. 

Between October and April, a Homeland Security official said, authorities identified 148 cases in which 301 immigrants were found to be fraudulently posing as the parents or relatives of children who accompanied them as they crossed the border.

The officials said they can’t detain a family for more than 20 days, under a settlement agreement.

The Administration for Children and Families is a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that receives children who cross the border alone and those who have been separated from their parents. The organization’s acting assistant secretary, Steven Wagner, said that 80 percent of the more than 11,700 children in its care crossed the border alone.

The division has more than 100 shelters in 17 states where children are sheltered as they wait to be released to parents or other relatives. Some of the facilities are designed to serve children with special needs, Wagner said, while others are for what he described as “tender age” children under 13. 

Wagner said he didn’t have figures on how many children had been separated from their parents who have since been reunited with them. 

“This policy is relatively new. We are still working through the experience of reunifying kids with their parents after adjudication,” he said. “I think we are going through normal processes of identifying alternative sponsors in case we are unable to reunite with the parents, but the overriding objective when we are aware of the presence of a parent in the country — our goal then is to reunite with the parent.” 

Washington Correspondent Herb Jackson contributed to this article.

Email: alvarado@northjersey.com and pugliese@northjersey.com

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