1. United States
2. N.J.
3. Letter

I am your constituent in District 32. I was at Delaney Hall, and I am writing because New Jersey has made itself the crowd-control arm of a federal immigration operation it never had to touch — and the law you codified this spring was written to forbid exactly that. Start with who is inside. Delaney Hall is a for-profit detention center, owned and operated by the GEO Group under a 15-year, roughly $1 billion contract with ICE. The people held there are civil detainees — nearly three in four have no criminal record at all. For over a week they have been on hunger strike over reported medical neglect, rotten food, and inhumane conditions, and ICE has blocked everyone who could verify it: the Governor was denied entry, state health inspectors received only limited access, members of Congress were delayed. Under E.D. v. Sharkey, 928 F.3d 299 (3d Cir. 2019) — binding here — immigration detainees are owed the same Fourteenth Amendment protections as pretrial detainees, applying the Supreme Court’s framework in Bell v. Wolfish (1979) and Kingsley v. Hendrickson (2015): no conditions that amount to punishment, and no force that is objectively unreasonable. Until last week, ICE was policing its own perimeter — its own agents, its own pepper spray. Then New Jersey stepped in. The moment State Police took over, ICE agents withdrew behind the fence and let our troopers do the work: clearing the roads so ICE’s vehicles keep moving, and dispersing the people protesting the facility. NJSP in riot gear, backed by mounted units, have fired tear gas and pepper spray on demonstrators the ACLU of New Jersey calls “overwhelmingly peaceful,” and forced a marked WNBC news crew out of their vehicle and into the gas — a plain violation of Fields v. City of Philadelphia, 862 F.3d 353 (3d Cir. 2017). None of this was required. ICE cannot conscript New Jersey’s officers into a federal program — the Supreme Court settled that in Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997), reaffirmed in Murphy v. NCAA (2018) — and the Third Circuit upheld New Jersey’s own Immigrant Trust Directive against federal challenge in Ocean County v. Attorney General (3d Cir. 2021). The state chose to help anyway. The function determines the violation, not the label. State Police performing the exact role ICE had performed — clearing the way so ICE could operate inside — is the entanglement the Immigrant Trust Act forbids, whether the state calls it traffic control or not. The excessive force is an aggravation; the decision to be there at all is the core breach. I need you to: • Open an oversight investigation and subpoena NJSP leadership: who ordered the deployment, the tear gas, and the mounted charges; what the rules of engagement are; and whether and how NJSP is coordinating with ICE. • Enforce the Trust Act. Demand the state withdraw its police from ICE’s perimeter and stop providing any crowd-control or logistical support to the facility’s operation. ICE can police its own fence, as it did before. • Demand an end to the use of force and press exclusion against peaceful protesters and journalists, and immediate, unobstructed access to the facility for monitors, counsel, and press. The state didn’t have to be there. It chose to be — against its own law