Following weeks of protests, Democratic infighting, media attention and a lawsuit from local religious leaders, Hudson County officials announced Thursday that they will move to end a multi-million dollar detention contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The so-called "path to exit" means that the county jail will not house immigrant detainees after 2020 and will in the interim seek to improve services for them, according to a statement from Tom DeGise, the county executive. The plan requires a vote next week by the county board of chosen freeholders, which in July renewed the ICE contract in a surprise, unannounced vote, fueling the controversy that led to Thursday's decision.
The all-Democratic freeholder board is expected to approve DeGise's proposal, including the chairman of the board, Anthony Vanieri, who had been a staunch proponent of the contract. "I will urge my colleagues to support this plan because it represents a humane, reasonable approach," he said in a statement.
Even though the contract to hold immigrants goes back to the 1990s, the Hudson County Correctional Facility had grown into a de facto immigration detention center since President Trump was elected, with about 700 male and female immigrants arrested in New York housed there. That amounts to a majority of the inmate population at the jail.
Officials said that the reason why the contract is not being scrapped immediately is in part to avoid disrupting the lives of the immigrant detainees, all of whom were picked up by ICE in New York, because many have relatives and lawyers in the area. But the county also needs time to find ways to backfill its budget after relying on nearly $2 million a month from ICE.
"Just a month ago, I did not see a path that would allow us to move forward on a path to exit," DeGise said in a statement. "I’m pleased that after what I have heard from state and federal leaders, I believe we have a consensus on how Hudson County can exit the contract in a responsible manner."
The policy reversal comes after meetings with immigration advocates and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, who could play a key role in weening the county off the ICE revenue. The county could, for example, begin accepting inmates from state prisons and other counties in exchange for fees. More federal prisoners could also be housed at the jail through an existing contract with the U.S. Marshals Service.
For weeks, Hudson County leaders argued that the ICE contract was a necessary way of making money — preventing the layoffs of 100 corrections officers and subsidizing the tax rolls by $11.7 million a year. They provided WNYC with an analysis indicating that the tax levy would otherwise go up in each town in the county: $2.4 million in Hoboken, for example, and $4.5 million in Jersey City.
But politicians in both of those cities dismissed the economic argument and said they would not be complicit in what they called Trump's deportation machine. Hoboken and Jersey City councils unanimously approved resolutions urging county freeholders to end the ICE contract, and Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop became forceful opponents of the deal.
"This shows what advocates being vocal can achieve," Fulop tweeted Thursday. "Our side of this conversation is the moral and right side but there is more to do."
Advocates were certainly vocal. Jail director Ron Edwards said protests outside were so loud at one point last month that a near riot was caused inside one of the facility's immigration wings.
"The PEOPLE made this happen," tweeted Amol Sinha, the executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey. The ACLU represented seven local religious leaders who filed suit last week against the freeholders for allegedly violating the Open Public Meetings Act by voting to renew the deal in July without public notice. That suit added to the pressure on local officials.
And there were other factors playing into Thursday's decision. Conditions at the jail have been criticized by advocates and human rights groups for several years. On a recent tour, WNYC found that immigrant detainees were playing a game using a marked-up bedsheet because they were not allowed to have boards and game pieces.
During the two-year phase-out of the contract, and with county officials pledging that revenue will be used to improve conditions, eyes will also be on medical care. Six inmates recently died at the jail in a nine-month period.
The other issues involved were national. Controversies around ICE — particularly the policy of separating children from their parents at the border — turned attention to the fact that Democrats in the most diverse and liberal parts of New Jersey were working with the immigration agency.
And the Trump Administration's stepped-up enforcement of immigration meant that immigrants who had long lived in the country but had overstayed their visas were more likely to be sent to detention, filling beds in Essex, Bergen and Hudson county jails. A recent bail reform law in New Jersey that led to a dramatic reduction in the number of regular inmates in the jails made room for immigrants to fill those beds.
"I think it's a good sign for New Jersey," said Johanna Calle, director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. "Hudson County has been a really tough area for us, because we had such a hard time telling the rest of the state to re-prioritize caring about immigrant communities and stop their relationship with ICE when one of the most diverse counties in the state was doing it. It hopefully will start a momentum to make sure the rest of the state does the same thing."
That focus will likely now turn to Essex and Bergen counties, where Democratic governments also have long-standing detention contracts with ICE that have come under renewed scrutiny. The end goal, Calle said, is not to ship immigrants elsewhere in the country but to reduce the number of available prison beds so ICE is forced to reconsider how many people it detains.
"This is why we really need to be careful about talking and making sure that whatever is going on here is coordinated throughout the states," she said.
Another option, she said, is for the state Attorney General to enact a policy forbidding such arrangements with ICE.
A spokesperson for ICE said the agency had no immediate comment on the announcement.
While the governor has spoken out against President Trump's immigration policies, he has not taken a position on the counties' ICE contracts. Thursday's announcement came at a convenient time for Murphy, politically. The announcement was made public immediately before a fundraiser for the Hudson County Democrats, and protesters were outside ready to make their opposition to the contract known to both the governor and local officials.
Seth Kaper-Dale, a former gubernatorial candidate and pastor who provides assistance to undocumented immigrants and refugees, found out about the contract announcement on the way to the protest.
"That's a bunch of baloney," he said. "You have someone trying to get critics off his back by saying we're starting the process to get out of the ICE contract. That's like saying, 'We're exiting Iraq, we're exiting Afghanistan.' We've heard that from politicians before."
Kaper-Dale said the county jail should accept no new detainees at all, beginning now.
Immigration attorneys were also upset by Thursday's announcement -- for a different reason. The Legal Aid Society in New York, which provides publicly-subsidized pro bono representation to many New Yorkers detained in Hudson County, said in a statement that killing the contract means that "ICE will simply detain New York residents even further away, limiting contact with family members and making life-saving legal representation that much more difficult."
Attorneys with Brooklyn Defender Services and Bronx Defenders also released a statement saying that although they support the movement to abolish ICE, detainees could now be moved "to remote private prisons where neither attorneys nor vigilant community members and clergy would be able to advocate for their rights and safety."
In recent months local jails across the country have ended contracts to detain ICE prisoners, including in Alexandria, Va., Sacramento County, Cal., and Springfield, Ore. And on Thursday, Atlanta's mayor announced that all ICE detainees will be transferred out of the city jail.