New Jersey immigrant rights groups demand ‘ICE out’ in statewide bus tour

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Advocates traveled the length of New Jersey on Friday, calling on state and local officials to enact stronger protections for immigrant residents in the face of President Donald Trump’s federal immigration enforcement crackdown.

Their demands include no collaboration between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local police departments, no detention center contracts, no more ICE raids, limits on ICE access to public resources and full legal funding for immigrant communities.

The action comes just two days after New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation that prevents ICE and police officers from wearing masks and codifies a longstanding directive limiting when local and state police can support federal immigration enforcement officers. A third measure signed by Sherrill restricts health care and government entities from collecting and sharing people’s immigration status and other information.

Itzel Hernandez, immigrant rights coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee New Jersey, commended the legislation.

But, she said, “there are additional steps that we must take so we are all safe.”

“I think what this bus [tour] tries to do, above all things, is dispel the notion that New Jersey has done enough, or that we are where we need to be,” she told WHYY News in a phone call from the bus.

“For folks who don’t think that there’s room for improvement, we are happy to show them that there is. And we’re also happy to make the case as to why it is everyone’s concern when there are masked agents, unidentified, kidnapping our neighbors and killing U.S. citizens without any accountability on our streets.”

The tour, organized by immigrant rights groups including Deportation and Immigration Response Equipo, Resistencia en Acción NJ, El Pueblo Unido of Atlantic City and American Friends Service Committee New Jersey, started in Atlantic City on Friday morning.

At a stop in Trenton, participants acted out a mock wedding between ICE and local police.

Attendees objected to the marriage of the two, citing how the rise in ICE arrests and deportations since Trump took office in January 2025 has impacted families and communities.

Other stops included Freehold, New Brunswick and North Bergen. The tour ended in Roxbury, where the U.S. Department of Homeland Security purchased a warehouse with plans to convert it into an immigrant detention center.

Hernandez said the warehouse detention center is poised to be “an environmental disaster.”

The facility, projected to hold up to 1,500 people, is located in a region that provides drinking water for 70% of the state, according to state and township officials, who have filed a lawsuit against ICE and DHS. They say the increased demands on the water supply and overburdening existing sewage infrastructure could lead to potential sewage overflows, which threatens the well-being and safety of all state residents.

“Roxbury, I think, in many ways, symbolizes what a lot of people are realizing in this moment, and that is that immigration systems are intrinsically tied to a lot of injustices in our country, much of which are historic,” Hernandez said. “But it does not mean that we have to continue to stay there.”

New Jersey has one of the highest immigrant populations of any state — approximately one out of every four residents is foreign-born.