Keep ICE out of NJ’s schools, hospitals, and courthouses! Tell the Law & Public Safety Committee to Move Forward on A4611

Help ensure that New Jersey’s immigrants feel safe going to school, making a doctor’s appointment or testifying as a witness to a crime — tell the State Assembly and bill-sponsor John Wisniewski (D-19): “Move Forward on bill A 4611!”

Recent executive orders allowing ICE agents to detain and deport any undocumented person, even those who have committed no other crime than being undocumented, have stoked fear in immigrant communities around the country. Undocumented families in various cities have kept children home from school, have cancelled doctor’s appointments, and have avoided public places, fearful that they could be apprehended by ICE.

Assembly bill A4611, introduced by John Wisniewski, would help calm those fears, by limiting immigration enforcement in schools, healthcare settings, shelters and courthouses. It would also prohibit state and local law enforcement agencies from enforcing federal immigration law or sharing information about immigration status, except in the case of a criminal warrant or for a federal request about a person’s criminal arrest and conviction history.

A4611 is currently in the Assembly’s Law and Public Safety Committee. Please join us in making some phone calls to get this bill out of committee and up for a vote!  Call the committee chair and Assemb. Wisniewski (phone numbers above). If you live in the following districts, you have a representative on the committee — call them as a constituent and tell them to move forward on A4611!

Why should you care about this if you are not an undocumented immigrant? Besides the humanitarian importance of keeping families together, there are real public safety concerns to heightened ICE enforcement. The recently-extended reach of ICE action is supposed to increase public safety. But public safety is NOT improved when kids are too afraid to go to school, when sick people are too afraid to go the doctor, when homeless people are too afraid to go to a shelter, and when witnesses to crime are too afraid to go to a courthouse to testify. Instead, the threat and fear of ICE raids could lead to LESS public safety–kids who aren’t in school during the day, sick people who spread their germs to the wider community, police unable to apprehend suspects because undocumented witnesses are too afraid to report a crime, and prosecutors unable to convict dangerous criminals because undocumented witnesses are too afraid to show up at a courthouse and testify.

Call to support A4611 and help ensure that New Jersey’s immigrant communities can feel safe in our local institutions.

LEARN MORE

• about bill A4611
• about undocumented immigrants in the U.S. 
• about undocumented immigrants and the taxes they pay
• about crime and undocumented immigrants