New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill Sides With Anti-ICE Protesters After Violent Chaos at Newark Detention Facility (VIDEO)

 

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill held a press conference Saturday addressing the violentanti-ICE protests outside Delaney Hall in Newark, and her comments showed exactly why blue-state leaders cannot be trusted to defend law enforcement when immigration enforcement becomes politically inconvenient.

The protests outside the ICE detention facility have spiraled into chaos. Demonstrators have confronted law enforcement, federal officers have been targeted, journalists have faced hostility, and authorities have been forced to respond as crowds escalated near the facility. 

The issue should have been simple. ICE agents are federal law enforcement officers carrying out federal immigration law. The governor’s first responsibility should be to ensure that officers can do their jobs safely and that violent protesters are arrested, prosecuted, and removed from the area.

Instead, Sherrill opened her press conference by emphasizing the protesters.

“My focus is on protecting people’s right to protest peacefully and ensuring everyone’s safety,” Sherrill said.

That sounds reasonable until the rest of her remarks made clear where her political sympathies were. 

Rather than focus on ICE agents who have been attacked and threatened, Sherrill immediately shifted the discussion toward alleged actions by ICE in other states and claimed she would not allow ICE to use the protests as a “pretext” to expand operations in New Jersey.

“I will not give ICE a pretext to expand operations at Delaney Hall or across our state,” Sherrill said.

That line revealed the entire problem. A governor watching anti-ICE unrest unfold outside a federal detention facility should not treat ICE as the threat. 

Violent agitators are the threat. People trying to block immigration enforcement are the threat. Protesters who surround law enforcement vehicles, threaten personnel and bring projectiles into the area are the threat.

Sherrill then praised “the vast majority of protesters” and said the focus should be on “advocating for better conditions” inside Delaney Hall. 

She also said New Jersey law enforcement moved in because action was necessary to “avoid escalation from ICE.”

Escalation from ICE?

ICE did not create the chaos outside Delaney Hall. ICE agents were doing their jobs. The protests were directed against them because the left has spent years demonizing immigration enforcement and portraying federal officers as villains for enforcing the law.

Even more revealing, state law enforcement later described exactly what officers were facing. Lieutenant Colonel David Sierotowicz said agitators surrounded a marked law enforcement vehicle and made threats toward personnel. 

He said individuals were seen retrieving face coverings, gas masks, fireworks, rocks and other projectiles from a nearby tent area. That is not a peaceful protest. That is organized escalation.

Sherrill did eventually acknowledge that five of the six people arrested were from outside New Jersey and said some national extremist groups had become involved. 

But even then, the governor framed the matter around protecting the anti-ICE cause from being distracted by violence. Her message was not a full-throated defense of law enforcement. 

Her message was that protesters should “bring the temperature down” so attention could return to detainees and Delaney Hall’s conditions.

This is the modern Democrat Party’s immigration problem in one press conference. The left claims to support law and order until the law being enforced involves illegal immigration. The left claims to oppose violence until the violence is attached to a cause favored by progressive activists. 

Sherrill ran as a supposedly moderate Democrat, but Saturday’s press conference told a very different story. 

When ICE agents were under pressure and anti-ICE activists were creating chaos in Newark, New Jersey’s governor did not make law enforcement the center of her message. She made the protesters the center of her message.