The mayors of Newark and Jersey City have signed executive orders designating their cities as sanctuary cities. Immigration becoming an issue even in towns with few immigrants

Wyckoff hardly resembles the small Iowa town where college student Mollie Tibbetts was murdered, allegedly by a farm worker in the country illegally. The wealthy Bergen County suburb located 45 minutes from Manhattan doesn’t even have a migrant farm laborer population.

But Wyckoff Township Committee Member Thomas Madigan, a Republican, invoked Tibbets’ name last week when he pushed back on Gov. Phil Murphy’s campaign pledge that “if need be, we will be a sanctuary not just city, but state.”


Little has come from Murphy’s promise, and it’s not even clear exactly what the governor meant when he made it during a debate last year. Still, Madigan, who’s up for reelection, put forward a resolution opposing it, citing “the costs involved, the safety considerations involved and ... the unfortunate situation where a young girl named Mollie Tibbetts ended up — an illegal immigrant in this country admitted to killing her by a field.”

It remains to be seen what impact the Republican anti-immigration rhetoric that’s percolating through New Jersey will have on Murphy‘s efforts to fulfill his sanctuary state promise.

To be sure, the governor has taken some steps to help undocumented immigrants, including setting aside $2.1 million in the state budget for legal services to help those facing deportation and signing a law to allow undocumented students brought to the country as children to be able to qualify for state financial aid at colleges and universities.

In Wyckoff, Madigan’s resolution touched off a heated, half-hour debate, as the council’s two Democrats questioned his motives. One of them, Township Committee Member Melissa Rubenstein, noted the resolution cited statistics from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration group whose founder has called for an immigration policy to preserve a majority white country.

“Do you guys know what FAIR is?“ Rubenstein asked. “It’s an organization [whose] sole purpose is to reduce legal and illegal immigration. And unfortunately their founder, John Tanton, promotes eugenics, which is basically the theory of white supremacists.”

Scenes like this are becoming more common across New Jersey as the national debate over legal and illegal immigration is playing out at the local level, where governments have little role in enforcing federal immigration policy.

The mayors of Newark and Jersey City have signed executive orders designating their cities as sanctuary cities. The orders bar the local police departments from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in many respects.

At the same time, Democratic officials in Hudson and Essex counties are in a fight with immigrant rights activists — many of whom make up part of the party’s base — over whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees should be held in county jails, a policy that has proven financially lucrative for the jails.

The debate has expanded well beyond cities with large immigrant populations.

Wyckoff, for instance, has a population that is 89 percent non-Hispanic white.

In Stafford Township — a middle-class, overwhelmingly white town in Ocean County — a group of Republicans defeated the longtime Republican mayor and his slate in the June primary by running a pro-Trump campaign that focused, in part, on illegal immigration. They’re virtually assured to win the general election in November.

And in Mendham Township, another overwhelmingly wealthy, white community in North Jersey that’s home to former Gov. Chris Christrie, the deputy mayor resigned under pressure after he shared a Facebook post comparing illegal immigrants to rabid raccoons.

While national issues sometimes play a role in local elections, the trend is becoming more common, said Ben Dworkin, director of the Rowan University’s Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship.

“American politics has become more hyper-partisan than in any other time in the modern age. You have to go back to the Civil War,” Dworkin said. “There’s extreme bitterness and tribalism. The Trump presidency has been an outgrowth of that. This is a combustible mix. And while this kind of thing has not been typical in past years, it doesn’t mean we won’t see it more often in the months and years to come.”

The Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale, an advocate for undocumented immigrants whose Highland Park church has served as a literal sanctuary for some of them, said that with 500,000 undocumented immigrants in New Jersey, the issue affects almost everyone — even in communities without big immigrant populations.

“The threats to undocumented individuals, they do matter to all of us. And I guess if you are profoundly right-wing, you could argue that the issues around immigration are impacting the overall New Jersey fabric,” Kaper-Dale said. “The weird part here is it’s being brought to the surface by Trump in negative ways and it’s being brought to the surface by resistance movements in some positive ways.

“One way or another, the issue is making it to the table,” he said.

In Wyckoff, the township committee’s two Democratic members questioned the purpose of Madigan’s resolution, especially since the state Legislature hasn’t put forth any bills to declare New Jersey a sanctuary state.

Would Madigan’s resolution mean Wyckoff’s school officials could ask students their immigration status or would the local police department effectively become an arm of ICE, they asked.

But they mainly focused the source behind the resolution, which cited statistics from FAIR.

According to Madigan’s resolution, FAIR claims illegal immigration is costing New Jersey $3 billion a year. (The figure cited comes from reports compiled by FAIR, whose methodology has been questioned, including for potentially over-counting illegal immigrants and including costs to educate and care for their citizen children without taking into account tax revenue their children will eventually pay.)

Madigan offered to remove the passage of his resolution that referred to FAIR’s statistics, but wouldn’t say who wrote the resolution, saying that it was a “combination” from “various sources” that are doing similar things “throughout the state.”

He also accused Rubenstein of “theatrics.”

“This is not theatrics,” Rubenstein shot back. “This is me trying to have a conversation about a resolution that was not written by anyone in this town, anyone in this community. It was provided to you by someone, we’re not even sure who, that contained inaccuracies, sources from racist sources, and things that have absolutely nothing to do with unfunded mandates.”

Rubenstein said in a phone interview she expects the resolution to come up for a vote at the council’s Sept. 6 meeting.

Madigan did not respond to a call and email seeking comment.

Rubenstein, in a phone interview, said she believes Madigan introduced the resolution because he’s up for reelection.

“It was was purely for political show,” she said.