ICE’s Own New Jersey Filing Undercuts the Criminal Immigrant Narrative
DHS told a federal court that 351,008 people in New Jersey have final orders of removal — while its own filing listed criminal records or pending charges for only a fraction of them.
DHS used a New Jersey court filing to argue for expanded immigration detention by pointing to hundreds of thousands of people with final removal orders in the state. But the same filing undercuts the public-safety narrative ICE and DHS often use to justify mass deportation.
In an April 23 federal court filing in Case 2:26-cv-02884-JKS-JBC, DHS said that “within New Jersey” there are 351,008 individuals who have final orders of removal, including 11,568 with criminal records and 13,325 with pending criminal charges. The filing was submitted as part of the government’s opposition to a preliminary injunction in litigation over a proposed ICE detention center in Roxbury, New Jersey.
Patch reported the same court figures and said that people with criminal records and pending criminal charges together amounted to roughly 7.09 percent of the people facing deportation proceedings in the filing. Patch also reported that the remaining 326,115 people, nearly 93 percent, had no mention of criminal records or pending criminal charges, and that ICE had not responded to its request for clarification.
The distinction matters. Immigration enforcement is often sold to the public as a campaign against dangerous people. But the numbers DHS put before the court describe a much broader civil deportation machine — one aimed at hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom were not identified in that filing as having criminal records or pending charges.
DHS used those numbers to support its argument for a detention and processing center in Roxbury, at 1879 Route 46, with planned capacity for 542 detainees. In other words, the filing did not only list removal numbers. It used them to justify more detention infrastructure.
New Jersey has already become a flashpoint for immigration detention and enforcement. Earlier this month, Governor Mikie Sherrill announced a $12 million increase for the Detention Deportation Defense Initiative, bringing total funding to $20.2 million, along with a Rapid Legal Response Initiative through the state’s Office of New Americans. The governor’s office framed the move as a response to escalating immigration detention and due-process concerns.
The public record is clear enough to cut through the rhetoric: DHS is arguing for detention expansion while its own court filing shows that the overwhelming majority of people swept into the New Jersey removal numbers are not listed there as having criminal records or pending charges.
That is not a narrow public-safety operation. It is mass deportation infrastructure.
Immigration enforcement does not stop at detention doors. It reaches families, workplaces, courts, housing, schools, and entire communities forced to live under threat.
Americans Against ICE keeps the record public.