Gov. Mikie Sherrill says N.J. will create a database for uploading videos of ICE: ‘Get your phone out’
Sherrill said her administration will create an online portion for people to upload cell phone videos of ICE, following the national uproar over shootings in Minnesota.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said her administration will create an online database for people to upload videos they record of ICE.
“If you see an ICE agent in the street, get your phone out,” she urged New Jerseyans in an appearance on The Daily Show on Wednesday night with host Desi Lydic in New York City.
Sherrill, a Democrat and former member of Congress, said her administration will set up an online portal “so people can upload all their cell phone videos and alert people.”
Cell phone video from onlookers has been used to rebut the narrative of President Donald Trump’s administration after federal agents fatally shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Sherrill outlined her plan just eight days after she was sworn into office. She became the second woman to lead the state and the first female veteran governor in the country.
“They will pick people up, they will not tell us who they are … they’ll pick up American citizens. They picked up a 5-year-old child,” she said on the show. “We want documentation, and we are going to make sure we get it.”
The policy announcement was not featured in the television broadcast, but it was posted to YouTube shortly afterward by The Daily Show.
New Jersey residents routinely report ICE activity and arrests around the state, including recently in Bridgeton and Princeton. The Garden State is home to about the seventh-largest undocumented population in the country, an estimated 476,000 people, according to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said Sherrill needs to do more.
“We don’t need to see more evidence of what ICE is doing,” Torres said. “They’ve arrested a New Jersey mayor. They’ve gone after a sitting member of Congress. They’ve opened up a 1,000-bed facility in our state’s largest city and they’re ripping our families apart. New Jersey doesn’t need more evidence, we need leadership who is going to act.”
She said the governor should work to pass additional immigrant protections, like those contained in two bills former Gov. Phil Murphy rejected in his final day in office that would have safeguarded immigrants’ data and expanded the state’s sanctuary policy.
Sherrill, meanwhile, also said her administration plans to put out information to help New Jerseyans know their rights in the state. And she said she will not allow ICE raids “to be staged from state properties.”
Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, compared U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to secret police forces she observed in foreign nations during her service.
“I knew where this was headed when we started to see DHS people taking loyalty oaths to the president, not the Constitution,” she said. “We saw people in the street with masks and no insignia, so not accountable at all, hiding from the population.”
New Jersey has become a key state in the Trump administration’s plan to arrest and deport millions of immigrants, and has been slated for an expansion of ICE detention.
A facility in Elizabeth was for a time the only detention center in the state. But the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall in Newark was reopened for detention in May, and the administration recently announced plans to hold 1,000 to 3,000 detainees at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, which spans parts of Burlington and Ocean Counties.
The specific details surrounding that South Jersey undertaking remain unknown.
In Wednesday night’s television appearance, Sherrill denounced the Minneapolis shootings, calling Good “a mother of three, who drops her 6-year-old off in her Honda Pilot and then gets shot and killed.”
And she noted that Pretti worked at the Minneapolis VA as an ICU nurse.
“I saw his official photo, and I’ve seen a million of those … with the flag in the background, I know those guys,” Sherrill said.
Pretti was fatally shot by a Border Patrol agent, while Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent. Both agencies fall under the Department of Homeland Security.
The new governor also said on The Daily Show that she called Trump to discuss his decision to freeze funding for the planned Gateway Tunnel in North Jersey, a project championed by Sherrill that would connect New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River.
“I haven’t heard back from him yet to flag for him that this is about 100,000 jobs in the region, and by the way, his numbers aren’t looking so good in that area,” she said.
Sherrill said the president “should listen to me because I just won back all his voters,” citing her victory in November of more than 14 percentage points, outperforming her Democratic predecessors and reversing rightward shifts in 2024.
But she also said it is time to “rethink” the federal government’s relationship with states because of attacks from Trump.
“We need to start looking at expanding,” she said. “This is a time when I think we’re going to see a large expansion of state power, because the states are the rational actors in this space.”
Sherrill also played a game with Lydic where she picked which things were most New Jersey, choosing Tony Soprano over Snookie; hating New Yorkers over hating Pennsylvanians; diners over Wawa; and “C’mon!” over “Oh!”