Starting last week, federal immigration agents can no longer walk into non-public areas of Essex County buildings, parks or parking lots without a judicial warrant in hand. The change touches county-owned property across all 22 municipalities, including Millburn, Short Hills and Livingston — and it's already drawn pushback from the federal government.

The Essex County Board of County Commissioners' "ICE Out of Essex County" resolution took effect July 9, following a unanimous vote in May. It bars U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection from conducting civil immigration enforcement on county property unless they present a court order, and it prohibits county employees, contractors and agents — including those at Essex County College — from using county resources to assist federal immigration operations.

The Department of Homeland Security went public with its objections around July 14. Spokesperson Lauren Bis said the resolution will hamper ICE's ability to transfer detainees out of the Essex County Correctional Facility, which DHS describes as the state's largest county-run prison. "It also requires us to have a larger presence to arrest criminals at large instead of in the controlled setting of a jail," Bis said, adding that sanctuary policies "make New Jersey communities less safe" for both the public and ICE officers.

Commissioner Brendan Gill, who introduced the resolution, framed it largely as a budget issue: taxpayer money funding county law enforcement should protect county residents, he argued, not subsidize a federal ICE budget that dwarfs Essex County's entire budget. Gill, married to a Colombian immigrant, has called the issue "deeply personal," and the measure passed by acclamation. Commissioner President Carlos Pomares told NJ Advance Media that "brutal ICE activities" over the past year and a half have pushed law-abiding immigrants away from participating in community life.

Essex ended its own multimillion-dollar contract to house ICE detainees at the Newark correctional facility back in 2021. Federal detainees are now held instead at Delaney Hall, a Newark facility owned by The GEO Group that reopened under President Trump's second term.

The resolution mirrors the state's Immigrant Trust Directive, first established under former Gov. Phil Murphy in 2018 and codified into law by Gov. Mikie Sherrill this year. Just weeks before Essex County's policy took effect, a federal judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit against Newark, Jersey City, Paterson and Hoboken over their own sanctuary policies, ruling those restrictions were nearly identical to the statewide directive already on the books.

A national report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that of more than 60,000 people in ICE detention nationwide as of April, about 71% had no criminal conviction at the time of their arrest — a statistic that sits uneasily alongside DHS's framing of the policy as a public safety risk.

The resolution also directs the county to set up training so employees and residents understand their rights under the new rules, though no timeline has been announced. Commissioners meet next on Aug. 12 at 5 p.m. in Room 506 of the Hall of Records in Newark, streamed live on the Essex County Commissioners YouTube channel.