Immigration enforcement targets a wide swath of N.J.

In a series of New Jersey raids announced last week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took into custody 101 foreign nationals they said were in this county illegally--a sweep that stretched across much of the state. Experts say the targeted areas underscored the wide landscape where immigrants live in the state. While most of those arrested were in Essex, Hudson, Camden and Middlesex counties, ICE said others were taken into custody in Atlantic, Bergen, Burlington, Cumberland, Mercer, Monmouth, Morris, Passaic, Somerset and Union counties. Lori Nessel, director of the Seton Hall University School of Law Center for Social Justice, said while the largest numbers of immigrants facing deportation are found in New Jersey's largest cities, "it is notable that there are now immigrants facing deportation in even the smallest towns and boroughs." In fact, new data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a non-partisan research group based at Syracuse University of pending cases in the state's immigration court showed those facing deportation live throughout New Jersey. And they are not just in the urban centers that have traditionally been home to immigrant communities. That data, which TRAC said was based on a detailed analysis of millions of records covering each deportation proceeding initiated by the Department of Homeland Security, was obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), a unit within the Department of Justice which oversees in the administrative courts.