UPDATES: ALINA HABBA, GEO’S ICE PRISON, BARAKA ON MILLIONAIRES

Plus: New Jersey’s universities, students under attack by the Trump administration

In today’s post, we’re updating some of the recent stories we’ve published over the last few weeks. Here goes:

Alina Habba Redux

Habba, of course, is the “interim” U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey: interim, because she can only serve 120 days unless President Trump submits her name to the U.S. Senate for confirmation. As The New Jersey Democrat reported at the end of March, Habba has abandoned any pretense of being an impartial prosecutor, instead pledging her full loyalty to MAGA, saying, “We can turn New Jersey red.”

Now, in the latest news, Habba announced – in an April 10 interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News – that the U.S. attorney’s office has launched an “investigation” of Governor Phil Murphy and Attorney General Matt Platkin over the state’s refusal to cooperate with Trump’s ICE purge of migrants. New Jersey, through its Immigrant Trust Directive, has instructed state and local police and law enforcement, including sheriffs, not to help ICE track down and arrest migrants when ICE does not have a judicial criminal warrant authorizing it. The Directive was upheld as valid by a federal appeals court in 2021.

Said Habba: “Anybody who does get in that way, in the way of what we are doing, which is not political, it is simply against crime, will be charged in the state of New Jersey for obstruction, for concealment, and I will come after them hard.”

Said Platkin: “I don't typically launch investigations on cable news networks.”

Or was it MAGA bluster? On the official website of the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, there’s not a word about investigating Murphy and Platkin.

GEO: Big Brother?

Also in March, TNJD reported on the GEO Group, the private prison goliath designated by ICE to carry out a $1 billion contract to set up an ICE detention center at the abandoned Delaney Hall in Newark. That article reported on the GEO Group’s multi-million lobbying effort and its big donation to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) PAC, and it described GEO’s worldwide network of prisons.

On Monday, a chilling update from the New York Times: it turns out the GEO Group has a side business installing high-tech surveillance devices on the bodies of migrants. Wrote the Times: “Over the past decade, the company has also built a lucrative side business of digital tools — including ankle monitors, smart watches and tracking apps — to surveil immigrants on behalf of the federal government. … The tracking program that Geo Group oversees, called Alternatives to Detention, was set up to keep tabs on unauthorized immigrants who face potential deportation. Rather than being placed in detention centers or released into the country without supervision, immigrants receive location tracking devices. They must quickly respond to alerts sent to the gadgets in order to confirm their whereabouts, or risk punishment.”

Immigrants wearing these mandatory devices have to take selfies on a regular basis and report their location, tracked by the device, to ICE.

Added the Times: “’The Geo Group was built for this unique moment in our country’s history and the opportunities that it will bring,’ George Zoley, the company’s founder, said on an investor call days after Mr. Trump was elected.”

The GEO Group runs at least 100 prisons throughout the United States.

Photo: AAUP’s Rebecca Givan and Ras Baraka, mayor of Newark.

Baraka: Let’s Make Rich Pay

TNJD has written several articles about the issue of taxing millionaires and the very wealthy in order to close New Jersey’s budget deficit, including an interview with a tax expert from New Jersey Policy Perspective, an expose of why Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s tax cut scheme won’t work, and a story about Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s unwillingness to support taxing the rich.

On Monday, Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark and himself a gubernatorial candidate, spoke at an event in New Brunswick, from the office of the Rutgers University branch of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which has endorsed Baraka, along with a number of other unions and progressive organizations.

And Baraka unloaded:

“I wanna say, no longer can we afford to subsidize millionaires and billionaires. You have a problem with us subsidizing education, but you wanna subsidize millionaires? You have a problem with raising people’s minimum wage, but you don't have a problem with tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires? … This is not equality. This is not equity. This is not what we need. We don’t need a budget where we cut people’s Medicaid, or cut people’s opportunity for housing, or cut people’s opportunity for a decent education. We don't need a budget that does that. We need a budget that’s fair! That makes the wealthy pay their fair share, that makes the individuals who make the most money add income to what we need in the state of New Jersey. That’s what we need!”

ICE Seizes New Jersey Students

Finally, in a story that The New Jersey Democrat will be following, ICE has been active on New Jersey college campuses, including actions to seize foreign students. And further, New Jersey colleges and universities are fearful that the attacks by the Trump administration on Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, both of which lost substantial federal funding, could happen here.

That’s according to Rebecca Givan, a professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers and president of the Rutgers AAUP.

Rutgers, she said in an interview with TNJD, is one of 60 universities targeted by the Trump administration over charges that the schools have allowed or tolerated “antisemitic” behavior by students and protesters. Penn lost funding over the fact that it failed to comply with demands by the White House that it not allow a trans athlete to compete in a sporting event, and Givan said that university DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs are under attack, too.

An unspecified number of students at Rutgers and other New Jersey campuses have been seized by ICE, said Givan, although she wouldn’t say exactly how many.

Unlike Columbia, which caved in to the Trump administration’s demands – over the protests of numerous students, faculty and member of Columbia’s AAUP chapter – Rutgers has fought back, she said, pointing to an amicus brief filed against Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others. According to the brief, 86 universities, colleges and academic institutions, including Rutgers University, jointly signed onto a protest in support of an injunction against the administration. Its lead argument: “The administration’s policy has created a climate of fear among non-citizens at U.S. colleges and universities.”

And the Rutgers University Senate passed a resolution calling for a “mutual defense compact” with other Big Ten schools to provide “immediate and strategic support to any member institution under direct political or legal infringement.”

In January, the Rutgers AAUP-AFT issued a guide: “Time to Take Action – What You Can Do to Confront Trump’s Attacks.”

Harvard, the nation’s oldest university, is the first university to forcefully push back, defying the Trump administration’s attack – and losing $2.2 billion in federal grants as a result.