>> From NJ PBS studios, this is NJ spotlight news with Brianna Vannozzi.

>> Hello and thanks for joining us tonight.

>> I'm Joanna gaggis.

A few stories we'll get into Later in the broadcast.

Ice enforcement activity ramped Up across the state over the Weekend.

We'll take you to hudson county With reaction from officials and The community.

Then the fight over homeland Security funding leads to a Partial federal government Shutdown.

We'll get you the latest from Washington.

And later, controversy over the State takeover of the lakewood Schools and why education officials there are pushing back against it.

But first, the Senate Judiciary Committee held an hours-long hearing today in the approval process for two of Governor Mikey Sherrill's cabinet nominees, Aaron Binder for treasurer and Jen Davenport, Sherrill's pick to be New Jersey's Attorney General.

The majority of the hearing focused on Davenport and how she'd lead the state on a range of issues, things like the cannabis industry and the sale of illegal products, her oversight of ELEC, the Election Law Enforcement Commission, and how she'd ensure public trust.

At one point during the hearing, Davenport said she'd take a close look at the Office of Public Integrity and Accountability.

But with so much focus on immigration policy in New Jersey and the nation, it's no surprise that senators from both parties grilled Davenport on how she'd handle the Immigrant Trust Directive, a policy that limits how New Jersey police can participate with federal immigration authorities.

Davenport said she would uphold it as it's written currently.

Treasury nominee Aaron Binder also faced some tough questioning about the state's fiscal reality, which he said is in a structural deficit in the billions.

He told legislators cutting spending is the only solution.

>> Both nominees passed the Senate judiciary committee with unanimous approval.

Their nominations now go to a full Senate vote.

A coalition of 27 towns have been fighting against the state's affordable housing mandates in the courts, but on Friday they were dealt yet another blow when they lost their third appeal to strike down the 2024 affordable housing law.

This third attempt in the third circuit court of appeals was consistent with the previous two that found the law couldn't be overturned because it followed the mandates outlined in New Jersey Supreme Court's Mount Laurel decision.

And that requires each municipality to build its fair share of affordable housing units.

Now the Coalition of Towns, known as Local Leaders for Responsible Planning, have argued that the formula used to calculate their fair share is unconstitutional, and they say the law creates unfunded mandates for municipalities.

They now plan to appeal their case to the U.S.

Supreme Court, where Montvale Mayor Mike Gasali, whose town is the lead plaintiff, says their application to the high court will be considered by conservative justice and Jersey native Samuel Alito.

South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross has been handed another legal win.

An appeals court on Friday declined to bring forward a racketeering indictment against him and his five co-defendants and instead upheld the lower court's decision to dismiss the charges.

Those charges were first brought by former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin last summer.

The indictment alleging that Norcross and a group of fellow businessmen had created a criminal enterprise to enrich themselves with money from tax incentives meant to benefit the city of Camden.

The appeals court ruled that a number of charges exceeded the statute of limitations and that the case "failed to allege a racketeering enterprise."

Prosecutors had alleged that Norcross threatened a local real estate developer, strong-arming him into selling property for less than it was worth so they could obtain and later sell millions of dollars in state tax incentives.

It'll now be up to acting Attorney General Jen Davenport to decide whether she'll appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court.

A spokesperson for the AG's office says she's reviewing the opinion.

Coming up, ICE agents detained several individuals in Hudson County over the weekend.

We'll get you the latest.

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Ice officers were out in force across New Jersey this weekend, making arrests in several cities and towns.

Many people were arrested in New Brunswick on Saturday.

And Sunday morning, Jersey City and Hoboken residents watched as ice officers made arrests at several different locations.

Many onlookers recorded the activity and posted videos online.

City officials in both Hoboken and Jersey City say they were not given advance notice before the immigration officers made the arrests.

Last month, both Jersey City and Hudson County issued executive orders barring federal immigration officers from staging raids on city and county property.

And as Raven Santana reports, those officials have been educating residents about their rights if they're confronted by ICE officers.

Listen, there's nothing that you're gonna say that's gonna prevent us from doing our job.

It's letting you know.

So you're wasting your time.

Okay, what is your job?

No, we're ICE.

Okay, clearly we're marked.

All right?

This cell phone video captured Sunday morning at the 9th Street light rail station in Jersey City shows immigration enforcement officers detaining a man as commuters look on.

We're not going to answer any questions, so just stay there.

You can observe, you can do whatever you want.

Just don't interfere.

In this video, recorded by Jersey City Councilman Jake Efros, an officer identifying himself as ICE, his face covered by a mask, tells Efros they do not need a warrant to make the arrest.

I'm not going to tell you anything else.

Do you have a warrant?

We don't need a warrant, bro.

Stop getting that in your head.

Federal immigration officers carried out enforcement actions in several areas across Hudson County, including near the 9th Street light rail station, Central Avenue, and South Street in the Heights and in Hoboken.

Another encounter at the same rail station was recorded by an observer.

Go get a job.

Go, go.

I'm on my way to work.

I'm going to work.

Jesus Christ.

Mind your business.

Hell no.

I'm letting you know right now, if you come any near me, I'm letting you know right now.

I am allowed to take part in the... You are not allowed to... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

The activity comes just days after Jersey City and Hudson County issued executive orders barring federal immigration authorities from using city or county property to stage enforcement actions.

A couple of key messages.

First, we condemn what we saw.

The videos are disturbing and they show what appears to just be people on their way to work being detained.

That makes us less safe.

Nearly 200 people packed an emergency nighttime meeting in Hoboken to learn about their rights if ICE is in their community.

Officials in both Hoboken and Jersey City have been speaking out about the incidents.

When we were on the elevator together because I followed them on to the elevator, two other men got off who were not ICE agents.

Some of the ICE agents followed who turned out to be a U.S.

citizen.

They just profiled him.

And then they followed the other man who they did end up arresting.

So clearly they are not looking for someone who has some criminal record that they're trying to investigate.

They just want to detain and deport people who they deem are non-citizens.

At any point were you even concerned for your own life?

Yeah, of course.

It was in my head what just happened to Rene Good and Alex Preti.

The arrests follow news of an internal memo from the U.S.

Department of Homeland Security that expands the authority of immigration agents.

Under the guidance, officers can make warrantless arrest for civil immigration violations if they believe someone is undocumented and likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, raising questions about transparency, accountability, and civil rights.

After those ICE arrests surfaced on social media, I found signage like this helping to guide those in case they are confronted by ICE, something advocates say they are now focusing on.

We operate a hotline folks can text or call it if they see ICE in their communities.

There is a bunch of different information that we ask folks to provide.

For example, the number of agents, what they're wearing, what vehicles they're driving in, and so on and so forth, what activity they're engaged in.

And from there, we have trained volunteers who can report to the scene and legally observe and ensure that any individuals who may be targeted are aware of what their legal rights are, and ensure that everything is documented.

Organizers say these are far from the first ICE arrests in Hudson County, but videos like those shared this weekend are gaining attention as ICE remains in the national spotlight.

We reached out to ICE for comment, but have not heard back yet.

Meantime, local advocates and lawmakers are urging residents to know their rights.

>> The federal government is in a partial shutdown today after members of the Senate and House failed to approve a spending bill to fund the government.

At issue is the funding for the department of homeland security, which oversees ICE and customs and border protection.

And so just two and a half months after the longest government shutdown in history, we find ourselves yet again in another political standoff between the parties.

So how did we get here?

Let's ask our Washington, D.C., correspondent Ben Hulak, who joins us now.

Ben, what happened?

What happened over the course of the weekend where we know on Friday House members did pass a bill package, sent it to the Senate?

What's happened since then?

Right.

So the Senate the Senate actually moved most recently.

They passed an issue essentially all back up a little.

An issue is six different bills from the government.

Congress every year has to pass 12 bills.

They have passed six of them all the way through September.

Now they're down to six more.

And really one is the problematic bill in the eyes of this Congress.

And that's the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security which includes ICE and CBP as as you mentioned.

So what Democrats want is big reforms to ICE and CBP and Republicans are not caving on that.

What happened late last week was the Senate passed a short term measure to keep the Department of Homeland Security running for two weeks while Congress negotiates and then clear the rest of the five bills that are still in the wind and pump them back to the House.

The House will take them up as soon as tomorrow.

But passage at this point is unclear.

And the bill at this point is already getting some blowback from the left wing of the Democratic Party and the right wing of the Republican Party.

So Mike Johnson here in the Senate, in the House rather, who has to shepherd this through into passage, will have to win some Democratic votes most likely.

We've seen a lot of pushback from Republican members of the House who said, "Look, we did our job.

We passed this package of bills.

We sent them to the Senate.

We're not going to be forced by Democrats in the Senate to give these concessions," which one of them, like you said, is splitting off the funding for that bill.

But Speaker Johnson has said that he's confident he can get this vote passed by tomorrow.

How is he going to do that?

He at this point it looks like he will have to rely on some sort of outreach from Democrats because the House Freedom Caucus, this hard right member, hard right sort of block of Republicans in the House, who are notoriously anti-spending, anti-government voters.

They at this point are against it.

And a handful of members who are Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee, including Lamonica McIver, a Democratic congresswoman who represents Newark, came out with a letter just a little bit ago saying, "We will not vote for anything, including the package that does not include DHS money, without dramatic reforms to DHS."

And they want to call me back.

They want to rewrite the agency overall.

Part of their point and this has been a missed by a lot of the public and reporters like me.

Ice and CBP are funded through the rest of the Trump administration.

That was what happened.

That was one line item few line items.

But that was a big element of the big budget law that went into effect last summer.

So even if Congress in theory were to strip out all DHS funding right now the agency is still running on a bunch of money through 2029.

So Ben in your in your take your analysis of this how much of it is actually grandstanding by Democrats who of course want to appeal to their base and are getting a lot of calls from voters saying defund ice now.

Is this all grandstanding.

I don't know about grandstanding.

I think if you talk to members who are on the committee that oversees DHS they will they will readily know that DHS has been funded through the next four years.

As I mentioned a lot of it is politically impractical.

Right.

This this will not happen.

Congress will not be able to defund this broad agency without help from Republicans which simply won't happen.

And of course the president would have to sign such a bill into law.

Democrats also want to impeach and convict and remove Christine Noem the head of DHS from her office as secretary of DHS.

That also won't happen in this under 19 Congress.

So that's certainly maybe not grandstanding.

I don't know political gamesmanship perhaps but.

Functionally of course it could happen but in this political environment no way.

Yeah.

You mentioned the impeachment potentially of Secretary Christine Noem.

What are you hearing from New Jersey's delegation in terms of support or opposition to that.

So the signatures are rolling in to impeach her.

I talked with Bonnie Watson Coleman sort of the liberal lion of the delegation for many years.

And her sense was she signed on right after the second shooting the second killing in Minnesota last weekend.

And her sense was the administration might be trying to tell us not to believe our eyes but I believe my eyes.

And this is an agency that needs to be informed at this point.

And this is probably these are probably numbers that would change.

I believe every Democratic member from New Jersey except for Herb Conway has signed on.

That includes Josh Gottheimer who is typically a lot more closely aligned with law enforcement.

So this is something that will soon I would I would bet every Democratic House member will have signed on.

And some members who voted recently to give ice more funding have walked that back just across the other side of the Hudson River on Long Island.

Tom Swazee a Blue Dog Democrat as Blue Dogs come voted recently for more DHS funding.

And then after the shootings in Minnesota said you know what folks I got it wrong.

And this is an agency that needs to be reigned in.

Just help us understand Ben.

We are in a partial government shutdown.

What does that actually mean in the sort of weak rough period.

I would say it doesn't mean a whole lot to the average person.

The agencies that could lose that at this point are in sort of a limbo funding limbo are the Pentagon and then federal agencies for labor education health programs health services.

But beyond that the longer this drags on as folks know from the fall that's when really the real life consequences kick in.

People start losing paychecks and being furloughed.

At this point we're not nearly there.

And it looks like at this point Congress can dig itself out of this funding hole.

You say as long as this drags on how much longer do they have before we start seeing those furloughs before people start feeling it in their pocketbooks.

I haven't looked at like a congressional sort of layoff layoff chart at this point.

But thinking back to the fall it was several weeks before where people really started missing paychecks in the military in the federal government and the workforce started feeling it.

It's it's a we'll be watching.

Ben you lack in Washington D.C.

for us.

Thank you.

Of course.

After a decade of financial turmoil and legal battles over state funding.

New Jersey's Department of Education has moved to take control of the Lakewood school district.

But Lakewood school administrators are pushing back calling a state takeover unnecessary and unfair even after troubling data has come to light around the district's fiscal management and chronic absenteeism among students.

Our education and child welfare reporter Katherine Carrera has been digging into this story and she joins us now for more.

Kat great to see you.

What steps can you tell us has the state taken right now to seize control of the Lakewood School District.

Yeah, well they have filed an order to show cause which is required in the procedure of a state taking or New Jersey taking over or intervening fully on a school district.

So now it's up to the Lakewood Board of Education to respond to that order to show cause.

And they can challenge it or they can go along with it and they're choosing to challenge it.

And so that means that they're going to provide reasons within the Department of Education's Office of Administrative Law, reasons that show that the state intervention is not warranted, as they said.

And we know they have until March 5th to do so.

Let's talk a little bit about what some of the state's concerns are in the district.

And before we actually do that, I want to just set up, this is a really unique district.

Lakewood has a lot of students who are transported every day.

First, just let's break down the financials and what district officials are dealing with in terms of how they manage that financially.

Yeah, they argue that this is not a financial mismanagement situation and that it's a structural revenue case in that the majority of the students in Lakewood go to private schools, about 50,000 do.

And so the district is mandated by state law to cover the cost of transportation and also cover the cost of tuition for special education students who are transferred out of district.

And so the majority of the students fall under that.

And so that kind of causes this imbalance they say within their budget.

And so who's left in the public school district is about 5,000 students.

And the majority of those students are English language learners.

So the district feels that there's just a unique situation, as you said, going on here that requires a look at the state funding formula, the state aid funding formula, and that they, with the fiscal monitors that have been in place for the last decade, they just feel like this state intervention is not going to be the path forward for them.

Yeah, you raised a couple points there.

And first, we should say there's a large Orthodox Jewish population there.

That is why there are so many students, 50,000 students who are out of district.

But yet, like you said, the district has to pay for that transportation or in some cases for placement.

What are some of the concerns that that state monitor that you mentioned that's been there more than a decade has seen?

And there's been other reporting by news outlets and others of other types of concerns.

Breakdown for us.

Let's start with chronic absenteeism.

What's happening there?

Yeah, so most districts after the pandemic were facing large or high rates of chronic absenteeism rather.

And so the district, like many other districts, were asked to put together corrective action plans as to how they were going to fix the chronic absenteeism issue.

But something came to light in news reports last year that the chronic absenteeism rate in Lakewood improved dramatically over the last couple of school years.

And so it was found in the news reports or alleged that in the high school, the numbers were being tweaked.

And so students were being counted as present when they were missing class throughout the day.

So the district or the Board of Education did put forward a corrective action plan that states that they were going to the various measures and ways that they were going to address chronic absenteeism.

Along with that was of course the another corrective action plan that the board approved just recently last week that addressed some of the red flags that a state monitor raised in terms of the way and the rate at which they were paying their general counsel.

Yeah.

Fifty thousand dollars a month flat fee.

These were not billable hours.

Is that right.

That's right.

It was a fifty thousand dollar a month flat fee contract.

And so that amounted to about six hundred K per year.

And so over the course of the last five years about five million dollars was shelled out to its general counsel.

It is a staggering staggering amount.

I'm curious what happens with a state takeover.

What would the state monitor come and do.

What would the state.

And I should mention too that we've this would be the first suburban district ever taken over by the state.

It's been urban districts previously.

But what would happen there.

So the State Board of Education would appoint a superintendent.

The Board of Education would lose its power and become an advisory board.

The state board would also seize control of contracts, finances, and determining staffing, curriculum, basically all the duties that the local board typically has.

with a state monitor in place with the state in control.

Do you think that some of the challenges and some of the issues that Lakewood says they've been trying to manage would actually come to light in a way that could produce results for the district?

I'm very curious to see what happens here.

The Board of Education, they're challenging this state intervention, but they also say that they're willing to work with the state because they also feel the strain of this imbalance in the budget every year.

And so they have actually taken out state loans to help fill the gaps that they see annually in their budget.

So it remains to be seen.

It sure does.

But thank you for your reporting.

Kat Carrera, great job with this.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And finally, today is Groundhog Day.

And if you're hoping for a sign that this frigid winter could end soon, I got some bad news for you.

The Turtle Bag Zoo's resident groundhog, Lady Edwina of Essex County, saw her shadow.

So did Pennsylvania's Punxsutawney Phil, predicting we're going to have six more weeks of winter.

And joining the ranks of New Jersey's animal forecasters today is a little eastern box turtle named Tomothy, who today made his first ever prediction at the Edelman fossil park and museum at Rowan University.

And yep, he said it too.

Six more weeks of winter.

But there was one outlier in the group, a groundhog at the Space Farm Zoo and Museum in Sussex County, who did not see his shadow.

But it seems the animal consensus is that you should keep that winter gear handy, because winter is here to stay.

That's going to do it for us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gaggis.

I'm Joanna Gaggis.

And I'm Joanna Gaggis.

And that's all we have for the entire team here at NJ Spotlight News.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

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