From NJ PBS Studios, this is NJ Spotlight News with Briana Vannozzi.

- Hello, thanks for joining us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gagis.

Briana Vannozzi is off.

Coming up, we talk with GOP Assemblyman Paul Konietzscha about his report on the cost of illegal immigration on the state.

Plus, new updates on the lawsuit brought against the workers who worked in a COVID-19 pandemic.

But first, Governor Sherrill's administration agrees to cooperate with House Republicans as they investigate voter registration errors.

What will that cooperation look like?

That's next.

Funding for NJ Spotlight News provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

from the Motor Vehicle Commission errors that illegally registered thousands of non-citizens to vote in New Jersey elections.

The Sherrill administration has refused to provide detailed information to the Trump administration, but new reporting by Politico this week shows that Lieutenant Governor Dale Caldwell will cooperate with Republicans in the House administration and judiciary committees, according to leaked documents.

Congressman Jeff Van Drew is among those who've demanded detailed records.

Here with more on the issue is our senior writer, Colleen O'Day, as part of our Under the Dawn series.

Colleen, great to see you.

Help us put this into context.

What do we know right now about the numbers and what the state and the counties even are looking into?

Right.

So, originally, we were told that there were about 6,600 people who were not citizens who wound up on the voter rolls.

What the State Division of Elections has been doing is contacting these individuals.

There have been letters sent out to people.

They've been told to get in touch with county election officials.

We've heard, at least from some counties, that some people have gotten back to them and said, "I'm legitimately here.

I'm a citizen.

I've been voting."

You know, but we don't know how many of those there are right now.

There's also this website on the DMV or the NVC website that kind of gives information to people if they have questions about this.

So there's a process still ongoing, but ultimately we're told anyone who is not a citizen, who is not properly registered, will be removed from the voter rolls.

So there's been a lot of finger-pointing here and some of the blame was cast on Edemia, which is the company that is contracted through the Motor Vehicle Commission, what are they saying in terms of what their responsibility was?

Has anything shifted or updated?

I mean, not yet.

You know, they've they have said that they did what they were supposed to do.

You know, they were contracted to create the system and the system worked as they were told to create it.

Obviously the state disputes that, but you know, when a person was asked to say, "Do you want to register to vote?"

If they said yes, that was recorded.

Then they were asked, "Were they a citizen?"

If they said no, that was recorded.

This is where I think the dispute comes in.

Those people never should have been registered.

The state says they never should have been registered.

The IDEMIA says you told us to send, you know, just have this process occur.

So I think that's really going to be one of the key questions to be answered when we get this final report out of the state, which is contracted with a law firm to do this report and do this investigation.

That law firm led by former New Jersey Attorney General Jeff Chiesa.

No timing yet right on when that will come?

No, no.

Just the Sherrill administration says that they want to complete a thorough and accurate report, but they also want it done as soon as possible.

So we don't have any time beyond that.

We know that President Trump has been asking for, demanding the names and the polling locations, among other information of all of these individuals who did cast a ballot.

The Sherrill administration has held firm in saying that they would not provide that.

In fact, I believe the governor used the term, there's no legal basis for this.

Can you just explain that position?

- Yeah, so I mean, I think the concern, especially given the climate in the United States over the last year and a half, is that if they were to provide this information to the government, these folks might become targets of ICE and immigration officials.

Because as we know, if you are an immigrant, you're not allowed to vote in a federal election.

And 2024 was a federal election.

2026 is again.

And so the concern is that these folks might be, become targets of ICE.

And some of them may, many, most, we don't know how many may have just been registered and didn't really realize it.

And that could impact anyone who is trying to become a citizen.

Being registered to vote, voting is even worse.

I mean those can both disqualify you from citizenship in the United States and could wind up having you deported if you're not here legally.

Yeah, it is illegal to vote if you are a non-citizen.

So Politico today reported that Lieutenant Governor Dale Caldwell has indicated he will cooperate with members, Republican members of the House who are investigating this.

We know Congressman Jeff Van Drew is among them.

Do you have any clarity in terms of what that cooperation could or will look like?

I don't think we have any specifics yet.

You know, certainly I think there is a lot of bandwidth in terms of what kinds of information and what kinds of documents the state could turn over to this committee to these congressional members.

For instance, what is the contract say, or what did the contract say that the state had with IDEMIA?

How did the process work?

A lot of things like that.

What I think the state probably will not hand over, as we spoke about just before, is any identifying information or any specifics about individuals.

Governor Sherrill was very clear in saying, you know, a few weeks ago, that she would not provide that information to the feds.

And so I think that likely the state is gonna continue in that stance.

- Yeah, and of course we don't have that clarity just yet, but what you're saying and what we've heard from the governor so far does run counter to what we heard from DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen, who praised the administration and said he looks forward to working cooperatively together.

We do know, and if you could just provide some clarity, I believe they requested information weeks ago and it looks like in that political reporting there was a letter that was included.

We can see they've asked for some type of extension, right?

Right.

You know, so the Secretary and President Trump had said back, this was in July before, shortly before this all kind of blew up, that roughly 35,000 people they thought who were undocumented, they used the term illegal immigrants, were voting in New Jersey.

And so they, you know, that's something that this, the Trump administration has asked, you know, give us more information.

Where does this number come from?

We have no idea what you're, essentially, we have no idea what you're talking about.

The Secretary kind of made it sound like this, the governor has now agreed to provide all of this information.

And I've talked to a few people within the administration today, off the record, who are just scratching their heads and actually kind of angry.

They say that there's been absolutely nothing, no signal that the Sherrill administration has sent that they're going to cooperate with that investigation, because again, they don't know where these 35,000 people are or how they would even look into that.

-Yeah, we have to leave it there.

Great reporting for us, Colleen O'Day, Senior Writer and Projects Editor.

Thank you.

-Thanks so much, Joanna.

-Under the Dome is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

-There's a new number in New Jersey's immigration debate, 8.2 billion dollars.

That's what a report from Assemblyman Paul Knitra's office estimates illegal immigration costs the state every year.

Nearly 90 percent of it in K-12 education, including children who were born here and are U.S.

citizens.

Now, Knitra has also been calling for a federal investigation of New Jersey's voter roll errors.

So is the fact that the Sherrill administration has said they will cooperate with House Republicans enough for Assemblyman Knitra?

The Republican from Ocean County joins me now to talk about it.

Assemblyman, thanks so much for coming on to talk to us.

You say that there are 737,000 undocumented individuals living here in New Jersey that have cost the state $8.2 billion.

I just want to start with how do you calculate these numbers?

Sure.

It's been a six-month effort.

We released our first version of this report two years ago when I first came into office.

It was about 20 pages at the time.

This new report is academically cited on every place imaginable with verifiable sources, and it's 39 pages long.

We used everything from the Congressional Budget Office figures to FAIR reporting, as well as a ton of OPRA requests and information gathering up on high.

We feel very confident about those numbers that we have.

I do want to point out FAIR, the Federation for Immigration Reform, does count people with TPS protection, temporary protected status, pending asylum cases, they count those individuals as part of the non-citizens, yes?

Of course, and we took that into consideration and actually extrapolated that out, which is ironic considering that that TPS status has actually now, since we did this report, been revoked, which means that there's another million individuals here that are living here without authorization to do so.

That's a whole separate conversation, those revocations and the impact that those have.

But your report looks at state and local costs to schools, to emergency services like police.

You do acknowledge that the undocumented here pay about $1.3 billion in state and local taxes, but you say that that's far less than the services that they use.

Can you just explain that a bit more?

Exactly.

I think the argument that you always hear from the pro-illegal immigration lobby is that, well, they contribute to the system.

And we wanted to make sure that we were really thorough with this report, that we looked into that fairly and objectively.

And we found that their contributions, sales tax, other contributions, only make up about 16 percent of the cost that they are causing every individual and household in the state of New Jersey, which is significant.

We found that basically every individual in the state of New Jersey is on the hook for about $1,700 each.

Every household is on the hook for about $2,200 each.

So the financial impact of illegal immigration and the cost to this state and its residents is far greater than what they contribute.

- So Assemblyman, let me ask you this.

If immigration enforcement were to come and remove all of these individuals, and I would assume including their children who were born here and are now legal citizens, because those numbers are included in your count, does that put $2,300 back in the pockets of households or $1,700 back in the pocket of workers?

- You'd have to scale the services back down as a result of that.

We certainly wouldn't need all the services that we currently have, right?

'Cause the infrastructure itself is built to support essentially one-tenth additional population in New Jersey.

So over time, it would bleed down, and over time, everybody would realize a tremendous amount of savings.

And in fact, our report also didn't include in that $1,700 calculation that I gave you, it didn't include the seismic impact that this is having on minority communities in the city in terms of housing costs.

An additional $1,000 a year is what the average person in New Jersey is spending on their rent as a result of the supply and demand problems created by illegal immigration.

So then I have to ask, do you agree with the way that immigration enforcement has been carried out under the Trump administration in the second term so far?

It's unfortunate that New Jersey and its sanctuary state status and the governors and the attorney generals have made this a necessity, right?

Because in states where there's law and order and where there isn't sanctuary state status, what happens is an orderly transfer of illegals in courthouses, in jails, in New Jersey, they run them out the back door, they have no accountability whatsoever, so they forced Immigrations and Custom Enforcement to go out into the streets and to find everybody and to play hide and seek.

And it's really unfortunate that the Murphy and Sherrill administrations and their attorney generals have wound up creating that situation.

I agree with you.

But my question is, do you agree with the way that ICE and CBP have carried out enforcement across the country and here in New Jersey?

Well when left with no other options by sanctuary states, they need to track down criminals.

And unfortunately, they have to do that in a way that's not elegant and they're constantly dealing with protesters and people interfering in operations and third parties trying to ram cars into them and involve themselves in police investigations.

And imagine how difficult the situation that must be for them to deal with, if only we had a more orderly way.

Do you believe warrants should be issued in these cases?

Criminal warrants, civil warrants?

In what regard?

Immigration enforcement.

I mean, if someone's already been found guilty of a crime and they're out on the streets, obviously they need to be arrested.

We don't have a lot of time left.

I want to ask about your response to Governor Sherrill, the Governor Sherrill administration, saying that they will work cooperatively with Republican members of the House when it comes to investigating and looking into what happened with the errors in the MVC.

Are you satisfied with the response right now from the Sherrill administration?

Depending on how you look at the clock, it looks like it conveniently came out about six to seven hours after we released our report on the size and scope of the illegal immigration crisis in New Jersey.

So that could be a coincidence or it may not be a coincidence.

Either way, cooperation with the federal authorities is a positive step in the right direction.

And for the Sherrill administration, if they don't have anything to hide, full cooperation is vitally important.

And that doesn't mean selectively giving the federal government what you want them to see after it's been scrubbed, right?

We have real problems here where 75,000 people were called for jury duty out of databases that illegals really shouldn't disproportionately be in to that regard and that number.

Our own report that we just released shows a hundred thousand illegals driving around on the streets of New Jersey.

These are numbers that need to be looked at because they're disproportionately high even for the policies that we have in place.

And if they do it the right way, hopefully we'll be able to clean the voter rolls accordingly.

And we do have a policy in place that allows non-citizens to obtain a driver's license, right?

That law was passed in 2019 and went into effect in 2021.

And so that is New Jersey statute here.

Correct.

Do you disagree with- And we utilize those after- Go ahead.

Oh, I drastically disagree that illegal aliens who have come here by breaking our laws or have overstayed visas and broken our laws should be able to drive around on the streets congesting our roadways.

But I was grateful to see that they had to do it with an affidavit that specifically says that you are not eligible for any federal ID number, which made it really nice for us to be able to Oprah those numbers.

And then they gave them back to us with zip codes.

So we now actually have a map of proportionality of where and what communities illegal aliens are living in and how they're hurting the local populations financially accordingly.

All right.

We have to leave it there.

Assemblyman Paul Canetro, Republican in the 10th Legislative District in Ocean County.

Thank you so much.

-Thank you for taking the time.

-Nursing homes in New Jersey were some of the earliest centers of disease spread and death at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and veterans homes in particular were hit hard by the virus, but healthcare workers at two state-run veterans homes, Menlo Park and Paramus, have blamed the state for policies that they say failed to protect them, and now a judge has allowed a lawsuit brought by Menlo Park employees and family members of employees to move forward to trial more than four years after they originally filed their case.

Here to talk about that decision and the key arguments in the case is NJ.com staff writer Ted Sherman, who's been following it.

Ted, great to have you on the show.

Thanks for taking some time to talk to us.

What were the policies in the early days of the pandemic at the state-run veterans' homes that workers have filed suit over?

The policies were they were not allowed to wear masks, they were not allowed to wear gowns, what people refer to as PPA, and the reason for all of that was was that the management, the officers who are running the facility were afraid of of scaring both residents and their families.

And so this had to do at the time with the optics, right?

This was the optics of wearing the gowns, wearing the PPE.

Absolutely.

Keep in mind that the beginning of COVID, nobody really knew what was going on.

There was no vaccine.

They weren't sure how it was being spread, except they knew that it was highly contagious.

And what most people were doing, most hospital facilities, health facilities were doing at the time, where they were masking up, they were using PPE.

And as you noted, this was an issue of optics for the veterans' homes.

Jenna: Now, the state has tried to dismiss the case and they've done it on the basis of New Jersey's emergency healthcare immunity statute.

But we saw recently that Superior Court Judge Glenn Slavin denied that.

Can you explain what that statute says and why the judge denied it?

Briana Vannozzi, Joanna Gagis, Joanna Gagis, Briana Vannozzi, Joanna Gagis, Briana Vannozzi, One was on the immunity statute.

The other was on simple workman's compensation law in New Jersey.

The immunity issue was in the wake of COVID, the state passed what was known as the Emergency Healthcare Immunity Statute, which was supposed to shield healthcare workers for acts or omissions undertaken in good faith for work that they were doing.

- I wanna get to the workers' comp issue separately because I wanna just point out that the judge here seems to be drawing a line in the sand between healthcare workers and state policymakers, decision makers, right?

That's what it looks like has come out of this decision where he's not looking at anyone who's making policy at the time as part of that health care worker statute.

Absolutely.

What he was, he was differentiating them because, because he argued, they, the lawyers in the case and and he agreed, argued that the statute affected those who are giving health care, which were the workers, the nurses, the CNAs, and not the administrators.

So you brought up very appropriately this Workers' Compensation Act, which is typically where workers who faced harm in the workplace would go to get compensation.

Why does that not apply here?

It doesn't apply here because one of the reasons on both of these issues is whether actions were taken in good faith and on both sides of the issue, both in workers comp and in the immunity, the attorneys for these people are arguing that what was happening here was not taken in good faith, that to deny the use of masks was not a recognized medical procedure that they should be following.

Yet right from the very start, the administrators were pushing back on that.

We had interviewed nurses who were so upset over what was going on, they were trying to make their own masks.

One nurse told us she went to Walmart, bought fabric and glue because she didn't know how to sew and made her own mask and was threatened with insubordination.

And in some of the filings in this case, they noted that insubordination was one of their favorite words, that this was run as a military operation because it was run under what was then the State Department of Military Affairs, Military and Veterans Affairs.

And according to lawyers for the workers, any issues, any people who were hurt by COVID, they became acceptable losses.

And Ted, we do know that a worker died in the early days of COVID.

I'm not sure if I have the pronunciation of that worker's name right.

If you know it, please jump in.

- Monamise Romulus, she was a 61 year old nurse aide at Menlo Park.

- It's important to note, I wanna jump in here.

This was all under the Murphy administration.

And the lawsuit was filed in 2022 originally.

And so this again was still under the Murphy administration.

Have we seen the Sherrill administration continue the legal arguments in the same vein?

- Yes, there has been no change in the legal strategy here.

They are trying to get the case dismissed both on the grounds of the healthcare immunity statute and on the workman's comp.

- But in just a minute left, we have seen the Sherrill administration, as you pointed out, make a serious change, a significant change.

Governor Sherrill split the Department of Military and now the Department of Veterans Affairs, what was once one department.

Just in terms of the veterans' homes in the state, what changes have we seen since that divide between the departments?

- Well, let me make a little correction here.

That actually started under the Murphy administration.

It was pushed by Senator Joseph Vitale and others who wanted to separate the Veterans Affairs and military.

It was passed and approved under the Murphy administration.

It went into effect this year.

So, at the same time when this was happening, even before this, the administration at the nursing homes was fired.

Even before they changed the explicit departments, they removed the adjutant general, they removed the nursing home administrators, and since then, both the most problematic veterans homes, which was Paramus and Menlo Park, have improved greatly.

They are now considered rated five-star facilities.

- That is a significant change.

Those are the two where workers have filed suit.

We got to leave it there.

Ted Sherman, staff writer for nj.com, appreciate you coming on.

Thank you.

That's going to do it for us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gagis for the entire team here at NJ Spotlight News.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

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