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

Hello and thanks for joining us.

I'm Joanna Gagis.

We're bringing you a special NJ Spotlight News edition of Reporters Roundtable, where I'll have a roundup of the top political stories of this week with the help of a panel of local journalists.

The Daily Reporter's Roundtable starts right now.

Even in the dog days of summer, there's still lots going on in the state of New Jersey, from the fallout of the non-citizen voter registration to another death of a detainee who was held at Delaney Hall.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Joanna Gagis.

This is Reporters Roundtable.

We've got a panel of journalists here with us to help break down everything that's happened in this last week of New Jersey news.

Let's see who we've got on our panel.

First up, P. Kenneth Burns, New Jersey reporter with WHYY.

We have Jelani Gibson, politics reporter with NJ Advanced Media, and our own Colleen O'Dea, senior writer and projects editor with NJ Spotlight News.

So there's lots to cover today.

with the voter registrat Governor Dale Caldwell sa with a house investigatio with you.

What do we know intends to cooperate?

So right now because they ar an extension to um we tho actually the letter that says the week of August 24th.

So at some point next week, we are expecting the administration to answer some of these questions.

There were roughly seven groups of questions that these four congressional representatives, including New Jersey's Jeff Van Drew, had asked all Republicans, we're obviously in a blue state, and you know most of the questions were not looking for specific personal information.

We do know that the Sheryl administration has been clear in the past in saying that she will not give out personal information on individuals who were caught up in this.

So, you know, we are expecting some responses next week, and it will be interesting to see will they provide correspondence between the state and the software vendor for the DMV, the MVC, you know, shed some more light on just how this error happened.

Yeah, Colleen, to your point, I mean, we know that President Trump was asking for the names of all of the individuals who actually cast a ballot.

He also wanted to know the polling locations where those individuals cast the ballot.

Do you envision any of these House members asking for those similar, you know, those, that same information?

- I could certainly see that happening because we know that some of those members, Van Drew being one of them, are close to the president, certainly very supportive of Donald Trump.

So I would certainly see them saying, okay, if the president can't get it that way, then I can ask for it this way.

But also the letter sent from the lawyer representing Dale Caldwell, the Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State, did say right up top that this was information that was being asked for voluntarily, so that the state in responding is also responding voluntarily.

You know, there's no subpoenas here, there's no requirement really that anything be provided, but certainly it behooves the state to cooperate with Congress, because it's nice to get along.

Yeah, it sure is.

Although the the Sherrill administration had said previously that there was no legal basis for the president to demand any of that information.

So it's going to be interesting to see if this ever does end up with subpoenas or in the courts.

Kenny, I just want to touch in with you because as Colleen said, we know that Congressman Jeff Van Drew was one of those who promised an investigation, promised to stay on top of this.

You're down in South Jersey.

Have you heard anything more from him on this issue?

I have not, which is kind of par for the course when it comes to Congressman Van Drew.

He usually speaks to national outlets more so than the metropolitan outlets.

He might call into a couple of the stations along the shore, but other than that, and also keep in mind, this is an issue that the Republicans, thanks to President Trump, have hung their hat on.

And keep in mind, we have about six, seven million voters in the state, and only in the grand scheme of things, as far as ratio, a handful wound up voting, some three or four hundred.

The good news is they got caught.

Their votes probably didn't count.

So we will see where this goes and Mike and then the concern about how they're going to let this play into the narrative that people who are not in the country legally are voting in blue states.

I know that was the narrative early on that they tried to approach.

Yeah, and we're going to Jelani.

I'm going to pull you in, but first Colleen, I just want to come back to you on those numbers because you and I tried to parse out some of the latest information that the Sherrill administration came out with an update on Wednesday.

What can you tell us just in terms of any more clarity on who actually voted?

Who was citizen, non-citizen?

What do we know?

Yeah, it was kind of confusing, but I think we have it figured out.

So 5,100 people have been removed, we're told, from the voter rolls.

They've been deleted.

These are people who registered in this one-year period.

They were determined to not be either citizens or, you know, not be people who should be registered.

There's another 1,450 people whose names have, or I should say whose driver's license information has been sent back to the counties, I'm told.

It's a way maybe to stop reporters from trying to Oprah for this information.

But anyway, they've got, the counties now have to look into these folks.

From that first group, the 5100, we're told about 340 of those cast a ballot in at least one election since registering.

Of this 1450 group that we're not sure of, because some of them have other registrations pending, you know, you can go into, you can be registered, go to MVC and re-register, which, you know, is not, I don't think, the most effective or efficient system.

But so there are questions about these 1450, whether or not maybe they are citizens and should be able to be registered and voting.

We're told about 220 of those have voted, and I've spoken to some county election officials who say they've already been able to confirm that indeed at least some of those folks have valid registrations and just probably made a mistake when they were at a motor vehicle agency.

You know you've been there for like three hours, you're desperate to get out, you're just like hitting anything on that pin pad to just get your license and get out of that building.

So maybe that's what happened.

Yeah, confusing and a lot of numbers to keep track of.

Jelani, we know that the House right now is looking into this, but we know that the Sherrill administration launched their own investigation.

They say immediately, the governor said immediately after learning about it.

Any updates there on this investigation that we know is being conducted by New Jersey's former Attorney General Jeff Chiesa?

Yeah, I mean, so they hired, you know, some high profile people to go ahead and look into the allegations.

We really haven't heard anything beyond what has already been released this week about how they're segmenting the additional inquiry into the county level.

But what we should probably keep an eye out for is what the ultimate inquiry from that firm actually says.

And then we'll more than likely be dealing with hearings that result from whatever it is that they find.

The question there is whether or not anyone in New Jersey's legislature is given subpoena power, right?

We've seen Republicans in the legislature asking for that.

It would take an act of the leadership to allow that, and the governor, I believe, as well.

Do you expect, again, we're prognosticating here, but this Chiesa investigation is, I believe, looking specifically at this one-year period, but we hear Republicans say over and over that they believe this extends far beyond that one-year period.

And so I wonder, and I imagine, that there may be an investigation that looks beyond that one-year period.

What's your thought there, Jelani?

Yeah, well, it's not as if the state can prevent the federal government from conducting their own investigation full stop.

It would appear that there are some conflicting numbers that are out there.

You know, the Sherrill administration is talking about things in, you know, the 6,000 range, and the Trump administration is talking about things more so in the, you know, 30,000 range, 30 to 35,000 range and things like that.

So it'll be interesting to see if the federal government has anything that they can push out to back those numbers up.

- Yeah, Joe, real quickly.

- Connie, I wanna speak with you.

Go ahead.

- I'm sorry, real quick, if you have one second.

I just wanna say that, you know, in talking to county election officials, they have said that they don't want the people who legitimately have been registered, were registered and got caught up in this to get caught, to be forgotten here because they don't want to see anyone disenfranchised.

So anyone who got a letter from the NBC in the last couple weeks about this, please should not ignore it and needs to contact the county election officials if they are a citizen because otherwise at this point they've been placed in this rejected status which means if they try to go and vote in November they will not be able to.

So county election officials are saying please read all this this mail that comes in a lot of people just kind of toss it now and if you are really a citizen, make sure to contact your election officials so that you can get back on the voter rolls.

Yeah, and it's county election officials who say that many self-reported to them.

Go ahead, Kenny, jump in here.

Yeah, just real quick.

If they want to investigate New Jersey, they have 49 other states and some territories to investigate because my big fear is that they're going to look at this and just make a big deal out of it because every day states are continuing with discrepancies and other errors that may happen in their voter rolls.

It's probably something that should be looked at but for the purposes of what the President and everyone else is looking at, they should look at the other 49 states, including the red states.

We know about two dozen states have passed these automatic voter registration laws where you can automatically register to vote.

And then Republicans will say, look, New Jersey has allowed, you know, driver's licenses.

Some Republicans are very opposed to this even still.

Years after it was passed, New Jersey allows driver's license for undocumented individuals.

But Kenny, you're correct in pointing out that it's not just blue states that have these voter roll errors.

3.

Delaney Hall was confirmed dead by a family member.

What can you tell us about why that's the way we're learning about this death?

Right.

So, you know, the facility has been controversial for the entire year with a lot of these showdowns.

There seems to be some back and forth between when the agency is reporting deaths and whether or not those deaths are happening in custody on site or whether or not those deaths are being reported in the hospital.

Since the Trump administration has made some changes to how you can theoretically report a death that may say, you know, happen at a hospital or something like that, there are instances where the agency is now asserting that they may not have to report a death if it technically happens away from the facility, even if it stems from health issues that may have taken place at the facility.

So that's a break, right, Jelani, from the Biden administration rule that said deaths had to be reported up to 30 days after a detainee was released, and now that policy has changed?

Correct.

Kenny, we know that the South Jersey community is rallying around a business owner who was detained by ICE.

What's the story here?

So, I'm at Safeo.

He owns a restaurant in Collingswood.

It's been there for more than a decade.

He was working on getting his citizenship and then shortly after his most recent court hearing, he got a letter from ICE asking them, asking him to report to their Mount Holly office where he was taken into custody because he overstayed his visa.

He got his visa 21 years ago, well more than 20 years ago.

And when he first came, brought his family over from Syria, they decided to make a life out of it, especially considering all of the war that has taken place in Syria in recent memory.

They took him into custody, he was there for two weeks, I interviewed his daughter who had concerns because he had health issues.

He had, he's a 65-year-old man, he has all the ailments that you would expect, including a vocal condition.

For those who have been listening to NPR a long time, it's similar to what Diane Rehm has where it controls the muscles in your voice box.

He was recently released on $7,500 bond.

I have not reached out to the daughter yet, but I'm going to find out what's the next steps for them in the coming days because if you recall, there's another restaurant moved in Collingswood in the last year that they were down the street, Jersey Kebab, the owner and his son are now facing deportation and the mayor, she is not happy that ICE is seemingly going after people who are being positive contributors to the community.

All right.

I know you'll stay on top of that.

Colleen, I spoke with Assemblyman Paul Konietzsia, a Republican, who's circulating a report that he commissioned a few years ago that looks at the cost of illegal immigration to New Jersey.

He breaks down some numbers.

What can you tell us about that report?

Let's start with the numbers.

So honestly, Joanna, I don't put a lot of stock into the numbers.

I mean, I know that he is, he's, yeah, I mean, let's be honest.

He's a Republican.

He's quite MAGA.

He's quite conservative.

And so I feel like if I'm going to see a report and I'm going to believe a report about the cost of immigration, I want it to come from a non-biased researcher, a scientist, a university, somewhere from there, somewhere.

I know that people have the background to do the kind of analysis and statistics, work with statistics that is necessary to do that kind of report.

I mean, what he's been trying to show, this is for a second time, is that immigrants, undocumented immigration costs the state millions or billions of dollars.

And that would be trying to counter, I don't know if he's trying to counter, but it certainly would be counter to some other narratives that we hear from pro, from immigrant advocacy groups that talk about the positives.

As Kenny just talked about, you know, the contributions that immigrants make, you know, the income they bring in, they do pay, many immigrants do pay taxes.

You know, if they have businesses, that creates economic activity.

So this was report number two.

He's saying that it costs the state billions of dollars.

I don't know if that can be verified.

He says that there are 737,000 undocumented people in New Jersey.

I did ask him about the fact that those numbers come from FAIR.

That's the Federation for Immigration Reform.

And they do count individuals who are here under TPS protection and those who are here with pending asylum cases.

So in his mind, and as he explained it, yes, those people are not legal.

They are noncitizens, full stop.

But he does... Yes, go ahead, Ken.

The other thing to keep in mind about the numbers, and this is, as long as I can remember, we don't have a true count of people who are in the country illegally overall, and every study that I've seen have made note of that, because people who are in the country illegally, they're concerned about their well-being, their families.

So even the professional studies that we have, it's not actually a true number.

It is very hard as far as I can see and as far as any reporting I've seen, it is very hard to capture exact numbers as you're explaining.

Let me just throw this out to all of you.

Is there any credence here to the idea that even with, and this is what the report shows, that even with the amount of income tax that folks pay who are here, who are undocumented, there's still a massive cost when it comes to New Jersey schools, emergency response, health care, throwing that out there.

Has anyone heard anything to say that that's not a concern?

Well, what I've heard in terms of balancing that equation out is that the reason why a lot of immigrants come to America is to essentially fulfill jobs that Americans are not taking.

And that usually is seen across the spectrum at all income levels.

What's also important to understand here is that what is being classified as a visa overstay may oftentimes just be two bureaucratic systems not communicating with one another.

Usually when you file for a visa extension, it can be something that takes months and months and months.

You're usually authorized to stay while you're filing for that extension and that extension is processing, but ICE is oftentimes just operating off of an automated database that's flagging you as visa overstay.

And so those two systems aren't even talking to one another, letting the agency know what is being classified as a legitimate visa overstay and what is being classified as someone who put their paperwork in, but the government has simply not gotten around to processing it yet.

And so that's the reason why you oftentimes see a lot of these incidents that are, you know, upsetting communities.

I have to... Yeah, that's a great point.

Go ahead.

Yeah, I don't mean to laugh at the question, Joanna, but this has a cost.

Everything has a cost.

So the issue... And if I had to make a guess at why the Republicans are now looking at the cost of illegal immigration, it's because a lot of our political arguments center around money.

But I would offer that it's not really so much about the money.

It's about what Jelani highlighted, the bureaucracy.

We have a lot of systems in place.

We have laws upon laws that probably cancel each other out, and no one has really thought to look at the system.

And there was a bipartisan bill in Congress that would have added more judges, and that would have, its goal, one of its goals was to increase the speed at which someone could actually go through the legal process.

That bill did not pass.

We know this.

Right.

And yeah, the bill did not pass.

But at the same time, if I would say this is the first like real something that was put forth in about 15 years.

I remember President George W. Bush put forth a compromise bill on immigration reform.

And thanks to talk radio and the Republican Congress at that point, the bill died.

Yeah.

Let's switch gears because I want to get a couple other things in.

Jelani, what's the latest with Jersey City?

We've been covering this possible tax increase there.

What can you tell us?

Yeah.

So, you know, people are still on track to get a pretty painful tax increase, you know, around the 15% range.

And it would appear, you know, very reasonably so that Jersey City residents are not happy about the increase.

They've been packing a variety of meetings, asking the city to find another way.

The city is saying that the increase is necessary to prevent a catastrophic loss of services.

And so this is going to be something that defines the Solomon administration for quite some time.

All right, Kenny, Governor Sherrill's been out on the campaign trail.

Is this just her supporting other veterans or do you think she's got higher office in mind, even though she's still early in her tenure here?

Just the season, right?

At this point, I think it might be a little bit of column A and column B. She could be out there genuinely supporting the other Democrats on the campaign trail this year.

Certainly the Democrats want to take the House and the Senate.

But also, it would be foolish to not keep your options open.

So I could see why she is on the campaign trail, just putting out little seeds to make sure that, say, one of the people she's supporting, they do want to be in higher office, say, president.

She could move up either as a secretary or in another prominent position.

But please let us get past 2028 because we still have the question about Booker and we still have the question about Governor Murphy.

I'm just saying.

We sure do.

Yes, and she's been out there in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, I should point out.

Colleen, we don't have a lot of time, but I'm going to ask you, just, you took a look at some of the spending in the supplemental bills, the supplemental spending bills at the end of the budget season.

Should we be surprised that you found much of it went to Democratic-led districts?

Not at all.

This is par for the course.

It seems to be what happens every year now.

And you know, in the old days, the legislators used to try to hide from this.

Now they embrace it.

They use it to help their re-election campaigns.

Look at the money I brought back to my town.

I mean, it certainly seems, yes, we found almost 90 percent, 88 percent of the money went to democratically controlled districts.

And that is actually significantly different from what happens at the federal level.

At the federal level, Congress has earmarks.

All legislators, all Congress people put in requests for money.

And money goes back to all districts, blue districts and red districts.

In New Jersey, the Republican districts get a very small percent, maybe 5% is kind of what we've seen.

You've got 88% to Democratic districts, the rest are going to the split districts, which, you know, both parties are vying for.

So it's just kind of what's been happening in New Jersey.

Many, many, many people throw up their hands, say this is not a good system.

Governor Sherrill said this year the system was going to change.

I mean, it was less than in the past, but didn't really change.

Still had all these things added to the budget at the last minute.

I don't know.

I think that's just kind of where unfortunately we are.

Yeah.

Well, we have to leave it there.

Kenny, Jelani, Colleen, I want to thank you all.

Great conversation today.

Been a pleasure to have all of you.

You can follow me on Instagram @JoannaGagisNJ and go ahead and scan that QR code on your screen to see more episodes of Roundtable.

That's going to do it for us.

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

Thanks for watching.

Have a great weekend.

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