The president, not the governor, is responsible for revived Roxbury ICE jail plan

It’s still a mystery why the once-canceled Roxbury immigration detention center is now apparently back on track, but one Republican councilman in the Morris County town has an idea.

Councilman Jim Rilee suggested to residents at Tuesday’s Roxbury council meeting that the White House revived the plan because Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill spiked the football too forcefully last month when the Trump administration initially decided to jettison its plan to build the detention center.

“The governor did a dance, an anti-Trump dance, in the end zone, to celebrate her victory,” Rilee said. “And now the ICE facility is back on.”

This isn’t a bad theory, since we know President Donald Trump can change his mind if he thinks public perception is that he’s taking an L on something. And surely some Democrats, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have occasionally used a strategy of cooing in the president’s ear to get what they want or to prevent Trump from doing something detrimental to their state.

Sherrill has not used this kind of scheme when dealing with Trump, and I suppose she could. But I question whether what Sherrill has said about the Roxbury plan can be considered performing “an anti-Trump dance.” Here’s the entirety of her statement when the Trump administration said in June that it would not proceed with the detention center plan:

“Today the Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that it is backing down and will not try to establish a mass detention center at an industrial warehouse in Roxbury. This is a major victory for the State and for the township of Roxbury. This has never been a partisan case, because the plan to establish a detention center at the Roxbury warehouse was always unlawful. Converting a warehouse for packages into a detention center for thousands of people would not only be inhumane but also have devastating local and environmental impacts — and it would not make New Jersey any safer. That’s why we took the Department to court and forced the Trump administration to abandon its plans.”

That’s a pretty banal statement. If it was enough to trigger Trump, that says more about the president than it does about Mikie Sherrill.

I asked Darcy Draeger, chair of Morris County’s Democratic Party, what she thought of Rilee shifting the blame to Sherrill for the return of the Roxbury detention center plan.

“It honestly sounds like an abused partner trying to rationalize what’s happening to them,” Draeger said. “I don’t think that Mikie spiked the ball, I don’t think she did any victory dance, and I think that this council person needs to really examine where the motivation lies in bringing Roxbury back. And it’s not with the governor.”

Roxbury Republicans are obviously frustrated that the feds continue to keep them out of the loop on their migrant jail plans, and understandably so. But the source of their frustration is obviously their guy in the White House, not the Democrat in Trenton.