New Jersey's attorneys want a federal judge to dismiss the Trump administration's lawsuit challenging the state's ban on masked immigration agents, and they're leaning on testimony from more than a dozen residents describing federal officers who forced their way into the wrong home before sunrise, sped past a loaded school bus with kids nearby, and told a detained man's wife she'd effectively lost him for good. The 195-page brief, filed Aug. 24, argues these episodes show the law responds to documented incidents rather than hypothetical ones.
Children Scatter as ICE Vehicles Blow Past a School Bus
Kristin O'Neil, who runs the Lindenwold district in Camden County's schools, said in her declaration that on Feb. 12 four ICE vehicles ignored a bus's flashing lights and extended stop arm, then rolled up on a housing complex where younger kids were bunched together, waiting for a different bus. The group scattered. O'Neil wrote that some of her students later said they'd recognized the masked, hooded men in tactical vests as immigration officers.
A Wrong Address and a Trauma That Won't Fade
Inez Jannotti, 75, said a half-dozen figures dressed entirely in black showed up at her Hamilton Township front step just before sunrise on Feb. 13, 2025, claiming through the gap in a barely opened window that they were law enforcement and needed to talk to her right away. When she unlocked the door, one of the men shoved her backward into her own home with a riot shield. It turned out the crew had the wrong house — they'd meant to knock on a different street where the address numbers matched. "I still have nightmares about that day," Jannotti wrote in her sworn statement.
Her son, Joshua Jannotti, corroborated her account in his own filing; he leads mental-health investigations within New Jersey's public defender system. He wrote that what lingers for his mother isn't the mistaken identity so much as never learning who was actually standing in her living room that morning — a gap even his own connections in law enforcement haven't been able to close for her peace of mind.
The Jannotti incident took place roughly 13 months before New Jersey's mask requirement became law, so it isn't presented as a violation of the statute itself. Instead, the state points to it as proof of a broader pattern of unaccountable tactics that the law was designed to curb.
"You Will Never See Him Again"
Deborah Gomez's declaration describes agents boxing in her car outside the Cumberland County courthouse in Bridgeton on March 26, breaking one of its windows, and yanking her husband, Edgar, out despite her repeated demands to see a warrant. Two months later, when Gomez tried to visit Edgar at Newark's Delaney Hall detention center during a stretch when visitation had been suspended amid unrest over conditions inside, she says guards turned her away and agents doused her with pepper spray and struck her with a rubber round while breaking up the crowd gathered outside. She also says she watched officers slam a nurse onto the pavement hard enough to bloody her face, even after the nurse had already announced who she was.
Weeks afterward, Gomez says, an officer she recognized from the day of Edgar's detention approached while she was in a lot outside a store and warned, "you will never see him again," adding that Edgar would soon be deported. Gomez says she was barred from Delaney Hall a second time after speaking publicly about how she'd been treated, and that agents pepper-sprayed both her and her children during a later gathering near the facility.
A Roadside Standoff Over an Unmarked Car
Adele Faust, a volunteer who monitors ICE activity around Bridgeton, said in her account that she walked up to an SUV with no visible plates and asked the masked man behind the wheel to identify himself. He simply drove off, holding eye contact and giving her what she described as a mocking beauty-pageant wave. Faust said the exchange left her rattled — not because he refused to explain himself, but because nothing separated him from someone impersonating a federal agent, or worse. She compared the uncertainty to not knowing whether she'd just come face-to-face with an armed stranger bent on harm.
How the Law Came Together
Gov. Mikie Sherrill put her signature on the mask restriction on March 25 as part of a package of three bills. Alongside the mask provision, the package codified a 2018 state policy that curbs how much help city and county police can lend federal immigration agents, and separately restricted government agencies and health facilities from sharing residents' immigration status. The Trump administration sued that April, arguing the mask provision illegally dictates how federal officers do their jobs. New Jersey's Aug. 24 filing counters that the statute's exceptions are broad enough that the government can't point to a single real-world scenario where ordinary ICE work would run afoul of it, and frames the lawsuit as federal overreach into the state's authority to protect its residents and officers. The case sits before Judge Renée Marie Bumb.
New Jersey Joins a Crowded, Largely Losing Field
California was actually the first in the nation to bar federal agents from masking, when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a pair of bills in September 2025. New Jersey became just the second state to pass its own version in 2026, doing so about a week after Washington adopted comparable restrictions; Connecticut, Oregon and Virginia followed with similar measures that same spring.
Nearly every one of those laws has since run into trouble in court. A federal judge blocked California's mask ban in February, and the Ninth Circuit later struck down a companion requirement that officers display visible identification. Virginia's law was halted by a federal judge on July 1, and a similar ordinance in Philadelphia — a city measure, not a statewide Pennsylvania law, though coverage has sometimes blurred that distinction — was blocked the following day. On Aug. 3, a federal judge froze New York's nearly identical statute, ruling that the Trump administration is likely to prevail because the Constitution's supremacy clause keeps states from dictating how federal agents operate. Connecticut's law remains tangled in its own unresolved DOJ suit, leaving it and New Jersey as the last two mask bans still awaiting a final court word.
What's at Stake Beyond the Courtroom
For New Jersey's Latino communities — concentrated in cities like Newark, Elizabeth and Perth Amboy — the fight carries weight well past the legal briefs. Advocates say that when agents operate masked and unmarked, residents lose any reliable way to tell a legitimate arrest from an impersonation, feeding anxiety around every unfamiliar vehicle or plainclothes stranger in the neighborhood. As Judge Bumb weighs whether the case proceeds, this week's filing offers the state's most detailed public accounting yet of what officials describe as the human cost of anonymous federal enforcement.
