New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim wants Americans to know where his priorities lie, and they aren't with the citizens he was elected to represent. The Democrat posted on X that detainees held at ICE's Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, and their families "need to be our North Star," pledging to "fight to secure dignity for them because that's who are in America."

Kim was not alone. Fellow New Jersey Democrats Rep. Frank Pallone and Rep. Rob Menendez joined him in a coordinated effort to champion the cause of illegal immigrants held at the federal facility, even as anti-ICE protesters set fires in the streets outside and law enforcement scrambled to restore order.

The message from New Jersey's Democratic delegation is plain enough: illegal immigrants detained by federal authorities deserve more political energy, more moral urgency, and more of the public spotlight than the American communities forced to absorb the consequences of mass illegal immigration. That is not a conservative caricature. It is what they said, in their own words, on the public record.

What the Democrats said, and what ICE posted back

Kim's post on X framed the detainees as a moral cause. As Breitbart News reported, the senator wrote that detainees and their families should be the guiding priority, the "North Star", for elected officials.

Pallone went further. The congressman posted on X about his visits to Delaney Hall:

"When I visit Delaney Hall, the immigrants detained there always talk about how much they value the American dream. They desire liberty and to return to work to provide for their families. They're shocked that they can be stripped of due process and be put in a place like this, in what is supposed to be the land of the free."

Pallone then aimed directly at the White House, claiming that "Trump wants to strip any pathway to citizenship and belonging in America, and destroy the American dream. And he's doing it in places like Delaney Hall."

ICE, for its part, responded with something the Democratic lawmakers apparently preferred to leave out of their narrative. The agency shared photos on X of several people being held at Delaney Hall. Among those pictured: one person whose rap sheet includes battery, and another whose record includes manufacturing heroin and cocaine and possession of dangerous drugs.

That is the gap between rhetoric and reality. Kim calls them a "North Star." Pallone says they dream of liberty. ICE says at least some of them have records for violent crime and drug manufacturing.

Menendez's overnight vigil for one detainee

Rep. Rob Menendez offered perhaps the most revealing account of how far New Jersey Democrats are willing to go. In an interview on MS NOW, Menendez described spending a day and a half trying to gain access to one specific illegal immigrant, a man named Martin Soto, at Delaney Hall.

"I went in about eight o'clock. At 10 o'clock after constant communication, ICE said they were not going to let me in, and I told them that's a problem because I'm not leaving."

Menendez said he stayed overnight. The next morning, at 11:30, he and a couple of colleagues were finally allowed inside. But by then, Soto was gone.

"The first thing that ICE says to me, after having been there for fifteen hours, 'Martin Soto's not here.' They moved him at two a.m. in the morning."

A sitting member of Congress spent fifteen hours camped outside a federal detention facility, not to address a constituent's problem, not to respond to a natural disaster, not to investigate waste or fraud, but to personally intervene on behalf of a single detained illegal immigrant. That is what passes for urgent public service in the New Jersey Democratic delegation.

The broader question Menendez's account raises is one his party has no interest in answering: what was Martin Soto's legal status, and what were the circumstances of his detention? Those details went unmentioned. The congressman framed the episode as an outrage against his own authority. The public was left to wonder what justified the intervention in the first place.

Fires in the streets, protests at the gates

The political theater around Delaney Hall did not stay peaceful. Video footage posted to social media Saturday night by independent journalist Nick Sortor showed anti-ICE rioters setting fires in the street near the detention facility. Law enforcement officials were later reported to have cleared Antifa protesters who had been causing violence out of the area.

This is the environment New Jersey Democrats chose to elevate, not to condemn. While rioters lit fires and Antifa agitators clashed with law enforcement, Kim, Pallone, and Menendez directed their outrage not at the lawlessness outside the facility but at the lawful detention happening inside it.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, herself a Democrat, used local law enforcement to corral anti-ICE protesters outside the facility on Friday, a move Breitbart News described as a win for DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. That Sherrill felt compelled to act at all tells you how far the situation had deteriorated.

The contrast is instructive. A Democratic governor deployed police to manage the chaos her own party's rhetoric helped stoke. Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers posted on social media about how detained illegal immigrants, some with criminal records, should be America's guiding light.

A pattern, not an incident

Kim's "North Star" comment did not emerge from a vacuum. It fits neatly into a years-long pattern of Democratic officials placing the interests of illegal immigrants above those of American citizens and legal residents. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out the logic plainly in November 2022, when he argued that the United States was "short of workers."

"We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we're going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the dreamers and all of them."

Schumer's framing, that America's future depends on embracing illegal immigrants alongside legal ones, is the ideological foundation beneath everything Kim, Pallone, and Menendez said at Delaney Hall. The policy position is not compassion. It is a calculated bet that demographic and labor-market pressures justify ignoring the legal distinction between lawful and unlawful entry.

That bet has consequences. Communities across the country bear the costs of illegal immigration, in strained schools, overwhelmed emergency rooms, depressed wages for low-skill workers, and neighborhoods dealing with the criminal element that inevitably accompanies any large, unvetted population movement. ICE's own posts about detainees with records for battery and drug manufacturing are a reminder that the people Kim calls his "North Star" are not all dreamers chasing the American ideal.

Not every Democrat has fallen in line with this approach. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania has publicly broken with his party over threats directed at ICE agents, drawing sharp criticism from progressive activists. Fetterman's willingness to side with federal law enforcement on basic questions of authority stands in stark relief against the posture adopted by New Jersey's delegation.

The political clashes over ICE enforcement have spread well beyond Newark. In Minnesota, a Hennepin County prosecutor charged an ICE officer following a shooting in Minneapolis, claiming a federal badge offers no immunity, a direct challenge to the authority of federal immigration agents operating under lawful orders.

And in New York, the anti-ICE movement's contradictions have drawn scrutiny of their own, with reports that a candidate backed by "Abolish ICE" activists has family ties to a firm that builds Border Patrol facilities. The movement's moral clarity, it turns out, has a few asterisks.

Whose North Star?

The phrase "North Star" is not casual. It implies a fixed moral reference point, the thing you navigate by when everything else shifts. Andy Kim chose to make that reference point the people held in federal custody for violating American immigration law. Not the taxpayers who fund the detention system. Not the legal immigrants who followed the rules. Not the communities dealing with the fallout of years of lax enforcement.

The detainees at Delaney Hall.

That is a revealing choice. It tells voters exactly where New Jersey's senior senator believes the moral center of American politics should rest, not with the people who built the country and follow its laws, but with those who entered it illegally and now demand its protections.

Pallone's claim that detained illegal immigrants are "shocked" to find themselves in custody in "the land of the free" is a line that might play well in a fundraising email. It does not hold up against the ICE posts showing detainees with records for battery and drug manufacturing. Liberty is not a blanket entitlement for anyone who crosses the border, regardless of what they did before or after arrival.

The Democratic Party's internal tensions on immigration are real, and the 2024 election results did nothing to resolve them. Some within the party have pushed for a reckoning with voters' concerns about border security and enforcement. Others, like Kim and Pallone, have doubled down on the position that enforcement itself is the problem.

The voters of New Jersey, and the rest of the country, will eventually weigh in on which approach they prefer. In the meantime, they can see clearly what their elected officials consider worth fighting for.

When a United States senator says illegal immigrants are his North Star, believe him. And remember who he left in the dark.